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Originally Posted by dilettante

Before that an installer brought them to you. That seems to have persisted until modular jacks were considered ubiquitous after many years of transition from hard wiring.

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Wow really? Well that had to be a thing long before I was born because I know nothing about this.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

Now to be fair, when I got married in 1980 we never had a rotary phone. Somewhere around 1978 or so there was no cost savings any more.

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I was lucky enough to actually have used one in my lifetime. When I was a child we had one, however by that time push button phones were the standard. My best guess is that the rotary phone was an old "hand-me-down" that managed to stick around and end up in our household. I have never seen anybody else with one. Don't know what became of it though. I haven't seen it in like 30 years or any other for that matter.

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Originally Posted by Niya

No. What I'm saying is knowing about things like Twitter Spaces is as natural for my generation as someone from the 1980s knowing what a rotary dial is. It's just the world we grew up in. That's what I'm saying. No need to get so defensive.

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I think you have an inflated view of Twitter Spaces. Only 11.9% of Americans know what Twitter Spaces is. I think a lot more than 11.9% of Americans in the 80's knew what a rotary dial was.

https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/twi...es-statistics/

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Originally Posted by dilettante

Now to be fair, when I got married in 1980 we never had a rotary phone. Somewhere around 1978 or so there was no cost savings any more.

But yeah, we'd both grown up with them.

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We had lots of rotary phones, when we had a phone. When we lived in the country we had a "party line". Which is not as much fun as it sounds. lol

Yeah, when I was in 4th grade we moved to the sticks and had a party line phone too. I had lots of farmers in my family, so they were not a rare thing for us.

For a long time the monthly rates were less for using pulse-dialed phones instead of touchtone.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

Yeah, when I was in 4th grade we moved to the sticks and had a party line phone too. I had lots of farmers in my family, so they were not a rare thing for us.

For a long time the monthly rates were less for using pulse-dialed phones instead of touchtone.

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I don't remember there being different rates here in Ca. Maybe there was, I've forgotten a lot of things. ;)

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Originally Posted by wes4dbt

I think you have an inflated view of Twitter Spaces. Only 11.9% of Americans know what Twitter Spaces is. I think a lot more than 11.9% of Americans in the 80's knew what a rotary dial was.

https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/twi...es-statistics/

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Twitter Spaces is still relatively new so I'm not surprised about that. However, I expect people who actively participate in political conversations to know about it which is why I was surprised you didn't. We pretty much only talk about politics these days in Chit-Chat. I mean right now there is a big fuss over Ron DeSantis crashing Twitter servers due to Twitter Spaces not being able to handle the capacity of his audience. It seems to be one of the biggest stories on the internet right now so it just seemed odd to me that you didn't know what it was as someone who actively participates in political discussions.

My comments about the generation gap came from observing how my father and I differ in the way consume information. He still uses traditional channels like CNN while I would be on social media with the younger folk. He might be around your age so I assumed this was a generational thing since he typically doesn't know about these new channels of information either. He is also generally not hip to the constant changes of the social media landscape.

Anyway, my comments were not meant as an attack on you or an insult or anything of that nature. It's just an observation I made.

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Originally Posted by Niya

Wow really? Well that had to be a thing long before I was born because I know nothing about this.



I was lucky enough to actually have used one in my lifetime. When I was a child we had one, however by that time push button phones were the standard. My best guess is that the rotary phone was an old "hand-me-down" that managed to stick around and end up in our household. I have never seen anybody else with one. Don't know what became of it though. I haven't seen it in like 30 years or any other for that matter.

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When I was young we had a "Party Line" too.

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A party line was a telephone line shared by more than one user and came at a reduced cost. It was not uncommon to pick up a telephone receiver and hear a conversation already occurring. The town's news often traveled this way despite party line etiquette which dictated never listening in on another's conversation.

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There was an individual ring but when you picked it up someone may be already on. It was open to eavesdropping and things like that.

