logbiscuitswave

I almost had to defer a procedure for one of my cats because my vet’s systems were all down. This meant they couldn’t process payments, schedule appointments, use their X-ray machine, or dispense prescriptions. (Thankfully, they had the ingenuity to get their diagnostic equipment online through other means, and our prescriptions had already been dispensed so we didn’t have to reschedule.)

I would imagine it’s the same story at human hospitals too that ran afoul of this. I wouldn’t expect life-critical systems to go offline, but there’s many other more mundane systems that also need to function.

When the iPhone came out, it was perfectly positioned. Smartphones weren’t new of course, but they were clunky devices with tons of compromise. The iPhone was designed to fix a lot of the problems around existing smartphones by having great built in apps, a great browser, and great usability thanks to many novel and intuitive forms of interaction. When it came out it was a must-have device and it solved so many problems for so many people.

For everything I’ve seen of the Vision Pro it has represented a solution in search of a problem.

Fun fact: in Japan there was a WebTV client for the Dreamcast [0]. The very first “Dreamcast” I saw was a Katana dev kit at a WebTV office.

[0]: https://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/WebTV_for_Dreamc...

Andy Rubin also was a founder of Danger Inc. which was also eventually acquired by Microsoft.

Unfortunately the acquired talent that brought us the wonderful Hiptop/Sidekick devices were then wasted by being sucked into the Kin boondoggle.

I worked at WebTV not long after the acquisition. I was always impressed with the amount of capability they were able to extract out of such minimalist hardware. Even for their time they had a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM but managed to have a bespoke UX that was even capable of rendering Flash-based sites.

Even in the late 90s there was a community of WebTV hackers. One thing people focused on was the “tricks menu”[1] that required typing in a password to get into it. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about what the codes “meant”. The reality was they were just chosen to be something easy to remember that could be typed with only one’s left hand on those IR keyboards.

[1] http://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/Services/Gallery/...

Apple’s approach to back compatibility was always give a stopgap to bridge generations. The irony is they would undergo heroics to support that back compat across generations (Mac 68k emulator, Classic environment, Rosetta, Rosetta 2) only to unceremoniously dump that work as soon as they could.

Microsoft can be almost religious about back compat to where long standing bugs won’t get fixed lest they break something (or special compatibility shims have to be built in to maintain those bugs for certain apps). You can’t run any Mac OS software from the 1990s on a modern Mac without emulation, but you can still run plenty of Windows software from the same time period as-is on a modern PC.

Of course one can argue which approach makes the most sense and there’s certainly merits to both.

20 years on, and so much of this still resonates with me: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... especially after reading the OP.

Lots of memories reading the OP, some good, some not so good. I still think WPF was really wonderful. It had a steep learning curve but it was so versatile and modern in so many ways. It’s a real shame that Microsoft lost all interest in it when moving on to the far inferior (IMO) UWP. WPF could be used for writing huge and complex apps while UWP never seemed to be good for much more than toy apps in my experience.

Thank you for your detailed reply! I have no issues tolerating CPAP, so I’m not the target audience here. I’ve been seeing it advertised pretty heavily as of late and was curious about what the gotchas were.

How do you feel about the new surgical options like Inspire Sleep as an alternative for people who can’t tolerate CPAP?

My DME used to be Lincare was equally terrible. They were awful. They never had replacement consumables in stock, and I had to deal with months worth of delays to get things I needed. That’s why I went to CPAP.com (like OP) for a time. It was annoying having to coordinate with my insurance company to get reimbursements since they didn’t direct bill, but at least I would always have my equipment on time. (As a bonus, it was cheaper than Lincare to boot.)

Carelon also does preauthorizations for various expensive procedures and such. I’ve had the displeasure of having to try to coordinate between my insurance provider and PCP’s insurance coordinator for authorizing some expensive blood tests. Insurance wanted the PCP to use Carelon, Carelon automatically denied it, the appeals process was designed to be as frustrating and opaque as possible.

(Unlike the OP, I didn’t have the patience to spend two years navigating the kafkaesque nightmare they did. I finally gave up after a couple months of being stonewalled by all the parties who would refuse to talk to one another and me trying to be the middle man. I never did get the blood work done. So much for preventative medicine.)

Quota was once a very good website. I spent a lot of time contributing and answering questions.

Then the email spams started happening pushing digests of irrelevant and in some cases harmful recommendations.

Then the increasingly asshole-oriented designs around serving up search results and blocking the content unless you signed in or registered.

Then the Q/A quality digressed massively to the point where it became less and less useful. There were also changes to the design that merged questions, answers, and recommendations into a largely incoherent mess where I was never really sure what I was looking at or why.

Not wanting any further association with the dumpster fire Quora was becoming, I ended up deleting every one of my answers and comments before deleting my account entirely.

Now I take pains to block Quora results from my searches and never click on a Quora link if I come across it. It seems like I’m not missing much based on the terribly awful “innovations” mentioned in this article.

The best is when those “silent updates” restart Teams while you are in the middle of using it.

A million times this. Things seemed more broken than usual in Teams for me today like image attachments not working and such. I just figured it was Teams being Teams until someone informed me there was a service outage degrading things. That’s how low the bar is.

ㅋㅋㅋ is literally “kkk” but it’s shorthand for 크크크 (keukeukeu). There’s also ㅎㅎㅎ (hhh) that shorthand for 하하하 (hahaha). It’s much faster to just mash out those single consonants, sort of like keyboard spam laughing.

