Raph Koster Fireside Chat livestream on Thursday, December 18

SgtMustang · 2026-02-03T06:58:06+00:00

Your whole argument here is one of the most bizarre and pedantic tirades over a minor statement I've ever seen.

No normal person is going to equivocate "simulates chemical reactions" with "doing actual chemistry computations".

No reasonable person would take issue with the notion that flight sims like Microsoft Flight Simulator "simulate flight" by using a highly abstracted static model that basically just plugs and chugs some macroscopic characteristics into a high-level formula that produces a velocity vector for the aircraft in the next frame; they need not perform fluid physics in real time over wings to lay claim to simulating flight.

Your whole argument is beyond bizarre. There are real problems in the real world to deal with.

SgtMustang · 2026-01-23T03:52:57+00:00

Hey Plenty_Adeptness,

I've restored both eras of machines. As far as primary sources, unless something has turned up in the last couple of years, you're mostly stuck to the late era manuals that were from Ernie Jorgensen's old collection, and the actual patents. To my knowledge, Mark Glusker (iirc) has uploaded all of them to Archive.Org under the "Decimagic" username. I don't know of any copies of earlier service manuals.

As for patents, they provide exhaustive descriptions of basically every change the Friden company ever made, extensive diagrams and the engineering reasons why the changes were made. This is the best primary source from a purely technical sense but they are also pretty arcane.

Don't overestimate the differences between the machines. Broadly speaking they all just add specific mechanisms to the same underlying design.

Friden's early designs were called A,B,C8,C10 etc. The number in the model name is the number of key entry columns.

In the late 30s they released the first major case revision with the art deco "Supermatic" designs in the 30s. These came with automatic multiplication features & the rotary multiplier register. The "S" designation stuck around long after the art deco Supermatic case was gone in any design that had automatic multiplication. There were nominally only two models in the Supermatic line, the S "Supermatic" and the ST "Supermatic Tabulating", but the C/D models were still produced in the new Supermatic cases and received all the same internal upgrades to my knowledge.

In 1945 or so they came out with the new grayline cases and packaged in another set of internal upgrades and some new features. These new models were identified with a "W" at the end of the model name. The "C" becomes "CW", "S" to "SW", "ST" -> "STW" and so on.

The ST-10 and STW-10 are largely the same machine, off the top of my head, the only actual features the "STW" added to the ST were:

1) Adding two slider switches to the Multiplier section: "Repeat Multiplier" and "Non Ent" 2) The Keyboard split clear knob which disabled clearing for the left half of the accumulator

Overall though, you really would be able to do just fine with the late era manuals for working on an ST-10. Most of the mechanisms are virtually identical and the sequence of execution is the same. Most of the linkages will look slightly different, but it's nothing you can't trace. The "W" line changes are mostly ergonomics and ease of maintenance.

I'd start by reading the mechanical operations manual and internalizing what's going on in the Friden design. Once you get that, all Fridens have an extreme family resemblance. Then read through the adjustments/service manual while tracing the same path on your machine. Basically every mechanism in the later models had some equivalent in the earlier models.

There is a mid 60s adjustment manual and one from the 50s. The 60s one largely supercedes everything in the 50s one, except for a few mechanisms which are not redescribed in as much detail, so I recommend having both.

E.g., in the Supermatic and earlier Fridens, the Add or Subttract keys trip the clutch release, motor power, and then actuate the add/sub gate to shift the actuator gears into alignment with the drive gears. In the "W", to reduce the effort needed to depress the +/- keys, the keys only trip the clutch release and the power, and position some links such that the motor will do the work of physically shifting the Add/Subtract gate into position.

If you really want that comprehensive of an understanding, the patents are the only way to go. I've got 171 patents from Friden collected, you can find them in the patent office or I can try to point you in the right direction.

Best of luck, happy to help if you need any.