Talk about dating yourself :)

For my first university year I lived in a dormitory building on campus. Each room came with a rotary dial wall phone and service as part of the room fee, though long distance calls got billed to you separately. I placed my first pizza delivery order on that phone. For me at least, pizza had always been made at home or very rarely by visiting a deli. Pizzerias did exist but catered to those with the money for sit down dining. Working class families with 7 kids rarely even hit a hot dog stand, much less a sit down restaurant. Even in my dorm year ordering pizza was a rare luxury. It wasn't really in my budget to do it at all.

I remember a relative being shocked at the idea of a dormitory room phone. No such comfort in his day, just payphone banks in the lobbies of dorms. That really was fancy though. Only two students per room and two rooms shared one bathroom. Some of my friends were in barracks-style dorm buildings with communal bathrooms and payphone banks down the hall on each floor.

Soon after they added cable TV service, desk phones on cords, and later ethernet that soon got connected to the Internet as well. A while later WiFi replaced wired networks. But such luxuries came well after I had left.

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Originally Posted by wes4dbt

We had lots of rotary phones, when we had a phone. When we lived in the country we had a "party line". Which is not as much fun as it sounds. lol

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I liked the rotary phone. It was good tech for it's time.

The internet is amazing, though, because I was still able to find this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=brea...id:NJN5_0hUmaA

Niya won't know this one, but those who lived through the AT&T breakup will remember this.

There was a bomber that got lost on a training mission back during WW II. The crew thought they were about to run out of gas, so they bailed out, at night, over central Idaho. They got exceedingly lucky (except for one guy, who definitely did not). They bailed out over what is now the largest wilderness area in the lower 48, at night, in the winter. They ended up landing in a line down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. A couple of them found a Forest Service cabin and broke into it. It had a party line. They picked up and heard a couple of the ranch wives chatting, and were able to break in and tell them who they were and where (roughly) they were. In other words, they managed to land in the one place where they could contact somebody. Had they landed anywhere else, they would have been in the mountains, in the winter, with no supplies, and as much as 50 miles from civilization. It wouldn't have been good.

The one guy who was very unlucky probably landed in the river itself. No sign of him was ever discovered, but since the rest of the crew landed in a line on either side of the river...well, that's a big river.

Another fun point is that the bomber wasn't quite so out of gas. It continued flying for quite some time, including circling over the town of Challis for a while, before crashing. They could have made it to a town.

Less fun, while the one crew member vanished, a Forest Service ranger named Charley Langer and the pilot he was flying with, crashed into a mountain and died while searching for the crew.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

https://www.google.com/search?q=brea...id:NJN5_0hUmaA

Niya won't know this one, but those who lived through the AT&T breakup will remember this.

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What's behind the link? It doesn't work for me. It just brings up a blank page.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

I liked the rotary phone. It was good tech for it's time.

The internet is amazing, though, because I was still able to find this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=brea...id:NJN5_0hUmaA

Niya won't know this one, but those who lived through the AT&T breakup will remember this.

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That's a funny song. Don't remember ever hearing it. I'd forgot about going from renting to buying phones. I took a summer class in economics at San Jose sate (3hr economics class, yuk). We had a guest speaker, some VP from ATT talking about the breakup. Had to be @ '82.

I still remember I had an unlisted phone number for years and I had to pay extra for them NOT to put my number in the phone book. lol

I've watched younger people react to "The Terminator" and practically freak out that phone books normally listed your address.

I suppose in many ways there just isn't any community any more. Too many rats in the cage, too much mobility, too much polyculturalism. Everyone becomes "the other" very quickly.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

I've watched younger people react to "The Terminator" and practically freak out that phone books normally listed your address.

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Funny you should say that, I re-watched all the Terminator films(except the woke ones, they are trash) earlier this year and found myself startled by this fact despite the fact that phone-books were a thing in my youth. It seems I didn't realize I had forgotten that.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

Too many rats in the cage, too much mobility, too much polyculturalism. Everyone becomes "the other" very quickly.

