dlevine

I've been teaching my nephew how to code using Scratch. He told me that they blocked Scratch at school because some of the kids were using it to play games during school. Kind of a shame, because it is a great way for kids to learn how to code.

I'm a bit younger than you, but I was visiting my mom a few weeks back, and found my old NES in some boxes she had saved for me (along with a few of the better games). Thanks to the composite connector, I managed to plug it into a modern HDTV and it worked just fine. My old copy of Zelda somehow even had a working save battery.

My mom made an offhand comment like "someone isn't sleeping much tonight."

The new games are more complex and realistic, but there is still plenty of joy in those old systems and games, especially for those of us who grew up with them.

I worked for Dan many years ago when he was an engineering director at Google. He's a sharp guy and has a lot of experience in the industry. I hope he does well at his new role.

Wouldn't it be a 486 SX-33 if there is no FPU?

I have tried a number of things over the years to cut down on my Internet addition.

For example:

- Getting rid of my smartphone and going back to a flip phone (lasted a year)

- Limiting my use of email to a few specific windows during the day (lasted a month or two)

- Requiring myself to write things down before looking them up on the Internet (lasted a month or two)

- Took the Facebook app off my phone (pretty much permanent)

- Periodically giving up Internet news for periods lasting from a couple of weeks to a month or two (works whenever I'm actively doing it)

Some of them have worked for a while, but I seem to eventually go back to the default.

The experiment I'm currently running is turning off the web browser on my iPhone. I started that about a week ago, and really like it so far. I don't have an email app on my phone (I use the Gmail web interface), so it really reduces the urge to pull out my phone and check email or look things up.

More like 1MB of RAM.

Our 286 (which was the first computer my family owned) also had a 40MB Hard Disk, which seemed like plenty at the time. It could run Windows 3.1 with that, although it wasn't exactly fast.

When I was in high school, one of my dad's coworkers had one of these. It had OS/2 Warp in addition to Windows, and I helped him clean that off to reclaim some hard disk space.

It looks like there aren't that many of these still floating around. Glad to see that people are keeping them alive.

Honestly, the X1 Carbon is a nice laptop. And even if you don't want to run Linux as your main OS, Windows 11 really isn't bad. With WSL2, you can use have all of the benefits of Linux for development while being able to run whatever Windows apps you want, and it really was pretty easy to setup. You can even run VS Code on Windows and edit files in your Linux container. I had a period last year and this year where I was consulting, and used my Ryzen Desktop as my main work machine.

If I were looking to use something other than Macs (which I'm not), there are more good options now than there have ever been. Even though everything is still compared to the benchmark of Mac Laptops, which isn't an accident.

I have worked for a lot of startups, and the best ones have deployed as often as possible. One company (which grew massively and is now public) allowed developers to push code whenever they wanted. Once your code was merged into master and the required tests had passed, you could push to staging and then production whenever you wanted. However, you were responsible for making sure that your push didn't break anything. Developers took a lot of responsibility, and when something broke, the last guy who pushed usually fixed it really fast (and if not someone else did). Releases went out several times a day.

At my current job (fast-growing mid-stage startup), any developer can push when they want, but it works a bit differently. Once the release is staged, everyone who has a commit on staging is responsible for verifying their feature. Then the developer goes through a "release checklist," which involves finding a buddy and jointly running through a list of manual tests to validate key features. After that, they can push. They probably push a few times a week.

I feel like code freeze/manual QA/weekly push is something of an anti-pattern. Developers are disconnected from the process of releasing their code, and take less ownership. While in practice manual QA should lead to finding more bugs, in practice it can lead to more defects.

I recently bought a cast iron pizza pan (https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/lodge-bakeware-pizz...) after my pizza stone broke. I had a lot of trouble transferring the dough to the stone without messing it up, but it's easy with the cast iron. You can take the pan out of the oven when it is hot, which makes it much easier than using the stone.

I preheat the pan in the oven, pull it out, transfer the dough to the stone, and put on the toppings. The pan stays hot, so the dough starts cooking while I prepare the pie. Then after cooking for 6 minutes in the oven, I can take the pizza out of the oven again, put on the cheese, and cook for a few more minutes to melt.

The cast iron is also super easy to clean, unlike the stone, which was pretty much impossible to get fully clean. After it cools, I rinse it off and coat with a thin layer of oil. Then it's ready for the next use.

I have an old DSLR (Nikon D90, circa 2008) and hadn't taken it anywhere in quite some time (due to it being big and heavy and smartphones being more or less good enough). However, I had been slightly disappointed with the vacation photos I was getting on my iPhone 11.

