wistlo

Yes. "We all" add it. Every time.

/s

Many years ago, I standardized on Journal in Microsoft Outlook.

Well guess what. Microsoft created Notes and Journal bceame a "legacy app." It was not possible to migrate. The deprecation of the .PST file in Exchange Server left me no way to transfer when I lease-rolled to a new laptop.

Enter Notes. As in, "notes.txt", which is exactly the same idea as todo.txt described here. Works. If this text file ever becomes machine unreadable, file compatibility will be the least of our worries.

This is so much better than reading the news.

Favorited—I'll be coming back to absorb more, as my aging semi-fluency in engineering physics and SQL doesn't help much with the notation I last saw in the 1980s.

When I click the link for this story, Edge (stop laughing. Please.) pops up "uBlock Origin works on Microsoft Edge." (It's already there, Edge, but thank you).

Edge is based on Chromium, so would that mean this breakage will eventually apply to Edge as the Manifest changes, uhm, manifest to Chromium-based products? Or is this just a Google Chrome thing?

FWIW I keep Firefox around but I have to admit I like Edge's smooth sync of bookmarks and settings across machines and even different platforms. I switched about two years ago when Edge was clearly faster and lighter. It's no longer as lightweight and there are slowly accumulating annoyances coming mostly from some Microsoft Clippy-esque attempts to make some tasks "easier" (mostly via Copilot) but I still prefer it to Firefox. My former employer/retiree benefits site, for example, won't open at all in Firefox. I've considered other Chromium based browsers like Brave but haven't (yet) been sufficiently motivated to switch. (Give Microsoft some time, I expect they'll eshit Edge eventually).

Showed this to my 16 year old and she said, "oh, yeah, I've got that bookmarked."

"You should also try Mondrian and Me."

I did, and it's as you would expect:

https://mondrianandme.com/

More fun than panda dataframes, at least at this hour.

Funny thing, I didn't any trouble finding gasoline on January 19, 1981.

"A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people,” Mr. Carter said. Reagan removed the panels in 1986."

All you need to know about the respective legacies of Carter and Reagan.

A worry about the incoming American president has nothing to do directly with the proliferation of sports gambling nor the harms it brings, but the sudden absence of formerly available data that might-just-might contradict the narrative of an industry that's unzipped its change purse and let Trump have at the mic stand inside (a horribly multi-mixed metaphor, but apt).

"That data set you got there, UC Consumer Credit Panel. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it, you know, if, say, somebody decided to publish a post tying bankruptcies to our donor's lil $300 billion enterprise here. Capiche?"

That's happened with climate data during his previous term, so expect more (of less).

The OG cloud email service, AOL, still revive it for testing now and then, from 1993.

Yahoo! account established July 17, 1996. I know the exact date because I remember a hyperlink blue headline across the top of the gray Yahoo! home page, "TWA Plane Explodes Off Long Island"

I tried a variety of configurations. The E-series was one of them, as it's advertised as "Great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics." Premium and Premium V2, tried those at larger capacities I didn't need just to get higher IOPS.

None came within an order of magnitude of a Ryzen 7600/nVME mobo sitting in my son's old gaming case.

An option I did not try was Ultra disk, which I recall being significantly more expensive and was not part of the standard corporate offering. I wasn't itching to get dragged in front of the architecture review board again, anyway.

I may have the "Ebsv5" series code incorrect. I'd look it up, but I don't have access to the subscription any longer.

What I chose ultimately was definitely "nVME attached" and definitely pricey. The "hypervisor-adjacent, very low latency volume" was not an obvious choice.

The best performing configuration did come from me--the db admin learning Azure on the fly--and not the four Azure architects nor the half dozen consultants with Azure credentials brought onto the project.

At my job at a telco, I had a 13 billion record file to scan and index for duplicates and bad addresses.

Consultants brought in to move our apps (some of which were Excel macros, others SAS scripts running on old desktop) to Azure. The Azure architects identified Postgres as the best tool. Consultants attempted to create a Postgres index in a small Azure instance but their tests would fail without completion (they were string concatenation rather than the native indexing function).

Consultants' conclusion: file too big for Postgres.

I disputed this. Plenty of literature out there on Pg handling bigger files. The Postgres (for Windows!) instance on my Core I7 laptop with an nVME drive could index the file about an hour. As an experiment I spun up a bare metal nVME instance on a Ryzen 7600 (lowest power, 6 core) Zen 4 CPU pc with a 1TB Samsung PCIe 4 nVME drive.

Got my index in 10 minutes.