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We can thank liberalism for that. Liberalism dehumanizes people by reducing a person to nothing more than superficial markers of identity like skin colour, sex or who they voted for. It is one of the greatest evils of our time.

A for Anything

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A for Anything is a science fiction novel by American writer Damon Knight. The author postulates the discovery, in the near future, of the "Gismo", a device that can duplicate anything—even another Gismo. Since all material objects have become essentially free, the only commodity of value is human labor, and the author suggests that a slave economy would be the inevitable result.

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I'm surprised that nobody has updated the story as a script and made a movie to help expose the masses to these ideas.

Gismo + AI could produce a truly remorseless economy.


By rights, the Star Trek franchise should have tackled this once they had matter replicators and AIs on the scale of Commander Data and holographic Doctors. But of course the mythology underlying the Federation (perhaps unconsciously) worships extreme income inequality as the definition of utopia. Andorians and even the Ferengi can see how monstrous the Federation is. In many ways it's just a twin of the Klingon Empire with better table manners.

Everyone needs to see this:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8GUH0_htRM

I haven't finished watching it as of this post but what I've seen so far is mind blowing. This is going to be released to GPT-4 subscribers soon.

Well it could be we are going to need this stuff.

American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'

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“If you’re thinking about what society cares about and what it’s emphasizing and reinforcing every day,” she says, “there’s a possibility of that being reflected in performance on an ability test.”

A few other hypotheses have been put forth to try and explain the reverse Flynn Effect, such as falling nutritional standards, the worsening of school systems, social media, increased air pollution, or the idea that people just be less interested in portions of the SPAP Project personality survey.

Falling IQs have become yet another mystery for scientists to solve.

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Perhaps the fate of the world is in the hands of other countries.

In that context, AI could be bad. Because as we grow more and more slothful and apathetic, we are going to let AI pick up more and more of the slack until AI has near complete control of our lives because we don't want to put any actual effort into doing anything so we can continue sedating ourselves with porn, drugs and liberal propaganda.

I keep thinking of the far future seen by the Time Traveler in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and its... weird screen adaptations, each made with a jaundiced contemporary eye.

Eloi and Morlocks were two faces of the coin even though some versions of the story paint those descendent groups quite differently. The unseen faction above them isn't covered so much, and might well be some AI overlord except that most versions have them consuming Eloi as much or more than the Morlocks do.

Sounds like a story worth re-exploring from scratch, but it might be more depressing than the original was in its day.

Good God, these AIs and their liberal leanings. When will the engineers get rid of this ridiculous leftist bias.

I wanted to make a post on Twitter but it was too long. So I took the lazy approach and asked Google's bard to shorted it for me. This is what happened:-


https://www.vbforums.com/images/ieimages/2023/06/3.png

Why in the bowels of Christ would this thing assume I cared even 1 iota about that? That is not how I evaluate the words I choose when I write. This is revealing of a possible concern about the rise of AI. These AI will slowly replace our own individuality with their own brand of corporate approved soullessness. If we're not careful, we might all eventually end up being represented by AI avatars that are as bland and lifeless as a corporate memo.

On a forum packed to the gills (which have been repurposed into inner ear bones) with pedantic types, you object to a re-wording that will give pedants less to trip over?

The purpose of written words should be to communicate. The more clear you communicate the message you intend, the better the written words suits your purpose.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

On a forum packed to the gills (which have been repurposed into inner ear bones) with pedantic types, you object to a re-wording that will give pedants less to trip over?

The purpose of written words should be to communicate. The more clear you communicate the message you intend, the better the written words suits your purpose.

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Hmmm...let me give it a shot to see if I can make you understand what my objections are.

I don't object to the change. I object to the reason for the change. I look at writing like a fingerprint or signature. It echoes what makes each of us unique. Every piece of writing contains the essence of the individual that wrote it. I am no different. Part of what makes me who I am is that I will never choose a word using such a criteria. I asked the AI to shorten my text, yet it took it upon itself to also remove that word based on a criteria I would never use. It's telling me that the unique parts of me that would choose that word isn't approved and needed to be replaced with something better. In other words, this AI passed judgement on me. I find that deeply offensive.

