trm42

One interesting detail is that the Chinese have been improving their photography lens production and quality in rapid pace and cheap price.

The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.

I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.

Best practices and such shouldn't be obeyed as "laws" but guidelines for general work. Once in a while there's good reason to avoid / skip them for whatever reason.

The bigger issue is that developers (me included) are usually making the decisions in their own heads. Usually the reasons are quite ok but they are not really said out loud or documented.

I've been stumbled upon this as both developer trying to get their code approved and when doing a code review.

For the developer it feels super annoying that somebody nitpicks about things which the developer has probably gone through in their heads already and ended up with the resulting solution. Just like Martin in the post complains and reacts passive aggressively towards reviewers mentioning these things.

For the code reviewer it feels like the developer is being sloppy or doesn't care about our common way of doing things thus increasing the need to nitpick and explain so that the developer understands how it should be done.

The solution for this is actually quite easy: document in the comments and in the Pull Request _why_ you're breaking team's / company's guidelines and why you think it's warranted for solution for this case. This seems to remove quite a lot of friction.

Oh and of course it doesn't mean that the guidelines should be broken all the time just because one thinks this kind of stuff is for "idiots|assholes". When working as a team, we need to adhere to common way of working for most of the time.

Haven't used any Linux Distribution on Desktop so cannot comment that side or the installer but my home server has been running Ubuntu LTSes for over a decade. Last night I upgraded it to 24.04 LTS and I was really surprised how well and easy it was to upgrade. Couple of previous upgrades were a lot more hairier things breaking in surprisingly ways after upgrade but this time everything worked perfectly from the first reboot.

Happened to upgrade my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio model with OWC's PATA SSD (actually was SATA SSD with PATA adapter), It wasn't a slouch with the probably original PATA HDD but SSD made things even faster and I don't have to worry about 20+ years old HDD dying out that much. That SSD saturates the Ultra ATA/66 IDE Bus completely which feels awesome.

Of course when used with Mac OS Classic, the OS is the biggest bottle neck because of it's bad multi-tasking capabilities. That OS reminds me of things we take granted these days, like computer not locking almost completely when decompressing zip package.

The N95 was super awkward to use. It had all the bells and whistles that you could cram into a phone at that point and it all was in small menus under menus under menus etc.

N95 being a best seller was one of the reasons why Nokia was so sure that iPhone would fail. It lulled them into false security and proved to them that things were going great.

I happened to review the N95 and it felt horrible after seeing Jobs demoing the iPhone prototype. Couldn't believe for a second that the Nokia's way would work out with S60 series and was super surprised to hear N95 was selling really well.

Of course iPhone would gather steam for a couple of years before getting good enough but still.

For Symbian phones Nokia was designing different icons for every phone model. When times started to go bad for them, they introduced common icons for new models and hailed that as a big design innovation.

The 3310 was the culmination of Nokia's really good UX work. Symbian convoluted all that and made it a big mess. The manuals for symbian phones were thick and heavy and mostly no one except the engineer-natured people could actually use most of the features.

At least in Finland just having the more expensive phones was seen as a status symbol and usually people were using them for calling, smses and perhaps for emails.

It was super nice to use at the time but it was also completely unsealed against weather so if a bit of snow or water got beneath the wheel, you would get unusable phone quite fast. Happened to mine even though I was super careful, luckily bought it used super cheap. It was also too expensive just because it has WAP and nothing otherwise spectacular.

Ooh, Tintin is one of the first comics I was introduced after Donald Duck (the Carl Barks stories are still as good as then!)

Luckily the Franco-Belgian comics have been readily available in Finland and usually with good translations as well although not all jokes can be translated.

From what I've heard, Asterix is notorious on the French wordplays that cannot be translated.

There's so much more ideas and humanity in those compared to Marvel/DC stuff (which I happen to read occasionally as well but they are repeating the same stuff from decade to decade). The Franco-Belgian comics are the reason why I'm contemplating on learning French enough to be able read them in the original language.

And don't forget that the Metal Hurlant comics anthology affected quite a lot of English comics as well.

Oh wow, before this I haven't used old System versions than 6.0.8 or so and it's just super amazing how ready and well thought even the System 1.0 feels usability-wise! Compare to any Windows before Windows 95, which finally caught on enough of the System/Mac OS classic desktop metaphor and made things feel not too clunky.

I've probably said it before and I say it once again: the old Mac OS windowing and spatial Finder feels even today better and more usable than any of the current DEs, macOS included. They managed to cram bunch of windows and widgets in the paltry 512x384 resolution when nowadays we manage to have max 2 windows in one screen or one window per display. (and yes, there are tiling WMs etc but that's a different story...)

