HeyLaughingBoy

When did he change his name from Tim Apple?

I generally don't start a fire in the fireplace unless the temperature is below 10F. I'm not hanging out around the firepit at that temperature.

This deserves far, far more upvotes than it got ;-)

The horses will probably go to a rescue. We run one and take in and rehome lots of horses that have been seized for mistreatment via court order.

I remember getting a mortgage and the loan officer saying that there was a 100% possibility that the loan would be sold within 60 days of closing.

That's not just happening on Amazon, tho. Hang out on /r/smallbusiness and you'll find tons of tiny retailers asking for help on how to deal with the same problem.

Yep, and I live in a rural area about 10 miles outside town. Amazon Prime was reliably within 2 days until a couple years ago when they opened a fulfillment center about 20 miles away. Now I often see an item I'm buying as available within hours. I basically use Amazon Prime as a way to avoid having to drive everywhere. Ease of returns, Prime Video, etc., are just icing on the cake.

Highlight the fact that it's a 501(c)(3) on the website. Being a non-profit opens up opportunities for donations from large corporations and applying for government grants. I notice that you have a PayPal Donate button. IIRC, PayPal has a specific payment structure for nonprofits.

You could say that about a lot of crimes, but that's not how it works.

Most software is purchased or built by businesses for their internal needs. Are you a business?

You sound like you don't like other people very much.

> how many orchestras will be needed?

Many more. There isn't a fixed amount of software needed in the world: the amount will expand to fit the capacity. There's a reason it's been consistently difficult to find good programmers: there's more work than the existing population can handle. By expanding to use AI, I expect that the amount of programming work will grow, not shrink. However, the amount of programmers may decline.

It's funny you say that because just this morning I was thinking about my first job and remembering how amazing it was that I was actually getting paid to do the thing that I did for fun in my spare time.

yes.

Yeah, well, that's one huge difference between you and me.

> lot of first time mothers are rather mediocre

I had a hen who was sitting on a clutch of eggs this summer. Did everything right: kept them warm, turned them regularly, etc.

Then one hatched and she promptly lost interest in the rest, leaving them to die.

Not for the person who's making it and accruing the benefit!

Memories. A long time ago I used to sell a little board that plugged into a printer port and added a power driver to the outputs and some buffering to the inputs so they were 12V-tolerant.

Forgot about that until you mentioned it.

[sigh] I've lost track of the number of times that I've suggested that instead of an ESP32 with small TFT screen for some web or BLE enabled project that doesn't require any I/O, you could just use a cheap phone or tablet and make life much easier. I'm downvoted every single time. I guess some people take pride in doing things the hard way.

I live on a small farm a few miles from the closest town. It's not totally pitch dark, but on a clear night you can see the Milky Way and sometimes on my way back inside after doing evening chores, I'll just stand there staring up at the sky. It never gets old.

Does feel a bit eerie on moonless nights when the coyotes start howling though.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the problem for others is that they simply don't drive very far, very often. Our pickup has a range of over 750 miles with a full tank. It's not unusual for the tank to have to be filled two days back to back: my wife drives a lot. When you're driving that much, the last thing you want to do is stop if you don't have to.

Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.

Or, you know, just use a different license?

I can't possibly take this at face value since it's obvious that people (businesses) pay others many tens or hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to build software for them. So, what do you really mean?

I've been holding on to a couple of fanless industrial PCs as much for their cases (I could drive my truck over one, and it wouldn't even make a dent) as for any possible future uses. As time moves on, being able to use them looks less and less likely.

My experience with hardware engineers, at least IRL, is very different. They love to talk about their work. However, I used to be an EE so that probably helps.

As for Reddit, there's a lot of "bury head in sand and problem will go away" behavior when it comes to AI. People are understandably worried about their jobs, but they're certainly not doing themselves any favors by downplaying AI or looking for "tech niches where AI isn't yet."

Copperhead is very interesting. I do some embedded systems consulting on the side, but I've never enjoyed PCB layout very much. I briefly investigated using AI for it the last time I had to do a board, but it wasn't very helpful.

"I got five kids to feed"

It's funny. As a SW dev working on medical devices, I've done at least two catheter ablation machines that I can think of, but I never knew the specifics of exactly what problem it solves. I mean, I obviously know in detail what the device is doing, just not the why.

And it's specific to just that type of device: anything else I've worked on that I can remember ATM, I know what they are used for.

Huh. I was actually thinking about him a few days ago. Is he still among the living?

I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!

I had a co-worker who was an experienced software developer but had never worked on a system that interfaced with the physical world before.

For quite a while, he hated having to test on real hardware because all sorts of failure modes that he couldn't predict: belts stretching, mechanisms hitting each other or not lining up properly and losing position, etc. kept happening and interfering with his nice "this will only take 15 minutes to test" estimates, making it an all-afternoon affair.

OTOH, it was that unpredictability and having to deal with weird stuff that I liked about programming embedded systems.