The employee's goal here isn't to make the employer feel proud, it's to exchange their services for money.

If the employer wants an employee they can feel proud of, well, that's a service too, and one they can purchase with money, if they choose.

I gave Claude a couple of paragraphs of Ozy Brennan's newsletter from today, and it guessed Scott Alexander.

She's a hero.

Abandoned doesn't have to be forever. As I got older I had a longer time horizon and more skill, and found I was picking up and finishing projects I'd laid aside decades earlier.

Now when I put something aside I know there's a chance I might pick it up again in ten years. There wasn't much evidence of that when I was twenty-five.

It's been one of the best things for me about middle age.

Totally. It’s usually a lack of time, lack of energy, general ‘life getting in the way’, that leads me to drift away from a side-project.

These factors can always be reversed. And (whisper it) a bit of vibe-coding can also help unstick a project that ground to a halt because the next step was dull implementation rather than exciting creation.

Why in the world would you get downvoted for this?

Sometimes also the project is just 'done'. I many years ago made a windows screensaver (never released to anyone else). Just so I could have a '2001' screen saver. Basically in the background of the movie was all these screens flashing just weird status stuff. It was a cool aesthetic I kinda liked. Spent many weeks getting it to flash 'just right' and have the right animations for the right feel. Then LCD screens basically killed any need to have a screen saver. As basically instant on/off meant there was no reason to have the monitor running all the time. So the project was done.

As someone who feels stressed about not feeling able to finish the side projects I have (that is, working on my music player, learn Arabic, and learning to draw), this is a very refreshing take. Thank you for this.

Last time I looked into this (last week, I think) it was a big wad of nothing. The people had disappeared over a span of many years. They weren't tied to any particular program, employer, or even any particular area of study, just “uh, tech stuff”. Some of them were technical experts, some weren't; one was an administrative assistant. One was killed by a campus shooter who also killed two students.

Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”

Yeah, it's like "At least 10 people with a red sweater on Tuesday have gone missing".

Or stupider: At least 10 people flipped a coin and it ended up on Heads!

The fact that it reached CNN levels of stupid means journalism is part of the overall USA's intentional brain drain.

It's worse than that, it's 11 people who wore sweaters in various shades of red, orange, and pink, at some point in the past ten years.

“Anthony Chavez, 79, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory until he retired in 2017. He reportedly disappeared on May 8, 2025.”

To be fair to CNN, this article is about an FBI investigation.

It’s sanewashing.

I suspect this is narrative shaping for future purposes. I think the military trying to frantically modernize and adapt is also a sign.

4 separate government agencies are putting time and effort into something.

The headline is accurate. The reporting is accurate.

Should CNN not report what the government is doing?

Or are you confused and assume that the investigation has returned and finding? Or maybe, we should highlight the things the government is doing.

Why do you find what the article is saying sane?

If the weather service starts an investigation into Tuesday’s rain shower, that should be reported. But if that rain shower was completely within the normal range of weather for that location and time of year, that should also be part of the reporting. This article takes everything from the government at face value.

CNN should accurately report just how bizarre the reasoning behind these investigations appears to be.

I wonder if it is reasoning. To me the sequence looks something like this:

1. The story is promulgated by a long-retired ex-FBI analyst

2. Fox News picks it up and runs with it

3. Fox News watchers get excited about it on social media

4. Someone behind a desk at the FBI is assigned to pick up the phone and say tiredly “Yes, yes, we're investigating it all very seriously”

5.The FBI waits for the new Flavor of the Week to distract the Fox News people, then closes the investigation

Meantime, CNN reports on phase 4.

This is the same network that breathlessly covered the obviously fake “drone swarms”.

What I want to know is, how much longer will I have to wait for my Mark Zuckerberg AI sex doll?

First very long, then after that every time very short, I suppose

Earlier than the anime catgirls Musk promised a few years back

If they don't mark their territory by spraying urine, I'm not interested.

Arthur Clarke's “Report on Planet Three” touches on this.

Did amazon.com go bust? Seems like I heard they were still in business as of a couple of years ago at least.

The point was that Amazon wasn't independent from the frenzied, leveraged land grab that characterized the .COM bubble. Like many other companies, they were hiring aggressively until the bubble burst. Whether or not the companies went bust, a lot of people lost their jobs in a short time.

Most people are more than one person.

XV was excellent, and had some features I've never seen anywhere else. For example, it had a control panel that would allow you to take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space, for example, turning all the reds (and just the reds) green.

When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green Elmo!” she would demand. I would adjust the sliders to turn the reds green, and we would laugh uproariously at green Elmo. Next it would be “Purple Elmo!”, and we would laugh even harder.

This kept us both amused for quite a while.

(Update: Here's a picture of what that control panel looked like. The turn-Elmo-green control is top center. https://xv.trilon.com/manual/xv-3.10a/color-editor-1.html)

>a control panel

That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.

However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.

That was really one of xv's superpowers.

Indeed, I've used that feature a lot. It's so extremely simple to use, unlike figuring out how to do that in Gimp or whatever.

There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.

Wouldn't you love to see that rendered with antialiasing at Retina resolution, but the same on-screen real size as it was back on a 17" 800x600 monitor? I bet it would look delightful.

We have to go back

No

The last time that I checked, XV was still in the OpenBSD ports collection. It fits well with fvwm.

I actually bought a license for XV, and I have the manual.

> take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space

fyi Affinity Photo has recolor and hue filters that will do just that.

I used it for my video game art.