My home server has currently running:

- Nextcloud (for normal collection of files etc)

- Home Assistant

- Zwave JS (for Home Assistant)

- Couple of Minecraft servers

- Pihole for DNS based tracking and ad blocking

- Not continuously running but in use: Unison backups for backing up my photo archive disks hooked to my laptop. Feels the best way to sync changes of big disks.

The Snowman is a tradition here in Finland as well but it airs in the midday just before the announcement of Christmas Peace[1] (which is aired live every year from Turku and watching that as well is a tradition for some).

Quite many Finnish (metal) bands have been covering Snowman song as well but they don't sound as good as the original, though. One example is the cover by Nightwish [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Peace

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nr-kdo6Lx0

Good list. With a paltry experience of 14 years, I would add one silly thing that kind of feels too obvious to even add:

When there's an error or exception, read the error and the stack trace thoroughly and figure out what it means even if it means googling. Lately I've noticed that younger generation doesn't really understand error messages even in the simplest cases and people end up in wild goose chases when the real reason was incorrect permissions or something really mundane.

This reminds me of a quite Mac centric[1] BBS system called Firstclass[2]. Its client felt almost like a normal Mac OS Classic Finder windows and it was so intuitive compared to normal text based BBSes which I also used at the time.

[1] I remember seeing it working with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 but it felt more kludgy and slow compared to the Mac version [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass

Bought a Canon EOS-3 year ago and it's funny how it almost feels like DSLR but with film. The amount of electronics and what in can do is amazing. Well DSLRs are basically film SLRs but with a sensor instead of film + some R&D improvements throughout the years. Also DSLRs got the back display which is a lot more better than the configuring late-90s SLRs with some weird function button setups with super small display on top of the camera. If my memory serves me right the last pro camera, EOS-1V had some serial link cable and a desktop software to configure things properly and get the exposure data for the film rolls. Like exif data but before exif data :D

One thing that's forgotten nowadays is that the old and even older 35mm films were a lot more grainier the ones we have now. 35mm started to gain bigger traction in the 60s and after that as the film stocks improved. Also 24-36 photos for the same price are probably more inviting compared to medium format's 10-16 photos depending on the frame size.

I love to shoot medium format but have couple of 35mm cameras laying around although the 36 frame rolls are too much for me and I decided that when I get the current 35mm stash shot, I'll buy bulk loader, empty containers and start creating that 10-16 frame rolls to get the amount sane and rolls developed more quickly.

My routine has been: * Vitamin D * Philips Wake Up Lamp for the mornings * Home-assistant controlling Trådfri lights with Flux so that the color temp changes throughout the day. Ie daylight style light in the mid day and then getting more orange in the evening * Old but still functional Philips Day Light therapy lamp next to me when working so that I get the 30-120 minutes of that as well during the work hours * Oh and getting out and do some walking/biking/whatever. It's still super important even though you don't get to see the sun

Photography in general after I started coding for a living 15 years ago but for the last few years I've been getting into film photography and somewhat into film camera collecting. Especially in medium format. Don't get me wrong, I still shoot digital as well but shooting film feels more satisfying.

It feels so liberating to shoot 10-12 frames and that's usually enough compared to our big memory cards that can swallow hundreds or thousand photos. It forces me to plan more in advance and not iterating between every shutter click.

It's fun that nowadays we have 60 megapixel mirrorless cameras with ML-optimized super AF-systems, dynamic range of 14-15 stops, ability to make moonlight look almost like sunlight (those crazy high ISOs of models like Sony A7sIII etc), but in the same time you can make good photos with some film era 35mm SLR or Medium Format Mamiya or Hasselblad. With a little of practice and bunch of film one can learn to shoot photos without all that automation.

The electronic-less cameras are surprisingly easy to use: select ISO and the look by selecting film and it's ISO rating, measure or guestimate the amount of light, set shutter speed and aperture and then focus. That's it. No need for deep menus and buttons.

Also the chemical development of the film and developing paper photos from the negatives feels more fun than Lightroom + Photoshop workflow. And accidents are more fun.

Failing is more concrete as well. Once I probably shot my best cityscape photos (or so I want believe) but fumbled the development totally, but that's okay. At least I didn't get some mediocre photos I anticipated to be awesome.

Also the film cameras have quite a long history compared to the digital gear as nowadays all the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are mostly the same.