So I dug out the old DSLR and brought (lugged?) it with me on a recent vacation to Peru. I threw in the largest SD card it would accommodate (32GB), which gave me literally thousands of photos at the highest quality JPEG setting (don't really want to deal with post-processing RAW images). The only lens I brought was a 35mm 1.8 DX lens.

I have to say that the quality of my photos was much better than I had seen in quite some time. It is hands down better than my smartphone. Even though they are both ostensibly 12MP, the larger sensor and lens make a big difference. The two things I missed from my iPhone were super wide angle shots and low light. Since I had my iPhone with me, I could just pull that out if needed.

I briefly thought about buying a new DSLR or a mirrorless, but really my old one is good enough. I will probably just buy an 18-55 zoom or something for my next vacation.

Something I haven't seen mentioned but am curious about is whether this discovery was facilitated by global warming.

From what I understand, the way it usually works is that LPs don't give the VC funds all of the money upfront. They pay in a portion, and then the VCs have the ability to subsequently make "capital calls" up to the total commitment value.

If the market is really bad, you could see LPs start to default on these capital calls. There are consequences to doing this, so this isn't a likely scenario, but it could happen in a worst-case scenario.

I'm a bit over 5'8". I always suspected that online dating was a bit more challenging because of my height. But when I looked at the numbers, I was doing fine at getting dates. The problem was actually that I wasn't confident enough on dates and didn't really know what I wanted, so the dates rarely went anywhere.

I did a lot of personal development work over a period of 10+ years. At some point, dating got a lot easier. I went from being single most of the time to usually in a relationship. I got married at 41, which was a bit late, but we all move at our own pace.

My little sister is married to a guy who is maybe 5'5" (and I think that's generous). She is 5', and is nearly as tall as him in heels. He's nice and treats her well. She dated a bunch of guys over 6', and likes him the best by far.

This is not to say that tall guys don't have an advantage. I'm sure they do. But fortunately there are a lot of things other than height that also make a difference.

After suffering through the Blackberry Storm and then a few Motorola Phones with the Motoblur, I tried a Nexus 4. I liked stock Android a lot better, but a bunch of my friends and family were using iPhones, and I wanted iMessage.

So I upgraded to a year-old iPhone 5, and have never looked back. It just worked better. Every app just worked, and the UI felt somehow smoother. I'm on an iPhone 11 right now.

I worked at Google from 2004 - 2007, and I remember hearing this towards the end of the time I was there in a presentation shared by the people ops team.

It's possible that this wasn't really followed in the hiring process - doesn't mean that the conclusion isn't true. I guess it seems counterintuitive on some level that more interviews wouldn't yield more signal.

This is interesting. I'm curious how this will be functionally different from using Carta to allow secondary sales.

Namely, I wonder who the "others" (other than GM) are. In addition to this being attractive for employees, is it also a way for additional institutional investors to take an equity stake in Cruise?

I agree that it makes sense to find a therapist.

I would also suggest that you look into joining a men's group. A lot of other men are experiencing (or have experienced) things that are similar to what you are going through, and it can be very helpful to be able to share your experience with people who have empathy and can help you through it in a healthy way.

I feel you, because my story is somewhat similar to yours. I was an engineer for like 20 years, but always wanted to make my own business work. Started a couple of companies, but nothing panned out long-term, and ended up back in jobs after a year or two. Eventually transitioned into product management to focus more on understanding customers and figuring out how to build what they want.

A bit over a year ago, I quit my job and made another stab at starting a company. A friend and I built a prototype for a new product, but when we tried to get people to use it and did customer research, there just wasn't enough validation. Tried some other things, but couldn't land on anything that felt compelling enough. I even did consulting for a while, hoping that I could identify a strong enough market need through that path.

I got married last year, and we want to start a family fairly soon. So, at the end of the day, I realized that this isn't my time to build a startup from scratch. The job market is pretty hot, and I recently accepted a full-time role. I chose a startup that's late stage enough that I get a reasonable salary but early enough that there is still the opportunity for some upside.

Coffee Meets Bagel did something similar to this when they first launched. You got one potential match a day, and you either liked or passed. I thought it worked well, but there were eventually some problems.

For example, it assumes that you have an even balance of participants in your marketplace. If you have more men than women, you either need to give some men no matches on some days (which decreases engagement), or you need to give women multiple potential matches on some days. There are other ways you can handle this, but they have problems too.

Another potentially bigger issue is monetization. It is hard to monetize one match a day. But you can give people the option to have multiple matches a day if they pay for them, which is what CMB does. But then you should probably give people who were liked by a paid member at least one more match a day, which causes your original premise to break down.

