downut

uhh, hmm. For thirty years or so I've lived by these two (shell immaterial):

mv='mv -i' rm='rm -i'

simple enough to add /bin/ to the command if I really mean it. That fixes the pipe issue too. I've had new to linux new hires go 'uh well I shoulda done that thanks I've done it now' more than once.

I spent the summer of '83 at the GE Wilmington, NC nuclear fuels plant as the sole user of an HP 9845C with the integrated full size plotter. My job as a GA Tech ChE co-op student was to go around the plant with a rather simple gradient air sampling unit mapping out the airborne density of the various sizes of UO₂. I would take my overnight measurements (point a geiger counter at the different filter papers from the different levels) and enter the data into a program I wrote in... HP Basic. I would then feed that into another program I wrote in... HP Basic that plotted the densities as level plots in HPGL across a rather detailed for the time 2D map of the plant. It produced multicolor paper plots on full size drafting paper. My bosses, the physicists in the safety department, were very pleased. I was so happy doing this that I spent the evenings in the UNC Wilmington library learning level plotting algorithms. I needed more programming time so I would come in very early in the morning and have to remember to clock in at 8AM (overtime not allowed). All of us co-ops made $10/hr in '83, and I saved enough to pay for the entire next quarter at Ga Tech every quarter I spent working.

Weekends I spent at the beach, though.

I see from Wikipedia that the system costs were enormous! But that was an exquisite summer romance with BASIC.

Not too many years later I discovered Turbo Pascal. Yeah, off to the races. And then came Turbo C++, and g++ around '92. Haha you kids today would really enjoy debugging templates in early g++. (The idea that you could write the same code for 'float' and 'double' was intoxicatingly cool.)

The transition from Fortran (what I learned to program with) => HP Basic => Pascal => C++ was pretty easy. Pointers, well if you study 'The C Programming Language' carefully, are not difficult. People writing serious computational mathematics codes are constantly using pointers, just not as 'pointers'. Debugging, well that is another problem entirely, and I believe from way out here in the future, that that is the most difficult problem of all. How to program in such a way that the bugs are not silent. Those silent ones were the cause of most of the grief in my programming life.

The thing about HP Basic is none of the bugs were ever silent. Same with Turbo Pascal. I did a lot of really cool things with those 'toy' languages. They never caused me any grief.

So I think Dijkstra didn't understand (maybe) the importance of painless pleasure when (some) mortals are learning programming. It sure turned me on.

So it turns out in the last year I have sold a remodel problem house and bought another all the way across the country. We could drill down and ask why my sold house tilers were so awful. To the point I paid to have it all Boschhammered up and replaced with engineered wood. Delaying the move. How about not. Why would you point to the dysfunction of another unrelated industry as being worse to justify the stupidity of the original topic here?

Old house sold for cash, "new" house bought for cash.

Does anyone spending tens of thousands of dollars not value their time? I think they do!

The last three vehicles I've bought, from three different Toyota dealerships, the options, color, etc. were negotiated completely over email, no phone calls or physical dealership visit. I always pay cash and I never trade in. At the end of the process, which wasn't excruciating, I asked for and received, in each case, a price fixed to the penny. In each case I quite brutally asserted, multiple times for each purchase, that if the price was even 1 penny more than the agreed on price stated in email, I was going to walk, even though I had to drive at least 100 miles in two cases. When I sat down at the dealer, I reasserted my guarantee that if the price was even 1 penny more, I was going to walk.

We still had to sit through videos and the standard sales pitches for the undercoat, etc. Can I shout now? Lasting an hour. For the last Prius they said well this particular vehicle has an optional security registration or some such that is installed in the car. I said remove it. Maybe two minutes of harrumphing about how I am exposing myself and I got quite acidic actually. Well whatever they actually did the price I wrote a check for was exactly what we had agreed to over email.

Now I don't actually care if what you like to do in your non-work time is to sit through car dealership sales pitches for nonsensical stuff, but I don't. And I want the option not to have to burn my time for this. It really is a wonder how normalized for many people it is to feel how pleasant it can be to sit through add on advertising while doing some sort of necessary activity where at the conclusion I'm going to write a check for tens of thousands of dollars. They're so helpful! Rather than what it is, which is time theft, condescendingly done.

Her Coq au Vin is a bit of work but it still tastes fantastic. A lot of those variants are a bit weird today, but I like to see them as ideas. I could see them being standards in the post-war mileau.

What I really don't care for are her treatments of vegetables. She famously couldn't stand non-soft (al dente?) vegetables. Also I guess it's "French" but she puts a lot of effort to make some recipes white, eg Poulet a l'Ancienne. Eh, I can't be bothered.

Still my hardback Vol 1 of MTAOFC is looking pretty ragged from steady use over the last 30 years, sniff.

That's... so French. Thanks for adding this bit. I'm always in need of culinary history ammo when I am confronted with having to feed people who only trust industrially processed food. Such as many of my relatives.

Hanging birds is a very old practice. Wait till you learn how long people hang pheasants.

Brillat-Savarin: “the peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation, just as the oil in coffee can only be drawn out by roasting it.”

When I started at GaTech in 1980 they still had card readers in the datacenter that nobody was using. I can't remember how we programmed (in Fortran 77) but it wasn't a whole lot more sophisticated than punchcards. Some sort of batch operation involving a trip to the service window. And a waiting period. I remember coding somehow on a paper teletype in the WREK studios. By the time I was finishing grad school 7 years later I was writing graphics code in $49 Turbo Pascal on my very own PC. With an add-on 80287 co-processor, natch. It was intoxicatingly awesome to sit down and code. Beautifully powerful. That's an astounding amount of progress. I don't think I've changed my coding tools significantly over the last 15 years. Emacs and c++ are better now, but the basic process & language are pretty much the same. I still have the 80287.

