markbnj

I feel like the author has another disappointment coming. Alexa has been annoying in this way for a long time now. Still very useful as well, but yeah, annoying. It has always been too proactive about suggesting things I don't want or need in response to simple questions like "What is the outside temperature?" ("It's currently 46 degrees, with a low of 32 degrees expected overnight. Did you know you can turn your lights on and off according to a schedule? Would you like to schedule turning some lights on or off?") But recent AI-oriented updates have just made it worse. Now its chatty and full of attitude, and having raised a few teenagers let me tell you, that's what we want more of in our lives. Chat. And attitude.

The John McPhee article that the author references was expanded into a book, and it's a great read for anyone that finds this story interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Oranges-John-McPhee-ebook/dp/B005E8AN...

I've got one sitting on the shelf above my desk, a 33 Mhz dx, I don't even remember what machine it came out of.

Adoption of a new technology has always sorted itself into buckets by early adopters, mainstream adopters and late adopters. I think this post is just demonstrating the mindset of the latter.

Ha, little fall down the memory hole. I had a Harris 20mhz 286 back in the late 80's. I thought that thing was a beast at the time. Paired it with a Conner 100MB disk and I remember my brother laughing derisively, "Who the hell needs 100 megabytes?"

I suspect that my recent experience confirms this. Our daughter shipped two suitcases home from the UK, paying some local company for "door-to-door" delivery. They contracted with UPS who demanded an additional $32 when the first bag showed up. For the second she paid the same fee online so they wouldn't require a check at the door.

Like the author I've been in the process of archiving family memories since my parents passed away. In my Dad's case his early fascination with super 8mm film gave way to a lifelong quest to own more Kodak slide carousels than any other human. It's sort of an odd place to be, when you're in possession of so much that _seems_ emotionally, viscerally important, but that ordinary people living their everyday lives take very little actual interest in. I scanned all the slides with a Kodak thing I bought on Marketplace. There were more than 6500 of them and the archive has passed 20GB in size. Now I have a stack of plastic kodak carousels taller than I am and thousands of slides that I can't just put in the trash because it feels wrong.

I'm working on loose documents and photos now with a great Epson flatbed scanner that I've had for years. It's something of an obsession for me now: to finish the job and tie their lives and a good chunk of ours off neatly. When I'm done I'll pack it all onto thumb drives and send copies to my siblings and they will look at a few of them and then put the drives in a drawer and that will likely be the end of it. But I will have done my duty to the old folks, even though it took long enough that I became one. It has all reminded me of how I mourned when I lost a hard drive years ago, and then came to the realization that I hadn't looked at any of its contents in years and that if I lived to be 100 probably none of it would ever have been important again anyway. You can't really keep anything, so do your kids a favor and dispose of your stuff while you can :).

For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a good start :).

https://markbetz.net

I would not say your list is anything like complete, although those topics are often discussed here. Apple is a huge player in the general computing ecosystem, and probably a majority of front- and back-end developers these days work on macbooks, so it isn't surprising that the things they do resonate in this community.

I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discussion. When I was starting out in the 80's I had to prowl dial-up BBSs or order expensive books and manuals to find out how to do something. I once paid IBM $140 for a manual on the VGA interface so I could answer a question. The turn around time on that answer was a week or two. The other day I asked claude something similar to this: "when using github as an OIDC provider for authentication and assumption of an AWS IAM role the JWT token presented during role assumption may have a "context" field. Please list the possible values of this field and the repository events associated with them." I got back a multi-page answer complete with examples.

I'm sure github has documents out there somewhere that explain this, but typing that prompt took me two minutes. I'm able daily to get fast answers to complex questions that in years past would have taken me potentially hours of research. Most of the time these answers are correct, and when they are wrong it still takes less time to generate the correct answer than all that research would have taken before. So I guess my advice is: if you're starting out in this business worry less about LLMs replacing you and more about how to efficiently use that global expert on everything that is sitting on your shoulder. And also realize that code, and the ability to write working code, is a small part of what we do every day.

Ditto, self-hosted for over eight years at my last job. SCM server and 2-4 runners depending on what we needed. Very impressive stability and when we had to upgrade their "upgrade path" tooling was a huge help.

I once found a bug in code that was read to me over the phone while I sat in an airport waiting for a flight. So I agree that constructing a model of the program in your head is the key, and you can use various interfaces for that. Some are more optimal than others. When I first started learning to write programs we very often debugged from printed listings for example. They rolled up nicely but random access was very slow.

A type system lets different parts of a program agree on how to interpret a pattern of bits in memory and then enforce that interpretation. I don't think electronic circuits built from discrete components that have immutable physical properties are analogous in the way that the author apparently thinks they are.

crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous

Given the way death was implemented ("LFG @ EC tunnel for a corpse run to Guk!") and the fact that you could fall off the ships in the middle of the ocean when the game lagged, it _was_ epic and dangerous. I remember the first time it happened to me and players in public chat coached me through a 20 or 30 minute swim to get my wizard and stuff to an island with a portal.

We're not seeing any connectivity issues between pods and vms in our vpc, but your mileage may vary.

> Is that a measured observation? Not trying to nitpick - genuinely curious if this is your observation from experience or there are some studies that you are referring to.

It is from my experience as a rider, as I said in my post, but there are also plenty of studies showing increased deaths and injuries among pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.

As an almost-daily motorcyclist with 15k miles on my current machine (Suzuki DL650), I absolutely agree that the increased proportion of pickup trucks on the road increases the risks for riders, however I suspect it is mainly because the larger, heavier vehicles aggravate the effects of a general deterioration in driving skills and attitudes. One thing about riding a motorcycle is that you are, unless you have a death wish, an active and observant participant in what you are doing, which alone separates you from a seeming majority of those driving cars and trucks. You become much more aware of what others on the road are doing, and what they are doing, in large numbers, is acting like twits.

Driving crazily fast in residential areas, rolling through stop signs, blowing off yellow and even red lights, ignoring turn signals, aggressively tailgating cars, trucks, even motorcyclists like myself, tapping away at their phones and steering with their knees. I think I see just about every variation of all of these things at least several times a week, to the extent that I have thought about the idea of creating some kind of org or foundation or even just a blog to advocate a return to taking driving seriously. I don't have a lot of confidence that I could make a difference though. I suspect a lot of the problem is simply many more cars on infrastructure that we haven't put enough money into for decades, but I'm no expert.

Like using a throwaway account to accuse someone of cowardice.

Lots of memories from my own childhood and my kids'. My dad took me on my first visit to a Detroit-area store in the mid-60's. Used to love just walking around and checking out the shelves. Sort of a Fry's vibe but there was one in nearly every decent-sized town. The oldest piece of running tech currently in my house is a 20 year-old Realistic 4-port gigabit switch that connects my office machines to the router in the family room :).

Nice shot of nostalgia seeing pictures of the mill in Maynard. I taught C++ classes there back in the early 90's. It was fairly early in my professional career and just being in that building gave me a feeling of having arrived in the place I had been trying to get to for so long.

I have all 21 of the Aubrey-Maturin novels and have read them through twice. At the end of the last time I mentally bid them a fond farewell, sure that I would never devote the time to give them a third go... but now I doubt my resolve on that point. Simply the best historical novels of the sea and the Royal Navy ever written.

I also still have an original user's guide, and I think the quick-reference pamphlet too.

Sad to read this, but all things pass I guess. Spent a large chunk of my life posting on and reading the AT forum. Last I checked I still have a mod account. Things sort of started to go downhill for me with the sale to... meh can't even recall the purchaser it's been so long. Farewell AT, thanks for all the good advice on builds and overclocking through the years.

> Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that's basically it.

I'm not sure if you're intending to be literal or engaging in hyperbole to make a point, but either way it doesn't gel with our experience. Yes, we definitely set timers and ask about the weather... near us, at places we're going to, in the near future, etc. We also ask for a lot of conversions, or adjustments to measurements. My partner is a great cook and she is constantly shouting out to Alexa to convert an amount, find a substitute, confirm a cooking temp and time and things like that. I ask it factual questions all the time and usually it has an answer: these might be history, technology, medicine, whatever. Given the device's low price point and lack of any ongoing subscription it seems like a pretty good value to us, and it will even play some mood music for us while we eat and tell us where our shipment of coffee filters is.

Confirmed it does work in Windows 11, and the desktop folder shortcut even gets assigned a special icon... however there is so much stuff in the folder I am not sure its really going to be that useful.

No, it's not. This immediately caught my eye too. According to google the right number is 7.8 k/s so it was very far off the mark.

Agree with you about loud pipes, but I am not sure why you had to throw high-vis clothing in there, unless the point is simply not to rely on any one advantage and to assume every driver is going to try to kill you. I do and heartily encourage every other rider to do as well. There is data to argue in favor of high vis clothing, and honestly given that the only downside to it is a perception of personal style I don't get why every rider isn't wearing it.

We're almost exactly 10 miles north of the epicenter near Oldwick, NJ. We experienced several sharp jolts that sent some items tumbling off shelves and shook my ember full of coffee off its charging coaster (or I spilled it in reacting to the jolt, idk really), followed by a gentle shaking that lasted 30 seconds or more. This is the first one I can recall feeling since we moved here in 1995.

Clicked on the first Bell Labs link hoping to read the original and ended up on some VPN service's landing page. Sigh. :(