Hinge severely limits the number of people you can like in a given day (unless you pay), and I think this works pretty well.

Prior to the SAFE, a lot of startups raised using convertible debt, which had a bunch of strings attached (convertible notes typically have an interest rate, a cap, and a discount). SAFE was an attempt to make this simpler and more founder friendly.

I spent a while with a 27" 4K monitor. It looked nice in HiDPI modes on my Mac, but I didn't get that much usable screen real estate (I was running it about 1440p). When the pandemic hit and I started working from home every day, I upgraded to a 43" 4k display. I now have the equivalent of 4x 21.5" 1080p displays, which is far more usable than 1x 1440p, even if it doesn't look quite as nice.

I have been through this before. I don't think all big companies are like this, but there is a bias at large enterprises towards moving slowly and more carefully. Honestly, this is one of the main reasons why big companies buy startups in the first place. It is also a key reason for why many of these acquisitions fail.

There are really two considerations.

1) Do you have any financial interest in sticking around? A lot of times when there is an acquisition, the acquirer offers employees a bonus to stick around for some period of time and hit certain goals. Or the salary might be a lot better. It could be in your interest to stick around even though the work situation isn't great.

2) How crazy is this making you? One option is to adjust your expectations and get used to things moving a lot slower. If you really can't put up with this, then there are a lot of other jobs out there. The bright side of this gridlock is that you probably have plenty of time to look for a new job.

In my case, I lasted about 4 months before I left. Within about two years, the product had been shut down and everyone involved with the acquisition had left.

"All this is ostensibly to combat the slowly, and ever-slightly increasing global temperature."

Am I missing something, or does the writer of this article live in an alternate reality where global warming is only a minor problem?

I just upgraded my PSU from 500W -> 750W when I got my RTX 3070 (I'm running a 5600X).

Seeing this makes me worried that maybe it wasn't quite enough.

There are some knock-off Topres that are less expensive. For example, Royal Kludge had some boards that showed up on Drop a while back. I haven't used them, though, and they don't seem to have really caught on.

I had a CM Novatouch for a while, which was Topre-based. It wasn't my cup of tea (I'm partial to dampened ALPs switches from old Apple Extended Keyboards), and I eventually sold it, but it was a solid keyboard.

It is cool to see Intel reclaim the performance crown with an innovative new architecture. After years of stagnation at the high-end, the intensified competition between Intel and AMD is a big win for the customer in terms of both performance and price.

However, I do wonder whether they are going for the wrong thing. They are not competing against AMD's Zen 3 desktops at anything but the very high end, and their power consumption numbers are pretty insanely high. In both the laptop and server market, the thing that matters most is performance per watt rather than performance per dollar, and they aren't ahead in that metric.

My sense is that Apple's M1 and other ARM-based designs are getting to the point where they are "good enough" for the vast majority of use cases, even if they are insufficient for a few high-end applications. This is classic disruptive innovation, and we are seeing it reach its logical conclusion. It's kind of interesting that Alder Lake's dominance is due to them adopting something very similar to ARM's big.LITTLE

As an introvert, I have found that I do best with situations that expose me to the same people for a while. For example, clubs and groups that regularly meet for the purpose of an activity. There are often many such things at most colleges - just think of some activities you enjoy doing and look at the directory of clubs.

And I wouldn't worry about having missed out - it's never too late to start. I wanted to be on my school newspaper, but didn't get around to it my freshman year. But I joined my sophomore year, got super into it, and was editor by my senior year.

I bought a cheap PS/2 to USB adapter off of Amazon to get a Model M working with a modern computer. I wanted it to work on both my PC desktop, which has a PS/2 connector, and my Macbook, which doesn't.

The adapter I bought was complete junk and didn't seem to work correctly, but I had some Pro Micros lying around (about $5 a piece) and managed to flash them with the Soarer's Converter firmware. Then I cut the 2 PS/2 connectors off of the cheap adapter and soldered them to the correct pins on the Pro Micros, and I ended up with 2 converter cables that worked just fine.

If you want cables that don't look like you built them, you can find Soarer's Converter cables on eBay that look professionally made.

In the book Post Corona, Scott Galloway talks about red vs blue companies. Blue companies (e.g. Apple) charge a premium for their product and offer you some level of privacy, while red companies give you their product (the Android OS and Google Apps) for "free" and then collect lots of data on you (and use that to make money). Amazon is clearly going this route too with the ridiculous number of ads they have started putting on their Echo Speakers.

He predicts that over time there will be paid versions of a lot more products for people who want (and can afford) privacy. I know there is a lot of hate for Galloway, and I take everything he says with a grain of salt, but this struck me as pretty astute.