The film cameras have a lot more of variety and different mechnical and usage differences and feel. Compare old MF folders to TLRs or to SLRs or compare Japanese cameras to German or to Swedish cameras and you'll see the differences. I guess the Soviet cameras would be ... interesting ... addition to the comparison as well but I'm trying to avoid them.

The Canon EF 40mm f2.8 is fun lens for DSLRs but with adapter to mirrorless bodies, the adapter eats the small size benefit as with the other small SLR-era lenses.

Sony has been keeping the mirrorless full-frame lenses quite small. The old Sony 55mm f1.8 (which I count to be in the class of 50 mms) is still sensibly sized (less than 300 grams) although a bit prone to flares but otherwise quite close to Otus class sharpness.

And then there's the Sony's 50mm F1.2 GM halo product which is still less than 800 grams. It seems that they are pushing down the weight at the same time they are improving the image quality.

Sigma's lenses are a lot of cheaper than Sony's GM lenses but they are bigger and heavier in many cases and in some cases they are still are old designs for DSLRs.

Haha, sounds super boring compared to 2004 when I bought Fujitsu Siemen's cheapest Pentium M laptop and had to build some kernel modules, build custom rules for power saving scenes (as there weren't that much of ready rules) and find the most optimal parameters for every module and CPUFreq configs etc.

Also, figuring out the sequence of disabling modules etc for suspend to disk and suspend to ram sleep modes with more custom scripts was super fun. Managed to squeeze whole 8 hours from a battery that was supposed to work 4-6 hours in Windows XP. Fun times.

Every phone is nowadays a slab with a touch display so there hasn't been big surprises for a long time. Just gradual improvements and small new features once in awhile.

To follow the scene I've noticed it's easier to follow new iPhone releases than multiple brands of Android phones. They are still more or less the same although the specs are in many cases a notch higher in Android phones as the Android seems to be more resource hungry.

I got frustrated with the Samsung OS support (long time for new Android releases and no support for quite recent devices etc) and switched from SGS 9 to iPhone 13. Been switching between iOS and Android couple of times earlier and it's good way to avoid platform lock-in.

I had partially forgotten the pixel graphics style of 80s - 90s Macintosh scene. Damn, it's crisp and graphical compared to Amiga and PC graphics.

It would be fun to read about the similarities and differences between it, PC, C64 and Amiga graphics scenes as the aesthetics are quite different and limited / moulded by the graphics peculiarities of every system.

Yes there is. Google for "film dx code stickers" to find some examples. Useful thing to have with point and shoot film cameras which are not offering manual override for ISO for push/pull development. (I'm looking at you Olympus Mju 2).

I've also seen a modded Mju to have big hole and dip switches to overide the the automatic settings as well.

My personal pet peeve is that the Chrome's different User Profiles is so easy to use. I'm aware of the different plugins that can offer similar functionality but the setup Chrome is offering is so simple and intuitive that switching feels annoyingly too complicated.

Otherwise I've been really surprised how much better Firefox has gotten in the last two years. Good to see old giant still alive.

There were Macintoshes here and there at least in Finland where I live. Saw first Mac in 1989 or 90 and did see them here and there but they were not common household items.

C64 was kind of a national computer for the 80s but there were others as well and Macs were used in the DTP and graphics circles a lot and sometimes one could find them in schools as well but as I said, they were quite high end and adult/work oriented compared to the inexpensive home computers like Commodores, Ataris and sometimes even PCs.

Funnily in Finland there were home computer magazines which basically ignored the existence of Macs for most of the time except there was one, seprate Mac magazine. Probably because the advertising segment was targeted to DTP professionals etc.

It feels that Apple gathered around the creative professionals needing computers and Commodore 64 and Amigas gathered all the future creative professionals that affected game and software for long time. So even when the prices were less than others and Commodore was dead before mid-90s, its (low price:) impact can be still felt within the industry.

And it's so amazing that both C64 and Amigas are still kept alive by new and old skoolers.

I've come to the same conclusion for the main product which always moves forward and currently has limited and tightly coupled relations. If the product gets lots of external consumers, then making it more versioned might make sense.

But for common libraries SemVer feels good solution for not breaking the main products and helps making developers to think about breaking changes etc.

Out of curiosity: Is it possible that the US Government will do the same for Xiaomi that they did to Huawei? If so, how long will it take?

I like ORMs for simple things like basic joins and wheres but in many cases more complicated SQL feels actually easier and more predictable than trying to convert them into ORM syntax. There's a limit to the usefulness of the ORM syntaxes.

Same here! Was expecting speculative implementation or comparison how their setup would be and what kind of algorithms etc there could be.