I took a course exactly like that. I wonder if we went to the same school, or it’s due to curriculum standardization. The professor was particularly enthusiastic about Ada, so I had assumed the course was largely his creation.
I prefer to read on screen if it can set to “night mode” (white-on-black), large font, and full screen. For one, I find it’s more ergonomic to look at a well-positioned monitor than bending my neck to read a book.
I asked ChatGPT for a succinct definition, and I thought it was pretty good:
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that provides on-demand access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources over the internet, allowing businesses to scale and pay only for what they use.”
When the sky turned orange in 2020, my wife and I were just done. Also, there's something to be said for living in a place with four seasons, and a sense of time passing by.
I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's data center was two stories underground in one of the older tower blocks in downtown Toronto.
I suspect it’s more about cost savings than environmental concerns, but the grocery store we frequent doesn’t provide bags at all. However, you can take boxes from the pile they have set aside that usually contained produce originally. So, the boxes are used at least twice, and then we drop them into recycling. On top of that, I find the boxes more convenient to load and unload since it only takes 2 or 3 versus handling dozens of bags. Obviously this won’t work if you don’t have a car, or perhaps a cart, when you go grocery shopping.
I rigged up something similar in my first corporate job in 2000, plugging an ORiNOCO into the PCMCIA slot of my corporate laptop and a spare at my desk. My boss, an old mainframe guy, was blown away that I could check email during the team meeting in the conference room without going back to my desk. Now wifi is so ubiquitous we don't even think about it.
"The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle.” --Theodore J. Kaczynski
Gas is obviously far more resilient, though not immune to more extreme problems. I’ve literally never experienced a gas outage, yet power outages are routine almost everywhere I’ve lived.
Unfortunately, there has been quite a few deaths in my family in the last decade, and most were on some form of pain management. They weren't always lucid, but none were as perpetually loopy as my aunt was in the last few months of her life. Someone in the forum accused me of being self-centered for simply mentioning this, but her incoherence did add to my, and particularly, my father's (her brother) grief.
My aunt passed away a few years ago now. Her husband will never read this. The rest of the family agrees with me as far as I know. I don't see who I'm disrespecting by publicly and semi-anonymously questioning those decisions in retrospect.
As I said, I respected her decision. But I question whether it was the right one because it left her unable to communicate despite an obvious desire to do so. I’ve had conversations with people on high doses of opiates, and while they were far from their full mental capacity, they were intelligible. My dad tried to convince her husband to use conventional painkillers, which I supported, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
How so? I was respectful of her decision -- although I suspect it was more her husband's decision -- but I wouldn't have made the same myself. It seemed like there was a lot she had to say, but couldn't in that state due to the drug. I suppose she thought she was making sense, but objectively wasn't.
My aunt died of cancer a couple of years ago. She took an unorthodox treatment of extremely high doses of marijuana, which her husband encouraged. It was frustrating for the rest of the family since it was impossible to have a coherent and meaningful conversation with her in her final months. My dad and I had some doubt about it, but the decision was entirely in the hands of her husband because she was too inebriated to think for herself. I’m not saying it was a wrong choice necessarily, but there are downsides.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but when I hear “Macintosh” a beige box from the 80’s or 90’s comes to mind, and with “Mac” I’m thinking post-millennial aluminum and glass. So, it’s sort of a temporal indicator for the product line.