teapot7

I am in fact a bear at this very moment.

Ok - bear mode activated: I'll add 'The Star Bear' by Michael Swanwick, where a man's series of encounters with a bear in Paris echo his feelings about being a Russian emigre.

https://reactormag.com/the-star-bear-michael-swanwick/

Similar to when someone said that the rule of thumb should not be DRY (don't repeat yourself) but WET (write everything twice) - that is, be happy to repeat similar code once or twice, and wait for the need for abstraction to become evident.

It's advice I like, as I'm prone to falling into design paralysis while trying to think of the One True Abstract Entity.

I'm pretty sure I've seen that one in a list, by a French person, of things they wish other people wouldn't say!

I don’t believe it. There are just as many variables involved in writing a short story.

Surely you're not implying that writing a good short story is a solved problem for computers?

Or because they're shy and antisocial but it's nice to think that they're part of the gang - as the original article was all about.

For me the followup was the most obviously AI bit of writing - it's exactly the tone you get when the AI admits it's been utterly wasting your time.

My ex boss read too much Ray Dalio and it ate his brain.

Yes! The number of lousy articles and blog posts I've seen that talk about "imperative, oo and functional programming"...

Oh a bug, surely. How is the quiz supposed to give you insights when it's unanswerable?

Cron is definitely not the biggest problem in my life. I've never had a problem with its format. I think this is a solution to a problem I don't have - and I tend to find that "English like" formats don't do me any favours.

I remember how much I liked my old iPhone 4. I liked the straight edges and crisp look and feel. I upgraded eventually to an iPhone 6 and hated the roundness - the design language of the phone said one thing to me, and that was "drop me on the ground and break me". I got a case for only minutes after I bought it so it would have a chance of survival.

Currently on an iPhone 12 mini and happy both that the clean straight edges came back, and that Apple's still making the occasional small phone.

I'm closing in on 62 and I've been saying for a while now that as soon as I turned 60 my body sent me a note saying "That's it - I'm done now. The rest is up to you".

I feel validated by this study.

The comments on the apple insider piece are quite something - apple fans have the most amazing cases of Stockholm syndrome.

Yeah. Bloody Apple. Google too.

Like (I'm sure) plenty of other people here I've written an app and put it up on the Apple and Google app stores. It does what it does with no problems and it amuses me. Occasionally someone buys it.

It is as good or bad today as it was on the day I wrote it. It provably works as well on older phones as well as new.

Every now and then I drag myself through the process of making new builds and putting them up on the net. This isn't as easy as it could be, as the tool I used to make it is now semi-dead and I no longer own a mac, but I'm stubborn.

We attacked Iraq because we were attacked on 9/11

Yes, by 15 Saudis, 2 from the United Arab Emirates, one Lebanese and one Egyptian.

Funny old world.

Thanks - I got annoyed with their site for not (as far as I noticed anyway) mention what their gadget actually was.

I got a nice numpadless mechanical keyboard to conserve my deskspace, and because I never used the numpad anyway. Then I promptly got into Blender, which makes great use of the numpad for zooming, rotating etc.

Off to buy another keyboard...

"A product should be owned by a lean team of experts, focused primarily on the architecture of their code rather than the implementation details."

Sheesh! The Lizard People walk among us.

"Ayn Rand exists as a roundabout litmus test for assholes" is a pretty widely held idea. I've never read a book of hers, but the extracts I've read... well, I can see why people say that.

Though not as dull. Rand's writing can send you off to sleep in no time - and then if you're reading in bed you risk having the book fall on your head.

I believe you'll find that's a direct quote from Winston Churchill. Or was it Dorothy Parker?

Australia too.

This is a non-answer in a way, because it's set in the past.

I think it might have been in the early '90s - certainly it was when mobile phones were new and faddish and the province of people with more money than sense. There was an earthquake in Thailand, and newspapers reported that survivors were calling for help from inside fallen buildings ON THEIR MOBILE PHONES. At the time I thought that was the most purely science-fictional real event I'd ever heard of.

These days, of course, I've got to stretch my mind to see why that should seem even slightly unusual.

That's rather evasive. The broccoli must have done something quite traumatic.

is like asking what the economic consequences were of King Midas’s reign.

Massive devaluation of gold, rampant inflation :)

My first job (mid 1980s) was writing video games in Z-80 assembler for chickenfeed. I still remember that in my interview my boss-to-be talked a bit about the company, and then hired me - literally without asking a single question.

He knew I was doing computing at uni and that seemed to be enough.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/flying-citroen-cars-look-... :)

That's awful.

I discarded my copy of Tales From Earthsea, but thought The Other Wind was very good indeed. On the other hand, I didn't like Tehanu, so that might help you decide whether my advice is for you or not.