philiplu

Thx for linking that. Just … wow

Learning club juggling was fun. That led to partner club juggling as well as flaming clubs. Got a nice video of me juggling flames and overrotating a club so I catch the flaming end. Whoops.

Or Puyallup, WA. Those two are definite shibboleth tests in the PNW.

Sorry, but this 65 yo grey-beard disagrees. A TUI to me, back in the 80s/90s, was something that ran in the terminal and was almost always ncurses-based. This was back when I was still using ADM-3A serial terminals, none of that new-fangled PCs stuff.

Huh, my childhood version was almost the standard US one, but the ending was “and Alfred saved the day”, not shown in the article’s diagram. This would have been learned in the Midwest US (St. Louis vicinity), late 1960s.

Not only are they still releasing problems weekly, they have a long backlog of problems waiting for release. I submitted a problem back in April 2024, and it didn't get published until October 2025 (problem 963). There's an excellent core development team that works with problem-submitters to get problems tuned up for Project Euler.

Sorry - my 9 year old golden doodle still doesn't get the concept of fetch. He's an expert at keep-away though. Throw the toy or ball, he'll chase it gleefully, then come back to just out of reach, drop the toy, and hover over it waiting for me to make a move at it. He'll lunge for the toy, back up a bit, drop it, and the cycle continues.

I’ll have to remember that one

I had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve. In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair. Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin the rest of my life or pig-derived valves. I chose the latter, mostly to avoid warfarin for life, but also because my surgeon was a PhD for work on creating biological-derived valves that didn’t trigger the immune system. Just mind-blowing what can be done. But I’m glad repair and not replacement worked out - and I now have GoreTex fibers attached to my valve.

He has a speaking role in an old 1987 baseball movie, "Long Gone", with William Petersen and Virginia Madsen, as the son in a father/son partnership who own a minor league team (Henry Gibson was the dad). Very disorienting to hear him talk when I first saw the movie way back when.

No clue. I left as a full-time employee in 2007, did a few contractor gigs with various old teams of mine to help out, but that was done by 2013. I lost touch with how things were going internally after that.

I worked on that! I was a dev on the team that built the first IntelliSense engine for C++. It’s a miracle it worked at all. It was based on a hacked-up version of the C++ front-end, but when it inevitably hit errors attempting a single-pass parse of the current source, it would silently bull its way through and try not to get too screwed up. Doing that in the presence of templates was not a good time. But with the RAM and processing speeds available then, I’m still kind of shocked it worked at all, 28 years ago.

No, there were two devs working on the 68k Mac compiler, with ~10 devs on the x86 side (though both targets shared a lot of code and differed mainly in the late codegen and peephole optimization phases). I never worked on the 16-bit code; the 32-bit and later 64-bit x86 backend was a different codebase from the 16-bit stuff.

No, that's not really true. I was on the C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. When I first started, the DevTools team reported up through the Windows team, but never really felt a well-integrated part. We were never in the same building as the Windows team, for instance. I remember, probably 1992 or 1993, driving from building 4 where the compiler team lived to the Windows building (forget which one that was, maybe in the 12 to 15 block back then?) to get a copy of the Windows NT source on a hard drive. That's because I was a dev on the C++ compiler back-end team then (moved to the front-end in '95, IIRC), and compiling that source was a major test of the 32-bit compiler I was working on.

Don't remember when DevTools was re-orged out from under Windows, but I'm pretty sure it was by '95, and well before VC++ 6.

A 40-year younger body :-) I'm blind in one eye nowadays; highly doubt I could pass the medical. It was a fun hobby in my 20s, though.

It’s been really sad to watch the decline of sea stars the past 10+ years. Tide-pooling just hasn’t been the same at Cannon Beach or the San Juan Islands. It’s very encouraging to pin down the culprit.

Never got far past my PPL decades ago (less than 100 hours total iirc) but landing was always such a fun dance in Pipers and Cessnas, slipping the plane into the cross-wind to line up the plane at the last moment before touching done.

I’m pretty sure that’s due to Unix’s early existence on PDP machines from DEC, which used octal instead of hex for encoding binary values. Why DEC did that I don’t know - I never got a chance to use DEC equipment back in the 70s.

I've had tinnitus since my teen years, half a century ago. At least, what I normally hear is, I assume, tinnitus, but it comes in two forms. There's a constant sort-of grey noise, not too loud (definitely softer than people talking in the same room), which wavers in amplitude over a sub-second period. The more annoying form is a pretty pure sine wave, much louder, which thankfully is more infrequent. Not really sure if that quieter form is something everyone gets, or an actual tinnitus form. Anyway, after 50+ years, it's not a big deal to me.

My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inflation-adjusted, as that PET!

It's been a real trip watching the accumulation of exponential improvements the past 50 years.

Compuserve had a port of this available for playing, back around 1980. I spent so much money I couldn't really afford as a broke college student, logged in for hours.

That PET is in amazingly good physical shape. I think the keyboard on my 8K PET back in 1978 looked that bright for at most a year or so, before the plastic overlays started fraying.

I spent so much time typing in the Star Trek game from that book into a Commodore Pet, and then so much time playing the game. Hunt the Wumpus as well. Good times

Past the edit time, but I had the name wrong. It's a Vita-Prep 3, not Vitablend, that's the commercial model I bought.

Yep. I paid something like $650 for a Vitablend at a restaurant supply store about 20 years ago. That's the commercial version of a Vitamix. Thing is a tank, and has blended many many gallons of soups, smoothies, grain into flour, etc. over the years. Cleanup is hot water and a couple squirts of dishwasher liquid and run it on high a few seconds. Had to replace the jar a few years ago, but the base will outlive me.

Back about roughly 1978 to 1982, I wrote and sold a 6800/6809 disassembler ("Dynamite Disassembler") for I think $200 a copy. Sold enough copies to pay for computer equipment during my college days. I think we reduced the price to $100 or maybe $150 when the TRS-80 Color Computer came out with a 6809 powering it.

$200 back in 1980 is about $800 today. Amazing to think anyone would spend that much for a fairly simple tool.

Another parent with an ARFID kid here, though it sounds like our case is somewhat different. My kid, almost 16 now, has always had an extremely limited diet repertoire, starting at a failure to switch to non-smooth baby food as a toddler. Early on he exhibited extreme fear reactions to being presented with new foods. Nausea has never really been a huge issue, other than gagging if we tried to force him to try something new.

As he's matured, the reactions are less intense, and with a lot of therapy sessions, most recently with a dietician who also has ARFID, we've made real progress. In our case, that means he's (enthusiastically!) eating cheese pizza, scrambled eggs, and chocolate (but not white) milk, along with the bacon which has been his main protein source since age 3 or so.

Not sure what we'll do when he heads off to college in 2.5 years.

Anyway, if you want to compare notes with another ARFID parent, my email's in my profile.

This would have been assembly code, probably 6809 or 68000 system I had back then. 6809 would have required dumping intermediate data to a disk. I don't recall just when I first got a hard-disk, which would probably have been a massive 10 megabytes in size.

And yes, I saw that transition. I learned to program using Fortran IV and IBM 11/30 assembly in the mid-70s, using punched cards. Wrote a MIXAL assembler and simulator for the minicomputer at the local college around 1976; it was about 7000 punched cards in length, all assembly. Got a Commodore PET in 1978, moved on to SS-50 based 6809 and 68008 systems in the late 70s/early 80s, with a serial terminal.

Back in the 70s, when I was a teen, we had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. It came with a service where you could send off for various pamphlets for more focused information. I sent away for a paper listing pi to 10k or maybe 100k digits. By the late 70s/early 80s, that was outdated, as I wrote code to find those for myself (though e to many places was far easier).

I lost vision in my right eye after failed retina detachment surgery damaged the optic nerve. I don’t see blobs of light like you describe, though I do see a dim pattern of swirling lines when I walk into a dark room. Also, weirdly, if there’s a sudden noise while I’m in the dark, I often see a flash of light go off, like an old flashbulb. I’m guessing that’s my visual system somehow rewiring itself to other sensory input.