sgerenser

RIP. I remember he had a column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. Probably at the same time he was writing for PC Magazine. It was the original "ragebait" since he always seemed to be pretty negative on Apple and suggested that Windows was better in many ways. I remember all the readers writing in complaining about his hot takes and at the time I didn't realize it was an intentional strategy.

Pre-1990s Macs (Mac Plus, SE, etc.) in good condition are actually worth a decent amount nowadays as collectors items. Not $5000, but quite a bit more than $25.

For many tech jobs, that still wouldn’t help much. Salary alone is often half or less of total compensation. They’d also need to include stock grants and bonuses for the comparison to be meaningful.

Yeah I've definitely heard belt-and-suspenders since way before LLMs were a thing. Probably even used it once or twice myself.

Upvote because AFAIK this is true. Not sure why your comment was downvoted to dead just a few minutes ago.

No, certainly just cutting physician salaries wouldn’t make a big difference. But cutting salaries for everyone involved, including physicians, nurses, and administration would. I’m not saying we should do that, but just that people seem to ignore how much higher salaries are in the U.S. when they compare healthcare costs to other countries.

How much of these new grad researchers have undergrad degrees in music vs. science or math? I’d suspect there’s very few of the former, and even then they got the position despite their music degree not because of it.

I have only a bachelors degree from a school ranked #57 in U.S. news undergraduate engineering programs (not terrible, but hardly prestigious). Google still interviewed me a few times (including back in the old days when that meant flying out for a full day on-site interview). I’m not convinced they really even looked at my college beyond seeing that I had a bachelors degree.

You might find those salaries reasonable, but they’re probably double what those same occupations pay in many other (first world) countries with lower healthcare costs. Maybe the trade off is worth it, but it’s not something that can be ignored when people complain about how much more expensive healthcare is in the U.S. compared to Europe (for example).

Is anyone who was in grade school in the 1990s reminded of Apple’s “simplified” MacOS shell called At Ease? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

If this kind of stuff interests you, you might want to check into the upcoming “Designed in California” podcast about Apple’s history (still on kickstarter but I think the campaign is over): http://designed.fm. I’ve listened to a few of their preview episodes already, here’s the first one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsOVyuc1v_w&t=4s

I don't think anyone is really blaming MUMPS for the limitations it had to work with 1970s tech. The story was more about how terrible it is to work with in the 2000s and the surprising fact that it's still in use today in certain niches.

Yeah, that seems to be the dominant theory, especially since the AppleTV hasn't been updated in a few years and is widely expected to be "due" for a new model within the next few months.

Even better is “defenestration,” a fancy term for throwing someone out of a window.

Mississippi, despite its much lower per capita income than California, has a much higher percentage of housing units with air conditioning (93% vs 72%). AC is now so inexpensive that whether or not a house has AC is mostly about average summer temperatures not income.

The Economist is not an American publication though.

Interesting, I knew most of Europe wasn’t very big on AC, but I didn’t know permanent residential installations were practically banned in (at least some parts of) Switzerland: https://lenews.ch/2026/05/29/the-politics-of-air-conditionin...

Joel Spolsky coined the term “Shlemiel the Painter’s Algorithm” for this type of thing back in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

SoftBank owns 90% of Arm which is up about 1000% since the IPO in 2023.

Their much hyped 10 year 100K mile power train warranty is only for the original purchaser. Once sold the warranty reverts to a more standard 5/60K term.

Agreed. I currently have a “Roku TV” that is hooked up to another Roku device, because the one built into it is so slow and outdated as to be almost unusable. The $29 (on sale) Roku stick I hooked up to it works fine. Getting a built-in Roku IMHO is a false economy, the built-in thing will almost certainly go to crap before the TV itself does.

I’ve never worked at any large company where janitors/cleaning staff were employees. Usually that kind of work is contracted out.

I’ve always heard of hackathons as being a competition with judges and a winner.

I’ve heard of these “toner scammers” since at least the 1990s and probably earlier. Apparently they’re still at it: https://www.eojohnson.com/blog/toner-scams

It would be worth separating out the “traditional” data centers (which offer things like colocation, and mostly run pretty standard CPU-bound or network-bound workloads) from “AI” data centers (which have racks and racks of extremely dense GPUs or accelerators). It’s really the latter that people should be concerned about due to their much larger scale, higher power draw, and propensity to use dirty, on-site power generation.

I think the issue is there’s very few empty existing buildings big enough to house a modern AI data center.

Hey, in 2026 strcpy is still part of the C standard library (much to the chagrin of anyone security conscious).

I can't actually find anything that supports a $400M valuation. ChatGPT seems to agree, that there's no public documents supporting that valuation, and an estimate of $6-$10M year in revenue sounds in the ballpark, meaning a value nowhere near $400M. But something as high as $100M is probably appropriate if their profit margins are high, which would be expected for a franchisor.

I definitely heard 10% first and only later 35%. For some reason the videos don't have transcripts and the Gemini AI isn't available, so I can't try to search for it. But I'm 100% sure that 10% was the figure mentioned first (maybe I misunderstood and it was just being used as an example). If the real figure is 35%, then I retract any comments about them making a bad business deal.

I head them say 35% at some point later in the videos, but they definitely said 10% first, so I’m not sure which is correct.