actionfromafar's comments

On: Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds

[actionfromafar]

If being raped, castrated or stoned to death was not horribly abused, I don't know what is.

On: Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds

[actionfromafar]

As I read, this is pretty much what the article says. The very very bottom may have been as many as 30 % of the total population.

On: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture (2022)

[actionfromafar]

This is very well put. If the open source repo was named "VSCodium" it would communicate better what is going on. (Chrome / Chromium.)

Edit: to be clear, I think Microsoft should offer VSCodium themselves and state clearly that they take that, bundle it with other stuff, and are calling that blob VSCode.

[petre → actionfromafar]

> I think Microsoft should offer VSCodium themselves

The instant they do that I'm moving to Theia or something else (zed?). MS is not to be trusted, as outlined by this article.

On: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't k...

[actionfromafar]

VHS was obsolete, but not everyone grabbed a new camera every year. Before digital VHS-C was the normal home camcorder. The first Digital consumer camcorder came out in 1995¹. Digital 8 came out in 1999. So people were definitely using a lot VHS up to early 2000s.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_DCR-VX1000

[Clamchop → actionfromafar]

Video and Hi 8 enjoyed a significant fraction of the camcorder market as well. They were better in every way than VHS and S-VHS, respectively, but more expensive.

On: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't k...

[actionfromafar]

Have the same experience. Also the composite to SD card recorders are supposedly quite good. But nothing beats tapping a VCR into vhsdecode and the soldering looks quite simple. Even cheap VCRs work fine for this. I will find time for it at some point...

[throwaway48476 → actionfromafar]

VCRs are just ancient enough that soldering is easy.

On: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't k...

[actionfromafar]

VHS tapes sell at easily more than $1 a pop. That's 50k dollars.

[ghaff → actionfromafar]

Good luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.

On: I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't k...

[actionfromafar]

Cheap? Get one of those chinese composite video to SD card mp4 rippers.

Perfect? A linux PC with 400 dollars RF capture card plus vhsdecode software.

On: Ceefax and the Birth of Interactive TV

[actionfromafar]

In some places it never went away :)

[timthorn → actionfromafar]

And you can start your own service if so inclined: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/create-your-own-teletext-se...

On: Rewriting Rust

[actionfromafar]

Not permanent how?

[Flex247A → actionfromafar]

Because the compiler ends up looking at all the functions anyway, only for the linker to discard them all.

On: Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today

[actionfromafar]

Even in 2014, it was apparent that you didn't need new research per se to identify a bird, only a bunch of bird training data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFace