marssaxman

That may well be true for you but it is not true for everyone.

I would probably have a DualUp by now if I could find one available anywhere: it's a very appealing form factor. I looked at the INNOCN site, but only see normal-looking monitors there; do you have a model name or any pointers I could search for?

I know exactly what this article is talking about, but for me the progression out from more mainstream genres initially branched off into industrial music, and from there into psytrance.

I definitely prefer music with no vocals, or with occasional vocal samples rather than singing, and if I can't have that I'd rather have vocals in a language I don't speak - leave the English-processing part of my brain free so it can focus on my job, please.

"It sounds like behind the fear of a loss of creativity and inspiration and passion in the world, we are OK with automating away the work that we don't want to do."

Yes, of course. This is and has always been the point of computers.

I tell Claude to record everything in Linear as projects and tasks. Larger design docs get saved in git as markdown files, and the linear projects reference them by path.

I could never stand to use project management software when I had to do it by hand, but now that I can just talk through what I want to do and let the AI handle the paperwork, projects/tasks/milestones are a really useful tool for keeping track of what I'm working on.

I start the work week by telling Claude to go investigate Linear and Github to figure out what I was doing at the end of the previous week. Quick way to get back up to speed without having to think about any of it over the weekend.

When I was young, "autism" was seen as a severe and generally debilitating mental disorder, and "Asperger's syndrome" was known as an affliction with similar but less dramatic symptoms. When the two were folded together into "Autism spectrum disorder", it was quite natural to understand this as a declaration that "autism" was not a singular condition but a trait you might have more or less of, that what we had previously called "Asperger's" was just "autism" in a less severe form, and that the "autism spectrum" described the amount of autism you had, ranging from none to a great deal. This is still supported in pop psychology by are-you-autistic questionnaires yielding a numeric score, and it was always kind of baked into general discussion of autism by Hans Asperger's original "extreme male brain" theory.

I must confess that I cannot make any sense of autism anymore, under the multidimensional-multi-spectrum definition used in this article; it seems to be all kinds of different things, or none of them, and I have no idea what it is that different people who have autism are supposed to have in common, such that the same term ought to be used to describe them. The only concrete idea I can find in the concept of "autism" now is the proposition that different people's minds work differently, which I would have taken to be obvious. Of course this is all very far from any area in which I may have expertise.

MeshCore is growing rapidly. Check out this map of CascadiaMesh - connectivity all the way from Vancouver down to Klamath Falls, and now east to Spokane:

https://cascadiamesh.org/map/

Also a source: back in the '90s, I once resolved a disagreement with a friend over the pronunciation of the man's name by emailing him to ask, and "Crichton rhymes with 'frighten'" was his exact answer.

The situation is much better than you think. I actually have a little DSL project along these lines: it's meant to be a declarative component in a larger application which enforces certain data guarantees.

It is not based on JSON or any other out-of-the-box format. The only source material for this DSL anywhere in the world is on my laptop: a little documentation, a few examples, a partial implementation.

This is enough. Codex can not only give me arbitrary examples in this novel DSL on demand, it can see what I'm trying to do with the compiler and extend it for me.

Oh, well, that's even more absurd in the north; in summertime the sun rises long before one wants to get up and lingers well after the day is done. What's to be saved? We have an irritating superabundance of daylight. Blackout curtains are often not enough.

I do live far enough north, which is probably part of the reason "daylight savings" strikes me as a bit silly: no arrangement of clocks can work around the fact that there's not enough sunlight for all we want to do in a winter day. Both getting up before dawn and leaving work after sunset are undesirable, but during midwinter you can't avoid either one. I figure you might as well just learn to deal with the darkness, and if you can't, move south until you have enough daylight you don't need to "save" it!

I'm glad we're agreed that changing the clocks twice a year is a bad idea, but I don't understand why we should abandon Daylight Savings Time by adopting it permanently. What's so wrong with Standard Time?

Oh, well: whether we put the clocks back or leave them permanently off-by-one, either is better than changing them around over and over.

The blogosphere was all about random people writing whatever they felt like: blogging died after the professionals took over and tried to make money at it.

Likewise - it's not just about generating production code faster; it's now feasible to create all kinds of experiments, test fixtures, visualizers, analyzers, and support software you never would have had time for before, which you can use to improve your process and create a better product.

I recently had to evaluate some data one of my coworkers had produced, to decide whether some process was going to be feasible. It would have taken probably a couple of weeks for me to dig through it all by hand, so he whipped up a quick little interactive web app that let me explore the data with all the connections and context visible, and I reviewed it much more quickly. A single-use application for a single user - what a luxury! - and it took less time to create than the time I saved by using it.