I then tried to replicate this in Azure, upping the CPUs, memory, and to the nVME Azure CPU family (Ebsv5). Even at a $2000/mo level, I could not get the Azure instance any faster than one fifth (about an hour) of the speed of my bare metal experiment. I probably could have matched it eventually with more cores, but did not want to get called on the carpet for a ten grand Azure bill.

All this happened while I was working from home (one can't spin up an experimental bare metal system at a drop-in spot in the communal workroom).

What happened next I don't know, because I left in the midst of RTO fever. I was given the option of moving 1000 miles to commute to a hub office, or retire "voluntarily with severance." I chose the latter.

Reads like the materials coming out of AT&T, a very different company but with the same need to obfuscate massive cuts from investment community.

Or better yet, a registry flag to enable browser choice.

The archetypal "good enough" solution:

Instead of preventing collisions, tolerating and managing them.

I think of Ethernet often when assessing how close to perfection I need to get in my work.

Handwriting simulator, yes.

Calligraphy? Not quite. I'll still be paying someone to address my daughter's wedding invitations, I expect.

Unless she elopes, that is (one can hope).

What about owning a domain and using a unique address for each commercial entity?

FOr example, amazon@mydomain.us, nytimes@mydomain.us, citibank@mydomain.us, etc.

I have done this for years, but now gmail recipients are rejecting my email as spam. (I've gone through multiple iterations with the DNS configuration at the host, but fundamentally the IP address is tainted other customers on this provider using it to send spam. I shouldn't have to fork up for a dedicated whitelisted IP address just to get functional email). As a result now I have a dedicated @gmail.com address just for those folks and businesses.

I'm surprised the world, and most especially the tech community, embraced gmail so quickly. Yes, it's a great interface, yes, it's free, but from the start they said they would be scanning content and collecting infomation from email content. WHy are we OK with that?

This presentation is so clear I'm going to show it to my high-schooler so that she can (1) understand why Dad works on Saturday (I confess to some "heroics"), and (2) concepts she can keep in mind on upcoming projects at school, and eventually at a job.

You are 63% of my age (there's a coincidence there, do the math).

A point I haven't yet seen in the comments: how much the advancement of civilization owes to 20-30 somethings. Take The Beatles, Alexander Hamiliton, even Anthony Fauci (who had the rare reprise late in life) as examples. At around 40 I gave up any illusion I might do something illustrious, and accepted that from then on, I would just work for a living. My best work became my children, and I'm happy to have done that.

Many of the other comments line up with my own observations at this sage old age:

* more distractions (my house seems to be aging much faster than me, and taking up much more time to maintain)

* bigger responsibilities (more savings to manage with less time until retirement to fix investment errors, offspring where simple existential needs like food and diapers have been replaced by tuition, aging in-laws with real decline issues like eyesight and bad joints)

* less energy. true, and most especially I can't skip sleep like I could 20 or 40 years ago.

* burnout ( this stuff does get old, and "boring" as noted by one commenter)

* underestimating the value of my experience. Not writing that really clever code when a simpler solution will suffice, for example. The ability to tell people a realistic estimate of work, not my old optimistic "couple of days" estimate that was almost always 10x short

* ADD, not helped by social media (stay off it when working, or always) and a trying to ignore the constant stream of news (except HN of course lol). But a great help in being open to new methods where I find myself evangelizing about git to people half my age.

* exercise, fitness, diet: need to up my game after covid isolation and increasingly creakey joints. It does make a difference. In my case living in The Big Easy doesn't help.

* Did I mention sleep? Why yes I did, forgive my forgetfulness....no, actually I put it here intentionally because it is that important. Exercise helps with getting quality sleep.

I am still writing code and I "provide value" (their words) in that I can solve complex data analysis problems that come to me after co-workers reach the limits of using vlookups and pivot tables in Excel. I'm not the fastest and I'm always fighting imposter syndrome, but that's quashed whenever I catch a glimpse of production code written by pricey consultants and realize they make the same mistakes and use truly ugly workarounds even I wouldn't consider.

COVID allowed my company to put everyone on the same level. It was wonderful while it lasted.

Unfortunately, the drive to "collaboration" has sprung up again in our senior ranks, who I think felt uncomfortable not being able to lay eyes on heads. Once again the remote folks are peripheral, literally. A lot of time and bandwidth is now wasted on arguing why it's necessary to arbitrarily be in the office one or three days per week, especially for people working independently on projects. Almost every leadership town hall has employees questioning why they agian have t sit in traffic and hunt for workspace while the closest colleague—the one they do real collaboration with—is actually a thousand miles away.

I value the occasional to the office, on my schedule (take vacation from vacation and stop in the office for an afternoon), to meet the people I work with regularly.

