skipkey

So for many years I only paid cash for everything, but I hit a point at which I wanted to start establishing credit. What I did was to open a secured credit card at my bank. They actually had me put it in a CD which was used to secure it. After I think 2 years of paying on time they removed the security requirement. I don’t know if that’s still a viable method but I used it in the early 2000s.

Absolutely this. I had installed wekan for a home chores kanban board on a $5 vps and had spent several hours trying to get the proxy working to make it externally reachable, and then I did this. Well, I used grok build to evaluate it, but I just told it where to ssh, and in about 10 minutes it was working, security was configured properly, backups were set up, etc. all of those post install things that I might never have gotten around to for a simple home setup.

So I've now shot 4 weddings. The first one happened because a friend of my wife had their photographer bail on them 4 days before the wedding, so they were in a bind. I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a prosumer canon Digital Rebel SLR that I mostly used to do wildlife photography, and some good quality lenses. It took me a good 40 hours to generate the final output in photoshop out of the couple of thousand photos I took. Based on what we produced on the first one I've been asked to shoot 3 additional weddings by friends, none of them large, involved productions, using better equipment.

The last one I probably took a thousand photos and it took about 10-12 hours to process. Researching, I found out that I could have outsourced the processing for pennies a photo, which is what I'm assuming a lot of wedding photographers do now. But based on what I was doing (delete blurry/bad, color balance, pleasing crop, select the best photos for a book, put the rest on a drive), I suspect I could get that down to a few hours with an AI workflow after I worked out the kinks. I'm not a professional, but I suspect I'd be ahead of the average wedding photographer after I worked that out.

I would imagine that in the future AI will be doing proofs in Lean or whatever the successor to it, which gives you a pretty good confidence it’s correct.

In 1970 minimum wage was $1.60/hour, equating to about $3.3k a year. A typical mortgage was about $126/month. Car payment, around $100. You weren't raising a family and saving on minimum. Median income was about 3x that for a family, so you could definitely raise a family and save at the median. Note, these come from querying AI, but they match my recollections as a child a few years later.

Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.

In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.

So in the 2010s I was working in game development for a company that mostly did Facebook and mobile games. I'm an early bird, I would usually be in the office at 6-6:30am. The next person would show up usually about 10-15 minutes before the 10am standup, so I'd have 3 hours of quiet productivity.

Generally I'd get all my deliverables done by the time that anyone else showed up, so after standup I'd just circulate and see what everyone was working on, and if I saw someone who was frustrated, I'd see if they wanted help. This let me help train and teach the kids, which I really enjoyed.

That's the one reason I don't like fully remote/zoom jobs. I really enjoy the interaction and the ability to teach.

The Barnes and Noble bookstore I occasionally shop at has a second floor that is about half full of nothing but games, legos, puzzles. I honestly think they sell more of that than books these days.

So the West still does have a fish sauce in common use, although one that's not nearly as strong as the eastern variants. Worcestershire sauce was an attempt to recreate an Indian fish sauce, and to this day contains anchovies.

Back in the 90s and the early aughts Simmons was on my “automatically buy everything he writes” list. But it seemed like he had stopped writing. But then I happened to browse Barnes and Noble beyond the SF&F and horror aisles and discovered he had been writing crime novels. And they were good.

I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.

Eh, not really? If it's a legit company who provides services to various governments, they're going to pay you, they're going to report the income to the government, you'll get a 1099 for contract/consulting, and you'll pay your taxes on the legit income. No red flags. Assuming they're legit and not currently sanctioned by the US government that is.

In 1993 I paid a shade under $10k for a new Chevy S10 where the only options were AC (not actually optional in Texas) and CD player in the radio. It was manual transmission, V6. Indexed to inflation that would be, what, about $24k today if regs allowed them to be built?

If it existed they would fill every rural high school parking lot in the south. Allow them to exist and someone will build them.

It’s not just you. I’ve known several people who lost their desire to drink beer specifically on these drugs. I didn’t personally experience it, but then I am more of a whiskey guy.

