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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro 4 months ago

In June 1977, the base Apple II model with 4 KB of RAM was $1,298 (equivalent to about $6,900 in 2025), and with the maximum 48 KB of RAM it was $2,638 (equivalent to about $14,000 in 2025).

(Source: Wikipedia via Claude Opus)

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Write-only code 5 months ago

Sure, but the article is talking about people who can and do read code now but will develop software without reading code in the future. Kind of like you rarely look at the object code that the compiler produces.

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Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020) 6 months ago

Bret Devereaux, an historian blogger, has a long, detailed look at the economics of premodern peasant farmers and their households, called Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, starting at https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

It begins:

“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”

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Kicking Robots 7 months ago

https://archive.ph/Ecmai

‘You can learn a surprising amount by kicking things. It’s an epistemological method you often see deployed by small children, who target furniture, pets, and their peers in the hope of answering important questions about the world. Questions like “How solid is this thing?” and “Can I knock it over?” and “If I kick it, will it kick me back?”’

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Against longtermism (2021) 3 years ago

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias:

Ozymandias

By Percy Byesshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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The Madness in our Methods: Crash of GW9525 and our broken aeromedical system 3 years ago

Admiral Cloudberg (Kyra Dempsey) writes detailed, thoughtful analyses of airline disasters. In many cases, subsequent improvements have made a disaster type unlikely to recur. This one (the suicide/mass murder of Andreas Lubitz on Germanwings flight 9525) is an exception, and the article makes a strong case that significant changes are needed but are not being pursued. The archive is full of fascinating, riveting accounts of what happened, why, and how for many different tragedies.

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When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver (1999) 3 years ago

Yeah. I started carrying the fire extinguisher because my parents’ full-size Chevy van burned up with all of their camping supplies, clothes, guns, etc. from a three-month roadtrip. Also melted the front of their trailer before the highway patrol arrived. Brave/insane CHP officer pulled the propane tanks off of the trailer before they blew.

I had nothing of value in the Buick.

Ironic, as Ms. Morissette would say.

My parents bought the Buick from my grandmother to drive home to Virginia after the van fire, and they gave it to me for my senior year of college. My fire was a couple of years after graduation.

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When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver (1999) 3 years ago

I actually used the fire extinguisher I used to carry in my ‘79 Buick LeSabre to put out a fire but I ended up regretting it.

Smoke started pouring out from under the hood, so I pulled over and popped the hood and saw a blazing fire. I ran in a panic to the trunk, got the extinguisher, and put out the fire.

It turned out that the air conditioner compressor had seized up and stopped turning, causing the belt to overheat and catch fire. The fix was simple: remove the remains of the belt and everything was fine. Roll down the windows when it’s hot.

If I had let the car burn out and be totaled I would have saved a lot of trouble, including endless transmission leaks and a busted U-joint which led to my coasting to the side of the road with the driveshaft (connected only at the front) dragging and bouncing and throwing up showers of sparks down the freeway.

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Gezellig – a word that encompasses the heart of Dutch Culture 3 years ago

I was just blown away. So many lovely, uplifting, funny, true-feeling storylines, balanced so well, leading to a satisfying and greater-plot-relevant conclusion and an absolutely perfect musical finale singalong (Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”) to wrap it in a bow.

And (spoiler) no sex or drugs, teases to the contrary notwithstanding (not that there’s anything wrong with sex or drugs, but that’s not what this show is about).

They did. Yes, they did.

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