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I had one of these and loved it, taking it everywhere. I vaguely remember it running some flavor of Linux that was pretty usable at the time. Sometime in 2012 the display started having issues and then it stopped powering on shortly thereafter. I would spend the next decade trying to recreate something resembling the experience through Chromebooks but never really getting there, eventually surrendering to the 13-inch MacBook Air.

Yes, and possibly a constellation of little cuts and bruises on your shins.

Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.

I also feel like giving a shout out to the PDF version of the official PostgreSQL manual. It was one of the most enjoyable and engaging tech books I've ever read, and seems like pretty much the gold standard in what official documentation can look like. It took me a while to figure this out though, because the UX of the standard HTML version of the manual is pretty clunky.

100%. I would also say that this broadly applies to pretty much all of the AI subreddits, and much of AI Twitter as well. Very little nuanced or thoughtful discussions to be found. Looks more like a bunch of people arguing about their favorite sports teams.

Almost every single post on the ClaudeAI subreddit is like this. I use Opus 4.5 in my day to day work life and it has quickly become my main axe for agentic stuff but its output is not a world-shattering divergence from Anthropic's previous, also great iterations. The religious zealotry I see with these things is something else.

Yes, as far as I can tell infinite scroll + 2010s era social media recommendation algorithms alone have already decimated the wider human collective's ability to think for themselves, and has subsequently eroded sane discourse and democratic norms in societies all across the globe.

I agree, I think it makes most sense to add them up to be the true #2.

I also find them very developer-centric — testers get forced into upfront design work that doesn’t fit how they naturally test, and many struggle with it. I’ve had better results by expressing behavior directly and keeping UI concerns thin, instead of using a wrapper around page structure.

I'm sorry, but if your testers are not comfortable getting involved in the early design stages of your software in a 21st century world, then there's at least a 90% chance that their primary role at your company is perpetuating organizational dysfunction.

Most of my career has been defined by cleaning up the gargantuan messes the culture of "throw tickets over the wall to QA" created, and it has been very, very ugly. It defies common sense how culture around tools and processes for dev and ops roles continues to evolve over time, but for some reason testers are still trying to test software off in a silo, like it's released once or twice a year on CD-ROM.

Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.

Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.

Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven.

I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.

This is definitely a useful exercise worth going through for the educational value before eventually surrendering and just using the big models owned by "unprofitable companies."

Good simple nootropic, but I like the cup of coffee even better with a 200mg capsule of a high quality L-Theanine to give a zen-like calm to the stimulation of the caffeine. Underrated as heck IMHO.

Thanks for the reply. I think I mostly follow your elaboration.

Topics like DEI have definitely become a much more touchy subject in the last 2 years or so, and that they are not discussed as much in "official" channels as they previously were, but that the practices are mostly still there and are generally still considered a positive thing to most people.

It might just be semantics, but I do think your definition of melting pot is slightly off, in that in the US, there is no real consensus of what "the same culture & set of values' actually means. The US is still a very young country. The only "native" culture here was colonized and mostly erased by white settlers. The population of people here can largely be defined by different waves of historical immigration from other parts of the world. Culture and values here are more of two-way street, where they tend to be mixed and matched in the "melting pot" type environments that have popped up all over the country. Now with that being said, most recently we have found ourselves in a situation where an extremely vocal (and quite incoherent IMHO) minority of people against rising waves of multiculturalism have come into power and started controlling the narrative, but I would say that they are not representative of most US citizens, and that the only reason why this has happened is because 90 million people were too apathetic and mentally lazy to defend against it when given the opportunity. I'm still struggling to understand what that says about the US as a people, but I really don't think that as many of us are as wrapped up in identity politics as it might seem like we are from the outside.

Yes. I would be curious to hear what formed your impression that it is now considered an offensive bad thing. I have some ideas of course, but none are reflective of the reality of the worldviews of most city or even suburb-dwelling US people. If anything, the cultural melting pot thing has never been stronger.

I have PSVT. I think it started for me around the age of 17 and was always pretty short-lived and infrequent, often with years between episodes. A couple years ago, chronic stress and lifestyle stuff began to catch up with me and the episodes started happening a few times a week, so I'm now prescribed Metoprolol as a pill in a pocket thing to deal with it. Generally speaking, as long as sleep, diet, and basic exercise are in order--and alcohol/caffeine consumption are kept low--it just doesn't happen. It also can almost always be remedied with some simple vagus nerve exercises. All of that can be tough to manage sometimes though, so I'm very seriously considering getting an ablation soon. The doctors have told me that it's not a particularly dangerous condition as long as you're an otherwise healthy individual, but it's definitely still terrifying and can't be good for you either.

I will say that it can definitely very much be a bullshit job if your org structure is optimized for bullshit. Like 80% of QA jobs are the result of hierarchical bullshit pipelines, and certainly no small percentage of dev roles too.

It really is great, and something that can be ordered at just about any bar anywhere. Excellent as a stand-in between alcoholic beverages to avoid getting too plastered, or if rolling completely alcohol-free, enough to feed the oral fixation that comes with being in any typical drinking situation.

Sounds like a lot of the adults in my world lol, although there is more subtlety in the ways that they will kick you in the head and ask for a sandwich.

Table of contents is definitely broken right now.

Portlander here since the late 90s. Downtown for much of it. I think most people are very aware, but just aren't really too concerned about it. Well, about drugs anyway. A certain degree of "live and let live" and just general anarchism is embedded into the DNA of the city. Everything going on in Portland today are the same things that have been going on in the city for decades, it's just become much more visceral and in your face over time as the American landscape has changed. Drugs are harder now. Resources are more constrained. Everything is more competitive. It's just not nearly as easy to get by. Guns are a different story, however. I think everyone of all stripes are pretty collectively worried about that. I don't know what the answer to all these problems are, but I think it comes from US society as a whole becoming more introspective about how we ended up here to begin with.

These kinds of experiments get even more interesting when you also pipe the IPs into Shodan and find out that a lot of the malicious login attempts are coming from pwned DVRs and other devices.

This is awesome. I would love to see a whole ass social network (or a webring?) that was just a directory of man pages that I could get lost in.

While I can't say that I have noticed anything out of the ordinary yet on my Pixel 7, I will say that I have been a diehard Google phone user since the Nexus 4 days and have been really disappointed with how things have turned out with the more recent iterations of Google phones. Terrible battery life, bugs, poor quality fingerprint readers, questionable design decisions in general. The phones used to be a fairly reasonable alternative to the Apple offerings, but these days I feel like there is really no competition and am very close to switching to the other side. I really want to stick with what had traditionally worked for me, but I keep getting burned year after year now.

I was about to say, I've brought friends from the US to Mexico City on a few occasions and it seems like the altitude (and maybe the pollution) has had strange and unpleasant effects on most people during the first couple days. A vertigo episode definitely doesn't sound far-fetched.

Haven't poked my head in there in a while, but in my experience it was more the opposite where much of the discourse is dominated by tech-left influencer types and their followers who migrated from Twitter. Choose your echo chamber I guess.

This article was somewhat revelatory to me in that I can now see that the source of my frustration with the direction my career has gone in recent years is that I spent much of it cutting my teeth at a SV-style company during the 2010s before it was bought out by traditionalists, and that subsequent companies ended up being more solidly traditional, even if they initially appeared SV-like on the surface. I think I had naively assumed that SV-style was the norm, and the experience of discovering this to not be the case has been a little alienating.

I haven't done a ton of Scrum in my career, but my observation of it, in concept at least, is that it's supposed to be sort of like training wheels for agile, which seems innocuous enough. What I have found particularly horrifying about some orgs adopting it is that the agile part (the part that's trickier to execute) gets thrown out the window in favor of what is basically waterfall with sprints, and then people eat it up like there's nothing profoundly wrong with the picture. Something like that is definitely a cancer.

Yeah it's funny, after what feels like at least a solid decade of on-demand audio I'm finding myself seeking out more live audio wherever I can find it. Miss the feeling of at least passively participating in something. I think the isolation of the pandemic kicked some of that into gear.