mprovost

It may seem like football hasn't changed but just think of the overall improvements in training, fitness, nutrition, sports medicine... Nevermind changes to the way matches are officiated and even in some cases the rules have changed. And the pitches! Imagine some players from the past playing on today's laser-levelled pitches where the length of the grass is mm perfect (and specified in the manager's contract!) instead of puddles and patches of bare dirt.

You can also get official HP emulators for the iPhone. They were unmaintained for years but now they've been handed over to a new company who is updating them again.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hp-15c-calculator/id503720774

My company did the same which led to lots of questions to determine the exact value of n so folk could move n+1 miles away and stay remote.

Back in college we ordered pizza and when the driver arrived there was some confusion finding money for a tip and after he was gone we realised that three of us had given him cash. After that every time we ordered it seemed like the pizza arrived in minutes. We assumed that someone had put a note in their system next to our phone number like "amazing tippers".

Apparently (according to TikTok) ending a sentence with an ellipsis is also a Gen-X thing...

We used to receive so many automatically generated emails and I really doubted that anyone was reading them but every time I asked if I could disable them people would swear that they were essential. I got so sick of them that I commented out the line in the script that sent them with a note that I would pay $20 if someone found that line. Nobody ever noticed that the emails stopped and I left years later without paying.

Totally agree. If you focus on the money you'll just be frustrated. I could have made more money spending those hours driving for Lyft instead. I deliberately haven't tracked my hours so I won't be discouraged at my hourly rate. Even spending that time on leetcode could get you a better job and more income.

But, there's nothing quite as satisfying as setting out to do something really difficult and seeing it come together. And unlike most other things in your career where you're part of a team and sharing your success, a book basically rests solely on your shoulders. So it's easy to point to it and truthfully say "I did that".

Plus, it turned me into a really good writer.

Kodak invented the digital camera. Being first doesn't mean much. New competitors don't have anything inside the moat (their existing business) to protect and can move faster.

There's only so much you can do to keep an 80 year old technology developed with slide rules from being reverse engineered by a dedicated group of scientists with the benefit of 80 years of advancements in physics and access to a supercomputer (ie an iPhone).

(As I always point out...) This is known as the "Dead Sea Effect" and it was traditionally associated with companies like IBM but now we're seeing it across the board with tech layoffs. The best people know they have options and they have a good network so once a company starts showing signs of slowing down they bail out.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

I would be surprised if anything has ever been removed from terminfo. Thomas Dickey is doing God's work.

I used to buy old DEC terminals on Ebay in the early 2000s (there seemed to be a lot of stock from US Post Offices, you could tell from the burn in on the screens) and hook them up to a x86 FreeBSD desktop. I think the 320 was my favourite - they had great keyboards. That was my cheap multi-monitor solution back then - just run terminals with separate keyboards! Of course this was when we had cubicles with enough space for that kind of thing... I was doing sysadmin work back then on big Sun servers which were located in another state anyway but I used to get a kick out of showing people walking past that I was running harrypotter.com from a screen session on a VT320.

Anyway one day I came back from lunch and everyone was standing outside the building with the fire department. A capacitor on one of my beloved terminals had blown and the smoke set off the fire alarm. After that my boss quietly asked if I could leave the vintage hardware at home. Although soon after we discovered a stack of old SGI Indy workstations left over from the VFX on some movie...

The OS notices when disks or NFS servers ("NFS server not responding") go missing, but there's no way to generally broadcast this information to every process. And then you would have to build in error handling everywhere. What does `cat` do when it's informed that the file it's reading is temporarily unavailable? You can either block the next read() call and hang the process until the disk comes back, or return a hard error that it's gone forever. Otherwise each application has to have its own wait/timeout code. (Which is what applications dealing with HTTP have to deal with but at least when you make an HTTP connection you're aware that something could go wrong.)

At the point where it disappears for seconds it's a distributed system not an attached disk. At this point you have to start applying the CAP theorem.

At least in Unix the assumption is that disks are always attached (and reliable...) so write errors don't typically bubble up to the application layer. This is why losing an NFS mount typically just hangs the system until it recovers.

At this point how many AirPods does Apple have to sell to buy a license and preinstall it on every Mac instead of TextEdit?

You remember... right. The Apple 2e blows away modern computers (in terms of latency).

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

I don't think anyone had any illusions about "teaching" us anything other than the value of hard work. We made minimum wage, no benefits (what does that even mean for a kid, we all had health insurance through our parents). I was able to save up for a few summers and buy myself a new computer (a 486SX!), which ultimately led me to where I am today.

Seasonal agricultural work like this has been done by kids for generations. There's a short time where you need a flexible workforce and then you don't need them the rest of the year. And our hours were totally variable based on the crop and the weather. Some weeks there just wasn't anything to pick and we'd have to wait. You couldn't count on this income as an adult trying to pay the bills or raise a family. There were adults working there of course but they had different jobs (like driving tractors) and more steady income. I don't think we were stealing jobs from adults.

In the end the number of kids willing to work in the fields went down and these days they don't even bother trying to hire locals. They started flying in seasonal workers from Puerto Rico and then Jamaica. You can save up enough money in a few months to go home and live off of for a while (plus any other seasonal work you can find).

I spent my summers from ages 14-18 picking shade tobacco (for cigar wrappers) in Connecticut's Tobacco Valley. I'm not sure if it was state law but you couldn't start until you were 14. This was during summer vacation when school was out - but it used to be such an important local industry that if the crop was late they would delay the start of the school year so kids could keep picking. Boys and girls could both work but it was completely segregated - boys worked in the field, and girls worked in the sheds sewing the leaves onto lathes to hang to dry. They used to rent the old big yellow school buses from the local school district to pick us up in the morning, and there were even separate bus routes for boys and girls. I remember coming home with my fingers totally covered in black sap from the leaves but don't think I ever felt the effects of nicotine. They were long hot days and it was even hotter under the tents - they grow shade tobacco under cover. If it rained they sent us all home! But it was a fun time hanging out with other kids and even competing to see who could pick the fastest. Still, when I went to college I remember telling myself that my objective was to get a degree so I wouldn't ever have to work outside again.

This is great and a lot of it rings true to my experience writing a book to teach Rust. It's basically a giant topological sorting exercise to find the optimal order to introduce syntax so that you steer clear of rabbit holes. Or you just end up drawing the owl.

For example, to implement a simple "hello world" program in Rust you have to use a macro (println!), so you can't even look for a function signature in the standard library docs to help. So you can either just say "don't worry about this for now, just trust me" or spend a whole chapter diving into macro syntax. The number of concepts you need to implement a basic program is pretty large and you could easily spend a chapter going into any of them.

Personally I'm not a fan of the approach in this post to just "lie" to people but I do find myself showing a non-optimal implementation because that's all the syntax I've introduced up to that point. Then later I show how to do it better. I know some readers just want the final answer up front though.

Meltdown/Spectre pulled back the curtain and revealed just how much magic is going on with modern CPUs.

In the mid-2000s I built a pretty large webhosting company entirely on Intel servers bought off Ebay. They had really high build quality and were less idiosyncratic than Dell or Compaq/HP. (I never had to deal with weird management consoles or drivers.) And were a lot cheaper.

Reminds me of this classic Steve Yegge post: "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work."

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...

We’re just starting the first “performance cycle” at work since ChatGPT came out and I strongly suspect next year’s won’t be based on producing so many written documents (self reflection, peer feedback, etc).

I chose to use InDesign to typeset my self-published book, and I have to say the quality it produces from just placing some imported text with no other changes looks 1000 times better than this. It's easy to go down a rabbit hole and start really tweaking the layout but if all you're doing is applying some CSS anyway then you can produce better output with InDesign's defaults in about 5 minutes. I've been writing the book in Google Docs and printing chapters for review as I go, and it's nice to see a physical copy of your work. But I was blown away when I made my first PDF copy with InDesign how much better the typesetting is. It really does feel like a proper book and not an essay that I printed out for a school assignment.

We saw this one iteration back with VMWare. Once it became easy to spin up a VM without getting a PO for a server and finding rack space, the number of "servers" in the org exploded. And of course we lost track of what they all did, and who they belonged to... but there was actually a healthy ecosystem of tools built for (and by) VMWare to manage this situation. The cloud providers seem incentivised to make tracking real costs as difficult as possible. At least with VMWare once you paid for it, it was yours.

Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile client.

There’s an official HP version as well:

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hp-15c-calculator/id503720774

HP sold an official IOS version of the 15C for years but stopped updating it at some point. It still worked but didn't scale correctly on new iPhones. About a year ago I noticed that it had updated. It looks like they sold it to "Royal Consumer Products" aka hpofficesupply.com which is a licensee selling HP-branded (physical) calculators. It rotates between landscape and portrait mode and includes a full manual.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 book "Pacific Edge" (part of the California Trilogy) he envisions a utopian future where company sizes are legally limited to stop the formation of huge, multi-national corporations so that control and profits stay in the local community. I forget the exact number and some quick Googling doesn't help. I remember being really inspired by the book though.