life hack and (sort of) hack hack
Dec. 18th, 2021 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavsort of life changing life hack: tl;dr you can use google meets as 24/7 live transcript for any communication on video?
long story; bad hearing had/has me avoiding any kind of video chatting because previous attempts before covid were god awful, and the only thing that saved the work video chats was everyone has reasonably good speakers/internet because of corporate-issued computers. i did not know google meets had automatic closed captions (i swear that wasn't a thing until like, a year ago? two maybe?), and that freaking thing works shockingly well, at least to somebody who was one of the first adopters of that like, neon dragon speaking program that was like the early 00's version of live transcription to a word doc and it worked .... horrendously lol
i was fucking around with the google meets and shortly realized you could have a "live" private meeting with yourself in one window, and have a video/voice call with anyone else on discord/zoom/etc/etc on a separate window and you can freaking get a live transcript regardless of platform : o
it's not perfect, i'd say it catches about 60-70% depending on accent, video quality, etc, but i was talking with my gf today who was like, in a freaking snowstorm outside and could "get" it. shit man, even if my ear dies on me for a bit i can carry around a phone temporarily and be able to "chat" with people using that transcript as my ears. absolutely nuts. technology is magic sometimes.
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on a completely different topic:
COBOL might be the one "proper" programming language i would learn for fun (if there was more time / could think of a project with it / and i was stuck in an art rut tbh). even reading through the basics of the manual I'm struck at how ... accessible? it is? like it was meant to be readable by non-programmers by design and I don't feel like running away screaming even though theoretically i could do more quasi art projects with idek python or javascript. tho making a text adventure in cobol for yolo reasons sounds fun as balls masochistically speaking ; D
ngl i also do love the job security it'd give you lol, and how it doesn't change.
which might make me the only person in the world to put HTML/COBOL as my two favorite programming languages xD
long story; bad hearing had/has me avoiding any kind of video chatting because previous attempts before covid were god awful, and the only thing that saved the work video chats was everyone has reasonably good speakers/internet because of corporate-issued computers. i did not know google meets had automatic closed captions (i swear that wasn't a thing until like, a year ago? two maybe?), and that freaking thing works shockingly well, at least to somebody who was one of the first adopters of that like, neon dragon speaking program that was like the early 00's version of live transcription to a word doc and it worked .... horrendously lol
i was fucking around with the google meets and shortly realized you could have a "live" private meeting with yourself in one window, and have a video/voice call with anyone else on discord/zoom/etc/etc on a separate window and you can freaking get a live transcript regardless of platform : o
it's not perfect, i'd say it catches about 60-70% depending on accent, video quality, etc, but i was talking with my gf today who was like, in a freaking snowstorm outside and could "get" it. shit man, even if my ear dies on me for a bit i can carry around a phone temporarily and be able to "chat" with people using that transcript as my ears. absolutely nuts. technology is magic sometimes.
.
on a completely different topic:
COBOL might be the one "proper" programming language i would learn for fun (if there was more time / could think of a project with it / and i was stuck in an art rut tbh). even reading through the basics of the manual I'm struck at how ... accessible? it is? like it was meant to be readable by non-programmers by design and I don't feel like running away screaming even though theoretically i could do more quasi art projects with idek python or javascript. tho making a text adventure in cobol for yolo reasons sounds fun as balls masochistically speaking ; D
ngl i also do love the job security it'd give you lol, and how it doesn't change.
which might make me the only person in the world to put HTML/COBOL as my two favorite programming languages xD
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-19 01:41 pm (UTC)i'm curious if you're able to put a finger on what about cobol feels more accessible to you than python? i ask just because the joke with python is "oh if you're kind of buzzed you can just pop open a python interpreter and tap out kinda vaguely what you want your program to do and honestly when you edit in the morning it'll already be 95% working"; but! maybe there's some kind of linguistic hurdle with python i've just not noticed / not aware of that cobol handles better?
(no subject)
Date: 2021-12-29 02:35 am (UTC)- even on the initial series of 'i wanna know about this thing, what is it, give me the elevator pitch' searches a while back cobol has a less abstracted 'one of the very first languages built for small businesses to crunch their numbers' pitch (which helps in debugging the smallest baby steps of narrowing possibilities down) versus python where, i'm gonna be honest, i'd have to cheat and tab over to the wikipedia page to even refresh my memory. i know it's used in, uhhh, a lot of web apps, a lot of games? but beyond that is question marks. almost a sense of choice paralysis.
- a large part of it is 'approachability' in the ... Romantic, feelings-sense? I have, perhaps an odd nostalgia for mainframe computers even despite not ever being in the same room as one (though it's on my bucket list to be, one day). there's a sense of tangible, historical 'these things (with cobol) were instrumental in building the awesome and terrifying levels of civilization that we know now' spine-tingling buzz that actively makes me want to touch it. the kind of buzz that helps push beyond that 'but math be haaaaaard' resistance. logically i know python's probably used in more places, and more "useful" in my skillset, but eh, the romanticism isn't there.
(particularly galling to me because i didn't think i was such a softie like this. xD )
- tying in with the last bit, knowing the "history" of how and why and the context a thing was made helps me piece together the abstract systems, especially if it straight up connects with larger international historical events (during wartime with grace hopper, during the explosion of computing, etc..). for example - this is more linux command line related than cobol, so i'm a little cheating here too, but reading one of the old, old linux manuals from '93 or something carefully explaining the purpose of every root folder (bin/boot/dev), what '$sudo apt' actually *meant* rather than blindly coypasta'ing it in... there's a tangibility to each decision even if the decision itself is a little ... crufty?
which is weird to say! when i'm skimming the python wiki page now and realize it was made in the 80's. :o so theoretically it should have that same association of nostalgia and tangibility, but it does not, hmmm. (this is fascinating to me).
- the last thing i touched on briefly in the post but there's a major relief knowing cobol won't change (much)(at all?) given how load-bearing it is for larger institutions rather than python which "feels" like a new language and has been rewritten a number of times so there's a sense of ... why learn it if it'll just change again?
aaaaanyway ya that might be a mini essay but hoped it satisfied the curiosity a bit. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-05 01:31 am (UTC)I have, perhaps an odd nostalgia for mainframe computers even despite not ever being in the same room as one
oh! oh!!! possibly relevant to your interests: there's this thing called the Living Computer Museum in Seattle which has a giant-ass mainframe, and it's set up so anyone can log in as a guest and try it out, run some basic programs, etc :P info is here. (in non-pandemic times one can go to the museum and go *see* the massive-massive-room-filling-computer where you've been running code, which is extra neat, lol)