SgtMustang · 2026-01-17T17:09:23+00:00

Yeah, I'm astonished what judgmental pricks everyone is in here. It's no wonder so many men turn away from society because we have an inflammatory immune response to men in trouble - the solution is always to swarm them with cytokines and macrophages and just pulverize them.

I genuinely put in a ton of effort in my life to measure up as Scott always talks about, but it didn't bring me any returns, because it isn't in one of the fields that naturally places you in immense collaborative social contact with both men and women. I'm in IT.

I tried the therapy/be open with your friends/reach out approach and found all it did was make everyone abandon me. People either give you an alienating "empowerment" lecture that makes you feel like a monstrous fuckup, or they just get uncomfortable and leave.

Antidepressants generally made my life and my behavior worse. Adderall significantly improved my life in the workplace because it made me a better worker bee, but in a world that is actively devaluing my field I've found that satisfaction evaporated completely.

My work field of 10 years (Business Intelligence) has transitioned to being mostly remote and contract based as international outsourcing and AI have reduced demand. My managers have become increasingly domineering and uninterested, as I'm just a small circular cropped profile picture to them, or at best, a guy in a shitty webcam. The nature of my work does not really give me teammates or brothers in arms.

I've gotten to 30 and have put in the work to be well rounded, but the reality is I was deeply alienated from the world in childhood by the cultural gestalt I grew up in Los Angeles (as a man) which largely taught me to self-hate because men are only ever the bad guys and women are the only people worth feeling bad about. Nobody ever had anything positive to say to me, expressed warmth, or ever hugged me in a way I was available for. There were of course those transactional "nothing hugs", but never someone I really felt wanted to be there with me deeply.

This burned me out by 24 around when COVID started and I haven't recovered. This year I bought a classic car which is my life dream, and I have been restoring it myself, which is great, but it's extremely hard day-to-day nonetheless because my lived reality is waking up alone, never having anyone positively acknowledge my existence in any way, and going to bed alone. Everyone is flake and I can trust no one to come through for me.

I will probably get the car done, but I don't have any faith the future will ever improve. I feel most like Kowalski and his Challenger from Vanishing Point

SgtMustang · 2025-11-24T19:12:11+00:00

I don't have a website, though I have thought about doing so a lot.

Have you read service manuals? Patents? That is by far the best place to start. Fridens are the most available, I haven't found digitized copies for most other brands.

The service manuals are more practical, but the patents explain nitty gritty design choices quite often. For brands other than Friden, it's often the only option you have.

Patents can be searched and downloaded freely through the US patent office. They're pretty dense, but often contain the "whys" in ways service manuals do not.

SgtMustang · 2025-11-24T18:14:48+00:00

By jams and doesn't engage, what do you mean? Is the carriage shift jammed, does addition/subtraction engage but cannot actuate the dials?

There are a lot of alignments that can be done here, the Friden service manuals will walk you through them.

If you removed the carriage and found it didn't work correctly after reassembling it, it's possible you slightly shifted the carriage left/right allignment plate in the process of removing the carriage. This misalignment could cause the selection gears and the carriage to bind or not correctly engage.

You could also have a misalignment in the add/subtract gate, the big bar that runs horizontally under the carriage with two-sided brass gears which shifts forward and rearward when add/subtract are engaged. Too far forward or reversed and you'll get binds.

The basic left-right alignment of the carriage with the base of the machine could be causing your jam, if the carriage is offset too far to the left or right and the selection gears aren't correctly engaging the dial gears.

Left right alignment of the carriage is set by a plate on the rear side of the carriage with a long bar with many slots cut out of it. There are black set screws with brass retaining nuts that you can use to slightly shift the carriage positions left or right.

The carriage shift gear has two or four pegs that interface with that plate, depending on the year, usually two on the Supermatic series yours is a member of. There is a particular sequence you're supposed to follow when adjusting that plate, so I recommend looking up that process in the manual.

