devilbunny

I played a lot of FCPro back in the 1990s. As noted at the link, it had more possible games, automated stack movement if you had enough free spaces, had unlimited undo/redo, and had solvers (that could either solve it for you, or just tell you that a solution was still possible - the latter was immensely helpful in letting me get better at the game).

> That alone won’t teach them to read

Oh yes it can. It won’t teach phonics, which is a very valuable skill especially in English, but my biggest struggle with phonics was that I could already read the words they were trying to use to teach us how to sound things out. Kids vary but some will already be picking up written words by 2-3 and self-guided by 5-6. Reading the same book every night is tedious to parents but really lets the kids connect shapes on paper to language.

> too lazy to write custom software to do it

Hell, I’m not a coder; I don’t even work in IT. I can install Linux and configure it reasonably well for an end user, but ask me to code something up and… well, hope you like Claude’s output.

Her desktop is a 27” iMac that’s too old for OCLP to help keep it going, and I keep thinking about putting Linux on it, but I can’t imagine trying to get her onto something that isn’t either Windows (used at work) or macOS (we have full Apple ecosystem at home and her laptop is an M2 MBA) until it just won’t run Citrix and a browser capable of hitting Gmail. Or until Apple finally makes another 27” iMac, which given the RAM and storage situation isn’t happening any time soon.

Okay, clean a 16000 email backlog on a phone.

On her phone.

Without her computer logged into her email.

Without her phone.

"I can do this for you, but I will need to use your computer to do it, and I will need you to read me off a bunch of 2FA codes in all likelihood, so you can either give me your phone or you can sit next to me while I do it. Oh, and they're your emails, so you may as well pull up a chair or I'm just going to have to guess whether you care or not."

My time is valuable too. You want me to do it, you help.

Good luck convincing anyone outside of HN types. I get regular requests from my wifeto assist with some task and my answer is “you can’t really do that on a phone or tablet, you need to use a real computer”. They are still not done.

Not impossible, just so unpleasant that I wouldn’t do it on vacation. If you’re getting paid for it you probably do have a different opinion on the matter.

You must be made of sterner stuff than I am. It was 14.5 hours for me to go to college, and after freshman year I always crashed at a friend’s place along the way. 12 is fine, 13 is stretching it, but at 14 hours there’s no way I’m doing it in one day.

Thank you. You do far more important work than I do and we appreciate it.

Yes, because the expected survival rate without surgical intervention is zero. With it, slim, but not zero.

My father-in-law once asked me how long it would take to teach him how to put people to sleep. I said, five minutes, but if you want them to wake up at the end, a lot longer.

We very rarely lose people unexpectedly.

Crystal, or Louisiana Brand, are much more my preference. I just don’t care for Tabasco peppers.

One of the reasons I am an anesthesiologist is that while you might have issues with the surgeon or the surgery, I find that very few people decline my services. If anything, they generally want more.

> it forces you into too many arcane areas to configure what should be basic functionality

This is a real pain point with OpenWRT, made worse by the developers' concept that there are "proper" ways to do it (which are supported by almost no other software) and so the workaround is either to do the dance or replace everything with OpenWRT that will do it "properly".

Defensible idea, but the reality is that most people who are willing to do this in the first place are trying to reuse an old router as a low-usage wireless bridge on a network that is otherwise centrally controlled like Unifi or Omada. My pool controller would be fine to run on 802.11b (setting aside what that would do to the rest of the wireless network), it doesn't need a WiFi 7 device.

But it's been around a lot longer than 200 years, so...

But it works.

> trying to recover your broken mind and spirit

You have a very strange view of how most people approach jobs. And politics.

Turn off tutorial mode in the original Civilization. Play it. Every person I considered really smart in the early to mid nineties had a Civ addiction at some point. Because who doesn’t want to try to be God?

One of my friends played on hard mode to challenge himself. One played on easy to build a proto-Factorio without interruption. Both valid ways.

I was about to reply with this. Excellent time waster.

> always glance at the temperature and weather on the dashboard before we go out.

Not everywhere has really unpredictable weather. And I have a garage at home and at work, and the garage leads directly into the building. I go to work without ever considering rain (though I do keep an umbrella in the car for when I have to go shopping, etc.).

The one "smart home" thing I've done is a garage door switch hooked into Apple HomeKit. I have Home Assistant running on a small server, just for kicks, but mostly it serves as a quick dashboard for my network devices.