I will check in Monday morning on the result of an A/B test I set running over the weekend, comparing a reimplementation of a certain tool with its original. The test spins up AWS boxes, pulls code repos, compiles them, runs analysis, recovers from errors and maintains a retry queue, etc., etc., and ultimately collates the results and generates a report. I didn't write a line of this! I wouldn't have written anything nearly so sophisticated, and the results I'd have gotten would have been far less useful. But here we are: I tell the computer "make it so", and I get a really valuable test which runs itself while I enjoy my life, and we'll be able to switch to the new tool with confidence.

I spent most of a week with no phone recently, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I mostly communicate via Signal, and have the app installed on my computer as well, so I wasn't really cut off - just less available. WhatsApp doesn't have an installable PC version that I know of, but they do have this web interface: https://web.whatsapp.com/

I learned to drive with paper maps and have never really made much use of GPS navigation, so that part was easier for me than it might be for most.

I'm not going to get rid of my phone entirely, but after that experience, I feel like not carrying it all the time anymore.

I really don't want permanence, no! I start to feel fidgety and uncomfortable after I've spent too many years in one place. The idea of living in a single house for decades on end sounds like a kind of imprisonment.

I think of Seattle as "home", and once lived there for twenty-three years straight - but I had nine different addresses during that time. I am probably more of a nomad at heart than the average American, but perhaps Americans have more of a nomadic temperament than the average human.

Getting to know your neighbors can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you make a great new friend: sometimes you're stuck with an obstreperous busybody. It can be nice not having to spend your whole life dealing with the same people and the same conflicts.

Caturday -> Saturday enjoyed with or similar to a cat

There's a well-known underground nightclub in Seattle which has a monthly event called "Caturday" - I had no idea there was another meaning for the portmanteau! Makes sense, though.

I'd prefer that my software isn't connected to servers in a datacenter that require me to pay monthly bills, either!

Your concern is reasonable but misdirected. This article is a publication of the "Modern War Institute", a research organization at West Point, the US Army military academy; it is literally their job to anticipate and plan for the next war, whatever it may happen to be. Deciding whether those plans ought to be used is a completely different responsibility.

I remember when folks had to have a degree to enter the "profession" of software developer.

I am not old enough to remember that era; by the 1980s, when I was learning to code, it was already quite normal to get a programming job on the basis of skill you had acquired independently. The past era of quality code you refer to must already have ended, because most of the code I encountered back then would be considered garbage now.

I spent many years of my early career trying to lower the entry level to a point where anyone who could read and write English could be a programmer: this was a popular idea, part of the whole "democratization of computing" theme that came along with the development of the personal computer. BASIC was popular, GUI interface builders were popular, HyperCard was popular, there were many efforts to make software construction as easy as anything else you might do with a computer. This all continued into the web era.

In the end, though, it seems that the great majority of people don't want to make their own software.

More of the same probably.

Yes, I imagine so. Technology keeps changing, but history goes around in circles!

Thank you for the reminder! I got out of the habit of checking StreetComplete since my previous neighborhood was well populated in OSM, but having just moved, I should check it out again.

That's funny - to me, Jodhpur is most immediately appealing of the three. It reminds me of the medinas I visited in Fez and Marrakesh: overwhelming at first, as a visitor, but compelling, and full of life. I'd rather live in a thriving urban place like that, all human-scale and pedestrian, than some sprawling, soulless, car-dependent suburb like the ones a majority of North Americans inhabit.

King County (where Seattle is located) repealed its mandatory helmet law in 2022, not because anybody has changed their mind about bike helmets being a good idea, but because the law primarily served as a discretionary-enforcement tool for harassment of homeless people and racial minorities. The law had no measurable impact on helmet-wearing rates or rates of brain injury, because people who can afford helmets generally choose to wear them. The city of Tacoma had repealed its mandatory helmet law two years prior, for similar reasons.

one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“

I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.

Who would do the requiring, how would they enforce it, and what would motivate them to bear the expense?

That's a different complaint. I was responding to the previous commenter, who said, "No one getting rich off data centers wants to live next to one, which kind of tells you everything you need to know": but people getting rich off anything choose to live in exclusive residential areas rather than industrial zones, so I don't think this is a meaningful argument against datacenters particularly.

The same is true of factories, mills, distribution centers, stockyards, and industrial facilities in general. As these things go, datacenters are relatively benign.

Perhaps there will come a day that I give up my gas range, after all.

The fear began in 1998, when a fraudulent research paper was published in the Lancet which claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The fraud was exposed in 2010, prompting retraction of the paper and revokation of the author's medical license, but twelve years was plenty of time for a folk suspicion of the MMR vaccine to put down roots independent of the original cause.

Someone is finally building an electric vehicle for people like me!