The microchips are basically little RFID widgets that are about the size of a grain of rice. The chip can migrate from between the shoulder blades to anywhere else, and the range is really poor - basically near-contact range.

I once tried a pet feeder that would read a cat’s microchip to determine if it would allow that cat to use it. It worked by having an arch with an RFID sensor that the cat would pass under and it would uncover the food for the matching cat. For one of my cats, it worked great because the chip was still between her shoulder blades in the usual spot. For my other cat it had migrated near her ribs and it didn’t work at all.

As soon as I saw the screenshots of it running in a terminal window, I was in love.

The problem isn’t the lead itself, it’s the phenomenon of tin whiskering that can happen with some Pb-free solder alloys where metallic hair-like structures grow from the solder and cause arcs or short circuits.

This is one such example of a failure in space due to tin whiskers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_IV

This was a fascinating read, not only for understanding about how Shazam works which is something I’ve long been curious about, but also a great primer on digital signal processing.

I would guess that that 486 speeds were the terminal velocity for Second Reality’s performance. That was the high end when it originally came out.

Don’t get me started on the GUS. That was such an incredible sound card for its time.

+100 I really dislike ligatures. They are one of those things that seem great in theory but I find them to be a real distraction. This is why I never got into the JetBrains fonts — there was no ligature-free option. (Maybe there is now, but I haven’t felt motivated to try it again.)

Second Reality was truly a technical marvel and arguably represented the pinnacle of the PC demo scene. It’s amazing how much influential it has been and how it continues to endure some 30 years later. Not too shabby for a group of teenagers from Finland.

(And now I feel extra old realizing the original Second Reality was released 30 years ago.)

Aside: I first watched Second Reality on my PC at the time which was a 386/40DX. I must have watched it 100 times at least. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did upon booting it up was to watch Second Reality. I was amazed at how much I had been missing before; everything ran smoother and elements that had been truncated before were now visible. Yet even when it was on my old hardware it was still completely presentable. It’s a credit to the Future Crew coders that it could run so well on such disparate hardware.

Another aside: the Second Reality source code was released on GitHub for its 20th anniversary: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

There was a great 5-part blog series to decipher it: https://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/

Every so often I go on a “font bender” and start searching for my “next great coding font”. I’ve been using Hack (https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/) for several years, but after looking at this I might need to give it a try. It looks really nice and the price is right. The font in the OP looks great too, but I can’t bring myself to pay for it. Not when there’s so many great alternatives out there at no cost.

I have a couple of home automation projects that use Raspberry Pi boards and rely on BLE. One thing I’ve found is the onboard Bluetooth is pretty awful on the Pi 3 and not very good on the Pi 4. Switching to use a Bluetooth dongle made a huge difference with stability and reliability. I no longer had to continually run scripts to try to reset kernel drivers or the entire Bluetooth stack when things got cranky (which seemed to happen many times a day). As a bonus I got a Class 1 adapter that would let me tweak the power output.

In the mid 2000s I had to test a product I was working on with all architectures supported by Windows, which of course included ia64. We had one engineering sample HP ia64 machine in the test lab (I think it was a zx2000 but I could be mistaken). It was this giant, noisy, hulking boat anchor full tower that weighed some over 50 lbs and had a 650W power supply.

I had to find a Server 2003 ia64 CD to install the OS (and work through the awful UEFI CLI incantations required to get the damn thing to boot). Once installed I was always struck by just how incredibly slow the machine was. It was just such a drag to use. Once we no longer needed to support ia64 I was thrilled that I’d never need to use that thing again.

Good riddance.

Git’s arcane command syntax is a thing of legend and after years of using it I still find myself being mystified by so many things once I need to delve beyond the usual.

Sorry if it’s already been mentioned but this fake git man page generator gives me a big stupid grin every time I use it: https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/ (I’m sure it’s been linked on HN before)

The documentation it generates just so plausible with the kind of verbs and nouns it uses, and how the help text is always descriptive, but never really helpful.

This reminds me of a text file I found back in the 1990s on a BBS about “how to build your own atomic bomb”. The first step was something along the lines of “obtain 50 lbs of weapons grade plutonium” as if you could just walk into your local military surplus store and pick up a crate. It was pretty obvious at that point that the whole thing was meant to be humorous.

I often have to do architecture diagrams and this usually involves Visio. Visio has design stuck in the past. It’s so amazingly clunky to use and even simple things like arranging or sizing shapes on a grid can be incredibly frustrating.

There’s a ton of shapes, but they are all inconsistent visually that mixing metaphors becomes a real mess. Search is terrible. I often find myself spending more just screwing around trying to get things laid out how I want than actually designing.

Figma isn’t really designed for this kind of thing but I find that with FigJam I can throw together really great flowcharts and infrastructure diagrams with really little effort. UML state diagrams and other things of that ilk are too much effort though.

Ultimately I work at a Microsoft shop so whatever I do in Figma ultimately ends up in Visio anyway but I find it faster to prototype in Figma and then adapt to Visio. (As frustrating as it is.)

Does anybody know how much this costs? The website is not at all transparent about this.

I’ve been navigating a nightmare through my insurance trying to get BRCA testing because I’m not female despite an immediate familial history and non-trivial potential risks. I’m looking for options so I can understand my risks without paying thousands out of pocket.

Insurance doesn’t seem to have any interest in proactive screening, only in reactive which really sucks.

A surprising amount of medication sheets say things like, “the mechanism of action for this drug is not understood”.