I can give you an example of when I am glad I rebased. There have been many times I have been working on a feature that was going to take some time to finish. In that case my general workflow is to rebase against main every day or two. It lets me keep track of changes and handle conflicts early and makes the eventual merge much simpler. As for debugging I’ve never personally had to do this, but I imagine git bisect would probably work better with rebased, squashed commits.

For years, Ultima VII was the buggiest RPG I ever finished the main quest on. Then I played Daggerfall.

But that’s just it-as a design aid it can really go off the rails, but as a testing strategy it’s really useful in one domain. Defect fixing. If I can convince a junior engineer that when he gets a bug report to first write a test that shows the problem and then fix it, using the test to prove it’s fixed, it provides immense benefits.

I resemble this remark. My wife and I run a feral/stray cat rescue, and anecdotally, this seems to be true, with a few caveats. In particular, the ferals tend to sleep with their backs to a wall, which overrides the left/right preference, the strays not so much.

As I recall, one problem was you got silent corruption if you ran out of disk space during certain operations, and there were things that took significantly more disk space while in flight than when finished, so you wouldn’t even know.

When I was at Microsoft, Source Depot was the nicer of the two version control systems I had to use. The other, Source Library Manager, was much worse.

In my neighborhood in the East Valley in Phoenix, I’ve seen Cooper’s hawks, kestrels, peregrine falcons, zone tailed hawks, merlins, and one immature bald eagle. Along with the numerous turkey vultures and the occasional black vulture.

But see, to the politicians this is a feature, not a bug. It’s the same reason that it’s incredibly expensive in terms of permitting and such to start a brick and mortar business in many cities. They would rather leave the locations unoccupied and available for something that will bring in high tax revenue than tie them up with low revenue occupants.

Both HP and Brother offer this - it goes to a server that then sends to an email you have configured. I’d guess the vast majority of people who use the scanner do this rather than setting up a share on a home network.

It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.

You used to be able to get uncleaned late Roman bronze coins from the Balkans for about a buck apiece in the early 2000s, so I’d guess they’d be maybe $3-5 each now. Then you get the fun of very carefully removing the encrustations to reveal the coin underneath. You generally ended up with a coin worth about what you paid for it, but it was fun.

So I can kind of understand where the confusion comes from. I used this to buy my wife and I MacBooks last year. When I started the checkout flow I didn’t initially realize I was just applying for an Apple Card, rather than just being a loan with a fixed payment. I could see people that don’t understand how zero interest offers interact with revolving credit accounts might not have understood.

But the UI is pretty clear when you make a payment, if you drop the amount under the recommended payment how much interest it’s going to cost you.

A pretty good rule of thumb was always, $_ is most likely the thing you need it to be. Oh, there are exceptions, but in my experience they were generally caused by code that had been made inappropriately clever.

There are still quite a few accessible mines on public lands in Arizona. Well, generally the mine shafts themselves are off limits for safety reasons, but you can usually get to the tailings piles. In the last couple of years I have pulled nice specimens of chrysocolla, fluorite, onyx from tailings.

Depends on the size of the team. Startup or small team? Yes. Everyone is on call all the time. Large number of developers? Someone on every team is on call all the time, and leads need to be almost always available for large outages.

On call pretty much just comes with the job, and always has.

If it has beans it isn’t Texas chili…

It was pretty common say 25 years ago when you would be developing in a terminal. When you were limited in the number of lines displayed, it sometimes made it easier to follow the code when functions and control structures were large.

I know I had coworkers using brief configured to do that.

So I worked for RealPage for a few years in the late 90s and again in the mid 2000s, and at the time they didn’t hold a majority of the market. But it would not surprise me now if they held a majority of the market in large complexes today. At the time they were growing mostly by acquisition of competitors.

It could be an age thing. When I was taught grammar 40 plus years ago, for someone of indeterminate sex, “he” was taught as always appropriate, “he or she” was a somewhat clunky alternative that was situationally appropriate where you were stressing the gender neutrality, and “they” was just simply bad grammar which would get you bad marks. I’m honestly not sure when that changed.