Beyond the occasional stop-through if I'm in the area, I don't derive much value from being there in person. I submit that sharing your desktop and talking into someone's headset is actually more intimate than sitting around the conference table or viewing a screen in a cubicle.

Yes, I stopped when I switched from a OnePlus 3T to Pixel 5.

My provider (and employer) kicked the 3T off the wireless network because it was not "4G compatible", though it very much is. The Pixel 5 was discounted for purchase, so I got a new phone in a hurry and never rooted it.

I really miss the pure red night color mode that required root, and with Magisk it finally became reasonably easy to cloak from bank apps and such. Now my phone's configured and I'm just too lazy to root it and start over, and I'm also happy so far with Google's security updates.

I'm also aware of the intense monitoring and collection, especially as I see advertisement tied to verbal conversations that happened in proximity to the phone. I'm halfway through Surveillance Capitalism and it makes me want to get a flip phone and pull the battery when idle. I hate to admit it, but I just don't have the energy to keep up a pure Google-free Android any longer.

I found a bug in mySQL and after the mySQL team fixed it, I included a summary of it in my annual employee review. Bug fixing widely-used software is not part of my role, but the company recognized it as an accomplishment.

Agree. In my case, I went from Excel stare'n'compare to MS Access and finally mySQL for several years.

mySQL worked great for my lil piece of company business involving a few million records. But then I volunteered to do some analysis with files an order or two of magnitude larger (10 mlllion-100 million). mySQL started coughing up with memory errors. Uh oh. Embarrassing.

I should mention that I'm doing all this on a Windows desktop, as that's what is installed and locked down on the machines they give me.

Enter postGRES. No matter what I throw at it, it gets to end of the queries without errors—in Windows, no less. With an nVME and 32 GB of ram, I can run a complex report on 70M records in seconds. Loading and indexing takes about 15 min.

mySQL was very very good to me for a long time, but for the really big stuff I'm sticking with PostGRES.

For the benefit of Mr. Kite, of course.

Database analyst for a large communication company here.

I have similar doubts about AWS for certain kinds of intensive business analysis. Not API based transactions, but back-office analysis where complex multi-join queries are run in sequence against tables with 10s of millions of records.

We do some of this with SQL servers running right on the desktop (and one still uses Excel with VLOOKUP). We have a pilot project to try these tasks in a new Azure instance. I look forward to seeing how it performs, and at what cost.

So many long-forgotten companies advertising!

So many modems!

I know someone who was a grad student at that time, and how excited he was to get a 2400 baud modem and his own VT-100 for work on the VAX.

That grad student was me, though today it seems almost impossible to remember what it was like back then. I do remember ruining a colleague's line-by-line source printout by sending a console message that read, "Andropov just died."

I would argue for 1870-1970. Flush toilets, motors and light bulbs, communication networks ( phones in houses, radio ) did not exist before 1870, but were rapidly being deployed in the decade or two before the Queen's birth in 1922..

A book by Robert J. Gordon from 2015, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," goes through this in great and fascinating detail. The life of an everyday American in 1870, starting off with the chamber pot and ending with an early bedtime by candlelight, was hard to even imagine by 1940. As he lays it out , life in that year would be familiar to us: toilets and plumbing, mass media via radio & hardcopy webpage (i.e. newspapers), worldwide communication from home (telephone), refrigeration, etc.

Full disclosure: Work has been Windows centric, but I recently moved to a new group with some Mac users. I'll have that choice, next time I swap hardware, but probably will stay with Windows because

* Would miss too many amazingly useful utilities like arsclip.

* Easier to patch into my home network, which is NTFS-based.

* Employer is now wedded to Microsoft and Azure, so having Powershell and native access to NTFS AD on my native desktop is proving more useful.

* I actually like the Windows interface, even with the Control Panel and other system utilities caught in a weird split between Windows XP and WIndows 10 UIs.

* Some things, like certificate management and hosting a personal database, I do in Ubuntu or Debian as a VirtualBox guest under Windows.

* Wife uses Windows on her laptop. She doesn't know it, but it's actually running as a VM on Debian, very stable, and can easily take her Windows to a new machine.

* [I keep coming back to add items to this list] Remote Desktop Services have improved vastly, and I can manage remote servers or 12 year old client machines at a remote site with equal ease. (XP/7-era machines got a second life when I converted Windows OS disk to SSD). Also find screen sharing via 3rd party VNC (TightVNC) useful.

* The keystrokes have become second-nature. Try as I might, I can never get fully comfortable on a Mac OS desktop. Now get off my lawn.

I'm working in Windows (employer's choice) and need to process some huge data files on the desktop.

Perl (Strawberry Perl for Windows) is much faster than native Powershell (or CMD) scripts. A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes.

Big fan of Perl here.