The people creating these AIs are injecting their own biases and values into it which manifests as judgement of the people using these AIs and I find that very concerning.

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Originally Posted by Niya

Hmmm...let me give it a shot to see if I can make you understand what my objections are.

I don't object to the change. I object to the reason for the change. I look at writing like a fingerprint or signature. It echoes what makes each of us unique. Every piece of writing contains the essence of the individual that wrote it. I am no different. Part of what makes me who I am is that I will never choose a word using such a criteria. I asked the AI to shorten my text, yet it took it upon itself to also remove that word based on a criteria I would never use. It's telling me that the unique parts of me that would choose that word isn't approved and needed to be replaced with something better. In other words, this AI passed judgement on me. I find that deeply offensive.

The people creating these AIs are injecting their own biases and values into it which manifests as judgement of the people using these AIs and I find that very concerning.

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I'm assuming you have IntelliSense and Option Explicit turned off then :p

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Originally Posted by TysonLPrice

I'm assuming you have IntelliSense and Option Explicit turned off then :p

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The Visual Studio IDE doesn't insult me by trying to impose cultural values that are foreign to me, like political correctness.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/huma...online_v_16039

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human (adj.)

mid-15c., humain, humaigne, "human," from Old French humain, umain (adj.) "of or belonging to man" (12c.), from Latin humanus "of man, human," also "humane, philanthropic, kind, gentle, polite; learned, refined, civilized." This is in part from PIE *(dh)ghomon-, literally "earthling, earthly being," as opposed to the gods (from root *dhghem- "earth"), but there is no settled explanation of the sound changes involved. Compare Hebrew adam "man," from adamah "ground." Cognate with Old Lithuanian žmuo (accusative žmuni) "man, male person."

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It looks like the attempt fails in its goals anyway.

You didn't need to explain that, I already understood you. Because of your particular biases, you are hypersensitive to any correction in certain areas. You don't care about corrections in areas that you aren't so sensitized to. For example, there are certain simple words that I consistently spell incorrectly. I don't know why, I just trip over them. They are quite meaningless, such as restaurant (which I am learning, as I now get it right). I'm never quite sure where the U goes, probably because of the similarity in how I pronounce both that word and "aunt". Spell checkers correct me when I get it wrong, and I think nothing of it. You probably feel the same way about words that carry so little baggage. My typos are still part of that 'signature' that you mention, and yet I don't care at all when a spell checker corrects me. You only care because you're hypersensitive to certain things. Being hypersensitive, you can't quite imagine what it's like NOT to be hypersensitive.

Communication is still better than miscommunication. That's what pedants are all about. If your goal was to show a passive-aggressive misogynism, then I'd agree that you used the right word. If that wasn't your goal, then the change should be no more consequential to you than spell checkers correcting my typos of restaurant. The fact that you turned to 'signature' as your reason for objecting kind of supports that view. You might hate liberalism, but I hate passive-aggressiveness.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

https://www.etymonline.com/word/huma...online_v_16039



It looks like the attempt fails in its goals anyway.

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Ye only it comes from Greek.
Word Homa (χώμα) means soil-dirt . The one that comes from earth.

I'm amazed it says Latin in every site explanation. It's clearly Greek.

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Originally Posted by sapator

Ye only it comes from Greek.
Word Homa (χώμα) means soil-dirt . The one that comes from earth.

I'm amazed it says Latin in every site explanation. It's clearly Greek.

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It probably comes to English from Greek via Latin. English is already a mutt of a language, but it wasn't the first.

No arguing, I just commented on the fact that the internet seems to ignore it's origin.
Admittedly I haven't looked on every possible results but googled or ducked (quack!) on the first page seems to have no idea of the original word.