But being able to control my garage door when I'm not home is definitely very useful. Get a RATGDO and it's entirely local, no cloud. Use your remote access solution of choice to get into your local network to operate it.

> Reliable NAT traversal on top of wireguard is their moat

And a damned good one at that. I can spend five minutes on a (family) nontechnical user's device and set it up to be able to access the parts of my network it needs to get to, and it's easy enough to use that I can walk them through the troubleshooting over the phone if it ever goes awry. Regardless of where they are or I am.

True, but this was more about what to wear when it’s 35 C, not 5.

The mosquitoes in question are invasive species in most of the world; there are native species that will build their populations back up. And the other ones don't spread human diseases.

This isn't DDT. It's selective killing of a handful of species when there are huge numbers of other species, native to the area, that can fill the same ecological niche but without the risk to human health.

> look extremely hot and uncomfortable

> I've never worn one

I live in the southeastern US. It's quite hot here, for quite a lot of the year.

Ever wonder why seersucker is Hollywood shorthand for "small-town Southern lawyer"? It's not just Atticus Finch; that's what people wore before air conditioning was widespread. Seersucker is breathable, cool, and naturally wrinkled in such a way that it doesn't really show. Linen wrinkles more obviously but is far more comfortable in a hot climate than even the best cottons (like seersucker).

I can wear a linen suit and shirt in New Orleans in July and be no less comfortable than I would be in a T-shirt and shorts. I might ditch the coat, but that's it.

If you don't like how they look, well, that's a matter of taste, and de gustibus non est disputandum. But they don't have to be heavy wool.

I mean, whatever.

AI chaps my ass when a restaurant that charges $125 per person for the prix fixe menu has it answering the phone. You're not Walmart. Don't be cheap. I don't mind if the host(ess) is on the phone briefly with another customer when I walk in because... I know that's going to be me one day calling.

If in five years of strenuous exercise, four days a week, for ~30 weeks a year, along with significant exercise for 20 of the other 22 weeks a year, I never once experienced anything like it, I'd say that the odds are as close to zero as they could meaningfully be.

Not to mention riding a bicycle as my only mode of transportation other than foot for ten years before I had a driver's license.

I enjoyed tackling people. I did not enjoy the exercise itself and would not have done it if I could have skipped right to the games without having done all that other stuff.

I have an acquaintance who works for Chevron in a normal office job. In California, only the refinery workers get regular drug tests. In Texas, everyone does. And this dude used to smoke a fair amount of weed. It’s a good job, so he stays clean, but there’s really no reason to require it of someone in his role - he has never even been to one of their refineries.

Not everyone gets that. I have exercised very hard at times in my life (American football in high school), and while I feel better in general when I’m active, and playing sports can be quite fun and rewarding, I have never gotten anything from running or other pure exertion other than tired and hungry.

One hour of cumulative charging, well spaced, means at least 1.5 hours of actual lost time (exit highway, drive to charger - remember that most US highways do not have service areas as such, so you are interacting with regular local traffic for fuel stops, start/end charging, get back to and on highway) and probably more like two. Same drive with ICE-speed fueling has more like 30 minutes down time (if it’s just me).

If you have children or pets along, you will stop more, but then the question is whether the charging areas have the amenities that fuel stations do - available snacks, restrooms, pet relief areas, and at least the Tesla superchargers I have seen generally do not have the same level of availability for those.

Also, 750 km is well within single-day driving. I did 950 km each way in June, with pets and wife, and it took a touch over 11 hours each way (Google Maps estimates 9.5 hours of actual driving time without stops), and I don’t know any other American who would turn that into a two-day drive unless they couldn’t leave early in the morning. Though I’m sure they exist. There really wasn’t a good place to stop after just doing most of the drive. Either halfway, or all the way, or sleep in some awful hotel and eat up the better part of two extra days of your time off. (I get more time off than most, but I have to take a full week at a time - a break is a full week, or two full weeks, or three, but not extendable by an extra couple of days.)

Yeah, my city traffic engineer is an ass too. There was an intersection I went through every time I left my old house. Outside of rush hour, it functioned much better as a four-way stop than a signalled intersection. I pointed this out and he said “that is inappropriate for two arterials”. Um, I live there. You don’t.