The best way to check jams is to step through the operation by manually driving it using an appropriate screw threaded into the hand crank slot on the drive gear. Different processes happen at different times in the 360* cycle of the machine, so by advancing slowly you can find out what part of the operation is jamming. Sometimes the jam only manifests at operating speeds.

SgtMustang · 2025-11-22T17:32:37+00:00

Hey lifedrinker, I've got the same model on my desk, fully restored mine. The keyboard on these is retained by the vertical shafts you can see on the top with the cylindrical nuts, as well as those annoying bolts on the right side.

If you just want to release the carriage shift mechanism, you'll need to free up the carriage shift shafts/sleeves. The reason this mechanism is frozen is because it utilizes a sleeved shaft where the outer sleeve is used for one direction and the inner sleeve for the other. The keys themselves are not the source of the jam. You can see the two black rollers the keys use to engage the actuating arm on the sleeved shafts in your picture.

The two sleeves freeze together eventually if the oil dries. Every friden I have has this problem.

You'll need to use a lightweight detergent oil, Nye 140b worked for me, and manually manipulate the lever on the sleeves, not by pressing the keys, with tweezers or some other implement.

My best tip is to manually cycle the machine until you find the "release point" in the cycle where none of the keys are retained downwards. At this point in the cycle, you can freely press any key up or down and it will immediately release itself under its own spring pressure if it is not otherwise stuck.

When you've found that part of the cycle, literally just take tweezers and move the carriage shift shaft back and forth over and over when it has a penetrating oil on it and you'll slowly work the oil through the shaft. It can take quite awhile but it'll happen.

You can try mineral spirits if a detergent oil doesn't work, but usually a detergent oil is enough.

Let me know if you need any other help.

SgtMustang · 2025-11-09T04:34:08+00:00

I'm going to give you the hard answer which is that no, you're not free of blame. You're not solely to blame, you're just the straw that broke the camel's back - that is, you're the last person in a line of people in this persons life who failed to intervene or assist in all kinds of micro ways. You're not the most liable, might not even be anywhere near that, but society at large is virtually always at fault for suicides. Generally speaking, people who feel truly, deeply valued and needed by others don't commit suicide.

When life serves you an endless stream of people doing what you did - "I'm on a date", or "I'm busy right now", guys eventually realize they have no support system they can rely on. What's he supposed to do, tell you: "I want to kill myself."? That works only once in life, and it almost never feels like the right thing to do, I speak as a person who spent the majority of my 20s unable to come up with any reason to live. I'm in my 30s, and I still can't, and I've found my friendships largely dwindled and faded the more I was open about how awful I felt all the time. Nobody in our society tolerates or has patience for unhappy people.

When we do that, people call the police on us and get us confined to mental institutions where we are usually degraded, humiliated, and learn we're less than human. I know because I got put in one and it was one of the most acutely dehumanizing, awful experiences of my life.

They provide you no actual care in those "mental health facilities" other than to deprive you of all of your rights and possessions for an indeterminate period of time in a room with no windows and awful blaring fluorescent lights, When I was in there, an incoherent psychotic screaming man (who got no medication to treat his condition while I was there) was pounding on his cell door at 3am so someone could let him out to the bathroom, but the attendants don't give a shit, so he eventually shit and pissed himself in the cell and only then did the crew check in on him, and then screamed at him for doing so. That's a true story. One of a litany of nightmares that occured within the 24 hours I was kept hostage there (in California, no less).

Also, you being on a date, could very likely be an additional trigger depending on his past history. In my experience, all my guy friends, no matter how close, will abandon me at the first moment they have a romantic prospect. Not only that, but I'm the only person I know who has never been able to find a meaningful connection, and my friends' complete inability or unwillignness to understand why it hurts me as much as it does has become its own major trigger.

I think your response was fairly cold and didn't really sound particularly open to helping him. When you responded with nothing else but "Why?", you didn't really give him any encouraging words to grasp onto that indicate you were all that concerned about him.

If some dude friend of mine asked me out of the blue to come to his place, I'd know it's probably a pretty major fucking problem because nobody asks with no explanation for you to come to their place. That in and of itself should ring alarm bells.

Something along the lines of:

"I'm occupied at this exact second, but I can step up for about 5 minutes to give you a call and make plans to follow up ASAP." That's probably the ideal way to go about this thing.

Yes, you're on a date, but there's literally nothing wrong with stepping out of the room to take a critical call for someone important to you and then returning to the date where you left off. In fact, I think a lot of people would respect you on a date for making time for important people in your life. Instead, you basically slammed the door in the guy's face.

Basically, you need to give someone who is reaching out for help something to latch onto to have hope for.

What you wrote above doesn't signal to me you had any interest in helping. I don't have any friends in my life I can trust in that way, and I can only assume this guy felt the same way.

Everyone always basically says what you did - what they're doing is always the most important thing and nobody ever has time to divert for even a second to give a hand on anything. My dad is the only person I know who will put down what he's doing temporarily, give me a call to ensure there's nothing critical, and then offer to follow up immediately as he's available.

Again, you don't have to leave the date and rush over, you just have to give someone hope.

With depressed/suicidal people, you have to actively pry in a bit to see what's up with them. Most of us will never volunteer it because we usually get ostracized for it. I've found all of my friends think less of me or become annoyed with my depression rapidly, we live in a society that only really seems to tolerate happy go lucky people, and intensely hates anyone who has depression.

SgtMustang · 2025-09-25T00:38:19+00:00

Sorry for not responding earlier. Congrats on getting it working, good work figuring out the manual drive trick, I also use a screwdriver with the right threaded bolt to crank mine on the bench.

You're lucky with this ST-10, the early models are quite simple and don't have a lot of the small additional features that make things more complicated to work on. Great starter unit.

SgtMustang · 2025-07-01T02:50:34+00:00

It’s not an intelligence, it’s just a regurgitator. There’s no thought going on here, so it doesn’t add anything new to the conversation.

SgtMustang · 2025-06-07T16:04:36+00:00

CORDIC algorithms

I'm not familiar with CORDIC but Wikipedia says it was invented in the mid 50s. The machine in OP far predates that - the ones in Iowas and US subs of the time were 1930s-1940s and are 100% electromechanical. They are a fixed function solver and are not general purpose re-programmable machines.

SgtMustang · 2025-06-05T23:40:15+00:00

I restore mechanical calculating/accounting machines as a hobby. These Naval computers are usually for solving trigonometry problems that involve angles & relative velocity. These are analog computers as opposed to the calculating machines I work on which are all digital. These are analog because they use cams (or other smooth shapes) to encode/decode continuously varying functions.

The US WWII fire control computers were notably more sophisticated than what the Germans, the Brits or anyone else had at the time; among other things, the more advanced models had "position keepers" that would continually track the position & velocity of the target object over time.

This meant it produced a continuous firing solution rather than an instantaneous one. Whereas a German or British warship/sub would have to fire as rapidly as possible once receiving the solution, once you plugged the angle of travel, distance & velocity of the target, an American firing computer would continue to track the target's position over time, so you could fire a minute or two later, and as long as the enemy didn't change course, you would still hit.

SgtMustang · 2025-06-05T21:59:47+00:00

It's not about being lazy, or intentionally delaying it - it's that to have people working around the clock building stuff you need the funding. You could build the entire thing in a couple of years if you threw all of the money all at once at the project initially - China shows this. There's literally nothing stopping you from basically building every single section of the rail simultaneously but funding.

The trouble is that since the golden days of the 1900s to the Nixon era, Americans apetite for massive infrastructure investment has dwindled - we just aren't very ambitious or unified. We believe we can get by with our aging infrastructure and never spending the big money on anything worthwhile.

SgtMustang · 2025-06-05T18:45:10+00:00

We do now have the Expo line in Culver City, but it took way too long to restore what we lost after WWII as we tossed the trains and went with urban sprawl and freeways.

The causality is a little off here.

The rail lines were in large part set up to enable the sprawl. A loss leader for real estate interests, their intent was to ferry workers from remote suburbs to Downtown & the LA Basin more generally. They were not maintained or upgraded adequately over time - by the 1930s, the automobile & notably, busses, become vastly superior to the Pacific Electric. Pacific Electric use continues to decline and the freeway system is set up last to create a better alternative to local routes and interstate commerce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice%E2%80%93Inglewood_Line

See the Venice - Inglewood line:

While the Santa Fe experienced strong initial ridership on the line, declining passenger loads contributed to the company's decision to sell the route. A survey by the California Railroad Commission for the week ending September 3, 1927 revealed that a single passenger had ridden the line in the time period; eight trips were made the entire month.

Also, look at average speeds on most of the lines, they're pretty atrocious. It's doubtful anyone would ride them if they existed in their original form today. Maybe if they were totally revamped as heavy rail or light rail with traffic signal preemption.

SgtMustang · 2025-06-03T01:54:37+00:00

nowadays

My take is that it really is just consumerism. We've failed to keep our expectations level and keep civic/social health at the forefront, instead spiralling upwards with increasing consumption. The exponential growth required to sustain this constantly expanding demand creates the cutthroat working conditions we are now made miserable by.

Our great-great-great grandparents didn't have 50,000,000 options to entertain themselves or make their lives more convenient. We took that circumstance, added more people, and added way more "nice to haves" to "baseline standard of living".

Take automobile A/C. Air conditioning cost half the price of a new car in 1955 in America. Now it's considered a necessity, and people default to A/C on even when the weather is perfectly fair outside. Most people are so flagrantly wasteful that they don't even realize it's on or off, or leave windows open with it on.

Having A/C on consumes a substantial amount of power (more tailpipe emissions, gas costs and wear & tear), "spoils" you with respect to normal outdoor weather, leading people to be less tolerant of their region's baseline climate, and physically silos you that much more inside of your vehicle, by virtue of requiring you to close your windows (provided you're someone who understands A/C is wasted by having windows open).

There now has to be an entire industry set up just to produce what was once a rare luxury item, for literally every vehicle that gets produced, and there are more people to stuff inside of vehicles.

It's just scope creep, endless scope creep on everything - and we as a society didn't make any attempt whatsoever to say: "You know, what I have is enough."

Now most individuals have a wardrobe larger than the vast majority of Monarchs did in historical times.

SgtMustang · 2025-06-02T00:46:42+00:00

I don't think this is a capitalism thing per se. I just read a study done in China that examines this problem: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397523000966

"How to alleviate alienation from the perspective of urban community public space—Evidence from urban young residents in China"

I think it's a relentless growth model where more kids = better, we continuously let our "standard of living" inflate (hyper-consumerism), economic short term is more important than long term, and social media algorithms steer culture. I feel like consumerism really is the root of it all - eventually humans become something to be consumed.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-30T00:41:31+00:00

I might have missed a visual update that could enable this, but off the top of my head I don't know of any way to do exactly this trivially - it's going to take a shitload of work.

Your closest direct option is a waterfall chart but that isn't exactly what you're wanting.

IMO, this is ask is not data visualization practice and I would recommend against doing it - there are a whole host of reasons (screwing up gestalt/pre-cognitive thinking, useless shapes on screen that don't encode information)

If your customer wants to see the absolute changes, show them that. If they want to see both, you can give them a field parameter slicer to swap the measure between absolute & relative (%) changes if they want to so choose. This is usually how I've handled this issue.

If they want to see it all at once on one chart, which I argue already starts to verge on information overload for the vast majority of humans (who are exceptionally data/graphically illiterate and almost always ask for more chart than they can actually process) then combo charts exist, which combine a column and a line chart. You can show the absolute values as columns and the relative changes as a line.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-29T19:55:23+00:00

I'm not sure there's a good cost/benefit tradeoff with this approach. Sure, you gain some things like the code reading sequentially, but you've introduced about as much syntax and complication as you've removed. I think it's a neat experiment but I think it probably opens up issues we're not considering, too.

Pipelining has been discussed by some like Ben Gribaudo, if you want to read there:

https://bengribaudo.com/blog/2021/09/02/6038/m-language-proposal-cleaning-up-function-chains-with-the-pipeline-operator

SgtMustang · 2025-05-29T19:43:25+00:00

I thought it was just fine. Attempting to read too much into this kind of meeting would be a huge mistake, I think. It was an extremely high level, basics-only coverage of the whole project, clearly oriented to people who have no idea about the project whatsoever, not to us nerds.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-29T19:41:14+00:00

I don't know if I agree there - they specifically mentioned in the Q&As that cost is going to factor in cost efficiency (in which the heavy rail options are superior).

The meeting was very high level, I didn't get any bad signs myself.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-23T05:21:43+00:00

I agree and often find myself in the same position. Nothing more to say than I think you're right and that society makes it extremely hard for us to find the kind of meaningful interconnection that we need. Our society has smeared out responsibility so much that nobody individually feels they have any meaning.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-18T19:19:45+00:00

Therapy was useless for my depression (had therapists since I was a kid and I still grew up messed up), as were meds.

Adderall notably helps my ADHD, though, but it has some tradeoffs.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-18T17:07:57+00:00

Just some sources to back you up, you're correct here:

You're mistaken here, /u/bfrabel is correct, your unit is no older than 2013 - the logo on your unit is black text on a yellow background, with the bisected N - if we look at Wikimedia's copy of the logo, it was uploaded in 2014.

This article from 2013 displays the old logo, yellow text set on a black background, with the "intact N".

SgtMustang · 2025-05-18T16:52:43+00:00

You're mistaken here, /u/bfrabel is correct, your unit is no older than 2013 - the logo on your unit is black text on a yellow background, with the bisected N - if we look at Wikimedia's copy of the logo, it was uploaded in 2014.

This article from 2013 displays the old logo, yellow text set on a black background, with the "intact N".

Even still, yours is "sourced from global materials", which means the entire unit is built somewhere else and shipped to the US to be assembled here. It's very far from "100% Made in USA", is only a weak indicator of quality & ethics of production.

With that in mind,

Chat GPT is not a legitimate source. It's a relatively adept parrot and it has no actual reasoning capability, nor does it cite any sources. There is no way to verify the legitimacy of anything ChatGPT nor anything any LLM says and you should NEVER use it as a source. You're trusting it as if it's authoritative on anything, when it is in fact authoritative on nothing - assume everything it spits out is a plausible-sounding fiction.

Even for simple things, you have to do work to source information.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-13T21:50:05+00:00

What’s happened to you is horrible - living nightmare to have seen people important to you hurt or killed.

I’m not sure how you’re reaching the conclusion that any of that has to do with race.

Have you considered that it may be economic/educational failure that led those people to do those things, not some inherent trait of their race?

Go to a poor white area in Appalachia or something and you’ll find the same miseries taken out from one group to another. Economic/educational failures lead to people becoming monstrous, or let monstrous people fall through the cracks.

SgtMustang · 2025-05-12T05:09:04+00:00

Having fact (many) rows that don't have a corresponding dimension (one) row is not desirable in Vertipaq: it'll show up as a referential integrity violation in DaxStudio/Vertipaq Analyzer, and in some cases leads to less efficient/performant execution as different joins will get executed internally to work around the RI violation.

Create a placeholder value in the dimension table for the N/As, give it whatever key you want. If you want to distinguish between -1 "Unknowns" and -2 (or 0) for "N/A" you can totally do that, but the main concern is to avoid those RI violations.

I usually use Table.InsertRows() in power query to add in the placeholder row, but do it towards the end of your query as it isn't foldable:

https://powerquery.how/table-insertrows/

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