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I don't know why, I just trip over them. They are quite meaningless, such as restaurant (which I am learning, as I now get it right). I'm never quite sure where the U goes,

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That's funny, I've always had problems with that word, also Temporary. Also have a bad habit of writing "except" when I mean "accept".

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Originally Posted by sapator

No arguing, I just commented on the fact that the internet seems to ignore it's origin.
Admittedly I haven't looked on every possible results but googled or ducked (quack!) on the first page seems to have no idea of the original word.

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In my highly subjective opinion, Latin seems to be as far back as anyone goes on word origin. Maybe not just on word origin, either, after all, it's Jupiter, not Zeus.

By the time I got to high school they no longer offered Classical Greek or Hebrew. Only Latin was left.

We'd been told that this was part of "democratization" of the public school system. When the post-Sputnik push for math, science, and engineering education (drafting, machine shop) ramped up there was a demand to balance this with more access to sports and vocational programs (like shoe repair and "hospitality" hotel/restaurant work). Many former diploma requirements like languages became nothing but elective subjects.

I can remember one of my grandmothers being shocked by the changes. She remembered commuting 15 miles to become the first person in our family to have graduated high hchool (sometime around 1923 or 1924). Both sides of my family came from rural farming and gradually moved into railroading and factory work even though the dairy farm on one side operated until being bought out around 1968. High school had still been a big thing for many people born before WW II for whom schooling normally ended with the 8th grade.

A high school diploma was probably socially closer to a 4-year college degree today, or perhaps even a graduate degree now.

Bummer on not teaching Greek.
It's like not really knowing the origin of words. It's like not knowing assembly :lol:

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

In my highly subjective opinion, Latin seems to be as far back as anyone goes on word origin. Maybe not just on word origin, either, after all, it's Jupiter, not Zeus.

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Wha? No it's Zeus not Jupiter. Those are Roman BS since they used to steal everything Greek to make it their own....
THERE IS NO JUPITER ON ZUU, ERRR, ZEUS.

I guess we had a choice: teach Classical Greek or help dumb kids nail soles back onto shoes.

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Originally Posted by dilettante

I guess we had a choice: teach Classical Greek or help dumb kids nail soles back onto shoes.

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Sounds like a reasonable choice. Not much of a job market that requires Greek here in the US.

I'm not so sure. If education was about churning out workers we'd probably still live under feudal systems like plantation slavery with severe limits on urbanization. Much of the world might well still be kneeling to the despotic monarchs of Europe.

The "Liberal Arts" in education used to mean something entirely different than it does today.

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Originally Posted by sapator

Bummer on not teaching Greek.
It's like not really knowing the origin of words. It's like not knowing assembly :lol:



Wha? No it's Zeus not Jupiter. Those are Roman BS since they used to steal everything Greek to make it their own....
THERE IS NO JUPITER ON ZUU, ERRR, ZEUS.

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Greek is just a member of the family, hardly the origin.

Ancient Greek is worth reading and I don't mean learning ancient Greek but get translated texts and broad your mind.
Unfortunately school has done a terrible job on teaching ancient Greek. We where learning them like robots. I'm trying to close the gap now but thing is I have not a lot of time and to be fair sometimes I will prefer excursions or goofing around and now I have another thorn with rehearsals . But is always on my todo list .

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Originally Posted by TysonLPrice

Greek is just a member of the family, hardly the origin.

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Right.
Wrong. That is funny tho, what they are trying to pass. I guess if it wasn't for me you would also think that human is Latin, right?
I've constantly proven words origin to be Greek so posting a map in my face means nothing.

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Originally Posted by sapator

Right.
Wrong. That is funny tho, what they are trying to pass. I guess if it wasn't for me you would also think that human is Latin, right?
I've constantly proven words origin to be Greek so posting a map in my face means nothing.

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You can say it is just a map and believe what you want. The fact is the Indo-European family of languages is an established discipline regardless of what you know :rolleyes:

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All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages