dws

dws.rip? That hit kind of hard.

Imagine that every so often, without warning, a 47-61 db house fly buzzes somewhere in your house. I'd grab a swatter and hunt it down before it disturbed me again.

Sure, I can run some slow Llama3 models on my home network, but why bother when it is so cheap or free to run it on a cloud service?

Running locally, you can change the system prompt. I have Gemma set up on a spare NUC, and changed the system prompt from "helpful" to "snarky" and "kind, honest" to "brutally honest". Having an LLM that will roll its eyes at you and say "whatever" is refreshing.

Full authenticity would also require raised flooring, and an audio track of people shouting "SAVE YOUR FILES!" whenever the lights flickered.

Coding forms, accumulated until someone had access to a keypunch.

Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.

I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.

There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between volcanic soil and alluvial soil. The same varietal of grape produces a noticeably different wine depending on which side of the line it was grown on.

Sedona, Arizona.

Named for Sedona Schenbly, of Goren, Missouri. She and her husband had moved to Arizona for their health. He wanted to open a Post Office, but the Post Office authorities didn't favor his suggestion of naming it "Schenblyville Station." Thankfully, he chose to name it after his wife.

"This I now perceived to be wrong, not because it is too radical, but because it is too simplistic. The biggest mistake in the 'Build one to throw away' concept is that it implicitly assumes the classical sequential or waterfall model of software construction." -- The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, pg. 265

Can confirm that this runs on an ancient i3 NUC under Ubuntu 20.04. It emits a token every five or six seconds, which is "ask a question then go get coffee" speed. Still, very cool.

Lightweight branches was a huge selling point. If you didn't do them often enough that they were rote, branches in RCS/CVS/SVN required ritual sacrifice.

Keyboards are a matter of taste. To my fingers, the T420 is the last of the T series with a really good one. Older Thinkpads are easy to repair. I've replaced the keyboard once, and after near daily evening use for many years, I'm about to attempt to replace a failing fan. I'll miss this laptop when its time comes. It's run various releases of Ubuntu like a champ.

Many years back (so details are fuzzy), a friend who worked at Atari in the early 80's told that the programmer who did the game part of the work had the basic chess algorithm working in a few months, spent the next year getting it to run in less than 128 bytes of RAM, and was then burnt out and left tech.

IIRC, the game devs used a PDP-11 for much of their work, so that had a bit more RAM to work with to get started.

"Notably, although officially psychoactive, we exclude caffeine due to its near-universal prevalence in software."

You'd lose more weight from the plastic components outgassing.

If you skimmed that headline and went straight to Firesign Theatre...

Agreed, thought it seems unlikely to me that the sensors I was testing were reacting to any sort of leak or out-gassing. They consistently showing a steady increase in TVOCs over 12 hours in an empty room with a window cracked.

Interesting that they don't recommend TVOC sensors. I spent a few months trying to get a set of CSS811 sensors to behave. They'd consistently, but erratically, drift upwards into "you should be dead now" territory, returning to believable levels only when fully reset.

Some of my D1 Minis have regulators that run really hot. Hot enough that temperature readings get thrown off unless the sensor moved several inches away.

One nit. Hoffman says you don't need to pre-rinse the filter. Try that into a cup, then sip the result.

Give 90C or 85C a try, and see if you notice the difference.

Visualizing being the shower can also sometimes work. I got stuck on a problem a while back, and tried leaning back, closing my eyes, and imaging being in a warm shower with a head full of shampoo. Voila!

He didn't single pin pick the lock, as that wasn't the point of the video. Raking is a picking technique, though, and common as a starting move in locksport competitions.

Elsewhere, https://sive.rs/book/ShortSentences, Sivers recommends "Several Short Sentences About Writing", which is a perspective on writing that I'd not seen before. A useful read if you want to practice his present advice.

And behind the camera, Stewart Brand

My copy is dated 1969. The COMPUTER merit badge card I have framed is dated July 27, 1970. Guess I missed the 50 year anniversary.

An Assistant Scoutmaster worked with the computer at the local Bell Telephone office, and guided me through getting the badge, mostly by providing binders of training material for their GE-mark-something. Computers then were expensive and precious, so the Bell folk only let civilians look through a window into the room with the magic box. And computer time being costly, they only let me run one program--which printed HI MOM and added two numbers. I didn't even get to type it in. In those days, one filled out a coding form and handed it to the secretarial pool to get cards punched.

"c. Describe jobs in the computer field."

Well, we all fly our jet packs to the office...

https://web.dev/learn/css/ is a well-organized overview, with optional short video clips and interactive parts (via codepen).

First heard it via the CMU Charrette Ada compiler, which implemented a subset of the language.

A lawyer dissects the lawsuit. tl;dr, it'll get tossed. https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1427800736960708611

A big benefit from putting in the effort to estimate is from the side-effects having to get clear on the what the problem is and what constraints apply. So much useful information gets flushed out when you're both under pressure and are trying to give a reasonable estimate.

Then, often, toss the estimate.