Vivtek

I can't avoid slow software because older, less bloated versions of mandatory tools in my industry (translation) are sunset with no recourse, and incompatible file changes mean I have to upgrade.

Agh, there I go all America-centric!

One piece of advice I'll give you (I have a coffee farm in Puerto Rico) - you can make a lot more selling as an estate brand, i.e. retailing it yourself. From Madagascar, though, I have no idea how you'd do that internationally. But you have a couple of years to figure it out.

Arabica, dried properly and sorted well, should bring you at least $20 a pound retail, which is way more than you can approach wholesale. Even after labor, you can live on 8000 trees a year.

Coffee is a weird crop. 8000 trees is probably about 8 or 10 acres, and you're not going to be able to work that yourself.

Where you at? Hawaii?

There are people who prefer robusta. Just .. not many.

I am laughing in technical translator.

Me?

Because "home", for me, while I've been working remotely since 1994, has been Indiana, to Puerto Rico, to Budapest. I go when I want, do a little schedule juggling maybe. And now I live in the tropics in the jungle on a mountain coffee farm - the best place to spend a global pandemic - and I still have an income.

I'll take my seclusion, thanks.

Englisch klingt so butterweich.

You're not alone.

Tesla, not Twitter. I misread it the same way.

Because when they don't, I end up owing the IRS $150k with a lien on my house.

I did the same thing with Bolo on an Apple ][e - I never got very good at the game but I dumped the assembler code for the whole thing onto greenbar paper and marked it up with highlighters. Then gave myself infinite lives, made the maze walls penetrable, made myself invisible to the robots - all kinds of stuff.

The penetrable walls were the best, because if you drove your tank off the map, the graphics renderer would just look at whatever memory happened to be specified by your impossible coordinates, display eerie shifting structures that were the working memory of your code, and pretty quickly crash the whole machine writing the tank sprite into god knows what.

That was a fun summer. I wonder if my mom still has that greenbar printout in her basement.

Oh, this is sweet. Back in my Windows days I relied heavily on AHK for hotkeys as well as some glue for various tasks, and while I've managed to figure out most of the glue items on Linux (which I've used for the past five years or so), I've always missed hotkeys, for which I've never found a really good AHK-like solution.

We are truly living in wondrous times.

Oh, son (and I say this because my son is also 23, spent a lot of his life on League of Legends and kind of regrets that, and is just now finishing college) - that way lies madness.

You know what I was doing with all my time when I was your age? Reading a whole lot of science fiction books. Sure, I also did a lot of programming, which later turned into a career, but the bulk of my time was spent in books that never paid me a nickel. I could have been learning more languages. I could have had a doctorate.

We all have that stuff. If you'd spent all your time learning code, maybe you'd regret all the fun times you had with your gaming buddies. If I'd focused more on math and logic, maybe I'd feel impoverished by never having learned about the Ringworld. I promise you there's always something you can feel you missed out on.

All you can do is decide what to do today. And then go do it.

That ... looks like it would be pretty neat if I could distinguish the colors.

It appears that what falls off with age is a tolerance for hoop-jumping. Or perhaps the ability to follow instructions.

My 27yo ("reference Millennial") even has a mental image of the video (although has never seen it on a Tele-Vision Device). It may have entered the meme reservoir on its own at this point.

This has exactly the same maddening maladaptations that forced me to switch browsers for a reasonably adequate Facebook "experience". JavaScript that breaks in older or less popular browsers is not something I think needs to be promulgated even outside Facebook.

Disappointing.

This process has started in Puerto Rico, too. People still mostly use cash, but almost every vendor these days has ATH-Movil, a phone-based payment system through your bank.

Came here to say this, as a professional translator finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.

This is an excellent point. I've been trying to go back and fix that, by correlating pictures with journal entries or blog posts and the like. I wish I'd taken better notes about who all these people were and what they meant to me at the time.

It's written in Perl - I think Perl is a niche language these days, right? I wrote a version of part of it in Racket, too, which definitely qualifies. I keep thinking I might move development to Zig.

The language is Decl. I think at this point it's more a notation than a language; it relies on a host language for execution. My understanding of what I set out to do has evolved over time, and the past couple of years I've thought of it more as a DSL along the lines of SQL (not in that it's used for database access, for which we already have SQL; I just mean that it's used by embedding it in something else that defines actions).

My hobby project is a niche language.

Look, I'm 55 years old. There are people I haven't heard from in maybe thirty years, easy. I wouldn't mind catching up on those people yearly - and it would be at least a thirty-fold improvement over my current management technique, right?

Absolutely. When Facebook got to the point that my old friends and family were ubiquitously present, it was a godsend. I reestablished contact with people I hadn't heard from for years, kept up-to-date on family that I would otherwise not have heard from - it was great.

Lately, Facebook doesn't do a very good job of this, so I've been thinking of better ways of doing it. Something like an email reminder might work.

Huh, you are correct. I guess a better way to put this is "the original Readability I encountered was in Python"! The first version I saw was in Aaron Swartz's 2012 read2text tool, but a check of the URL I found that through says, yup, it's a Python port of Arc90's original code, which was a browser extension.

And you're right. It was in JavaScript. I finally tracked a copy down (the original is long evaporated): https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...

All I really need is WiFi, Linux, relatively low power draw, and low cost, and I can fake the WiFi with an ESP8266 if I have to. Beagleboards seem to have the same supply problem as the Pi, though. Odroid is something I'd never heard of, so I'm going to look into that - thanks!

Here's a reasonable overview: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/10/3988

I'm not sure that one touches on neuroscience; it's more psych-oriented if I remember correctly.

You know, the original Readability was in Python. You could eliminate your Node dependency by moving to it, I'd think.

Flask is pretty lightweight and will run under anything. Including compiling to a portable executable.

I mean, potentially.

I'm 100% with you on file-based storage and flexible storage interchange APIs. I have a bunch of stuff I'd like this kind of tool to interoperate with.

Yeah, same. I have an ag robotics application that I can prototype with stock on hand (glad I prebought a few Pi Zero W now) but I won't be able to scale up my test fleet for the foreseeable future, and that's going to be a problem.