New electric blower owner here, thanks for the additional detail. Mine has 2 batteries too and I don't come close to discharging them in 15 minutes, so a big win. I don't think I've had to use the maximum flow setting yet.

One year ago, in November, I bought a house in GA after 40 years in the West, and it's got a bunch of Ents on a 1/2 acre lot. Upon moving in I had no tools to deal with the leaves, and the house had been unmaintained all Fall, so the leaves had piled up everywhere but importantly, on top of the "grass". I have a long concrete driveway also, and the piles of leaves were kind of annoying there. Raking was... suboptimal.

All my life I have hated leaf blowers with all my being, reserving a special place in that hatred for the landscapers working in the middle of the night in Santa Clara on commercial property.

However I have friends who don't share that hatred and as a surprise housewarming gift I received in Dec. a 20V battery electric leaf blower. My gawd that thing works great, and it's not very loud, takes 10 minutes, so problem solved for the driveway, deck, steps etc.

As for the "grass"[1], wherever the leaves had piled up and matted down after the rains, nothing grew. It was just mud. I'm not interested in leaf blowing a half acre so after researching it I got a Honda mulching lawnmower. I mulched for the first time last week. Worked great! This week the leaves have piled up again. I'll keep mulching until the accumulation wanes but I'm optimistic I'll have more "grass", and less mud, next year.

I retain my intense hatred for gas powered leaf blowers. I've got a neighbor across the lake and that mutherfucker likes to blow his deck for I swear to god an hour once a week with a tremendously noisy gas blower. Visions of setting the thing on fire. Maybe I should buy him an electric leaf blower. He also has a very noisy Harley and one of those extraordinarily loud Mustang adjacent cars, so possibly that would be a fail. Oh well.

[1] "grass" Well there's some grassy stuff most places, and it looks like dozens of other species of ground covering plants. All fine with us, what I care about is cover and not growing too fast.

I had been admittedly a bit depressed before the big move across the country and the Tundra had been a bit neglected except for oil changes/tires etc. So after the life reset settled down Mr. Tundra got the full mechanics inspection with me ready to put in Whatever It Takes to make it ready for the next 20 years. And nope! Nothing mechanical needed fixing except for the timing chain. Rats had done their thing but that's just wires and money. I've got brake pads and a spare fan clutch stockpiled. Might replace more of the basic suspension bits if they become noticeable. Two things the mechanic told me that I found surprising is neither the AC nor the cooling system(!) needed maintenance after 22 years.

20 years on the hard 4wd trails of AZ, CA, CO, NM and both MX BCN and Sonora. A couple of hundred miles on the Baja 1000 route with a bed full of camping gear did one suspension in. And there's a lift/helper leaf in there.

Never once left us stranded.

They can't pry my 2001 v8 4wd 14mpg[1] Tundra bought new for cash from my cold dead hands because I am seriously thinking of when I die I get laid out in the bed and the whole shebang put in an enormous hole and buried somewhere. I'd prefer if it was hauled out by helicopter over the Pacific somewhere and oops dropped.

125K miles, 3rd suspension, zero problems, manual windows, door locks, seats mirrors, everything. The odometer seems to be digital. It even passes GA emissions now.

[1] It was so... liberating when we started buying Priuses and I discovered I could drive them like race cars and get 44mpg more or less reliably. X-country + urban miles almost all go there. The current 2015 is so comfortably very dumb.

Here's another me too. When I turned 55 my GP started to nag me to get a colonoscopy, and my wife too. But in the small western town that we lived, there's only a very small number of specialists and for 1.5 years "they" kept accusing us of not submitting the paper work. (We did, each time). It all sounded unpleasant and I was riding fast times in centuries so how bad could it be? Finally the GP needed a colonoscopy and the specialists did to her what they did to us and she got pissed off and forced the issue. And her nagging was effective and got us through the procedure. My wife was fine. I was Stage IIa. I did not get the IIa diagnosis until after 10+ weeks, including 4 weeks after the 18" resection. Only thing anyone would say is "your diagnosis is unknown, could be Stage 4". Which, you know, kinda sucks, and I can tell you it might suck harder for your life partner, than yourself. You'll be gone, and they go on alone.

So I get (used to get) colonoscopies every six months and the very good surgeon down in Phoenix chops out the polyps. Weirdly he can fit me in on a couple of weeks notice. But COVID fucked all that up. And then we moved across the country. So now I'm starting all over with the fact that we can't find anyone local to do the colonoscopies. But it MUST GET DONE. (Reminding myself).

So yes indeed it's annoying but if you've got cramps or occasional blood in the stool or are over 55 and never had one do not avoid the colonoscopy. Everyone who loves you will appreciate it.

BTW I started riding centuries again about six months later and the next year I set my life record in the Tour de Tuscon. I tell people the resection was my weight loss plan. I get weird looks. I enjoy it.

We spent 25 years out in the rural West, though we preferred to live in a town.

We left because over the last 15 years the decay of uniform public law enforcement has essentially led to "norms" being enforced by the local landowning elites. And they have certain characteristics that make them highly identifiable. IOW, if you look like them, you get all the space you have said you prefer. If not, well, there's not a lot to limit the potential downsides.

This has also led to a large increase in trash behavior out on the public lands. Lots of new wildcat trails/double track for instance. For us it got pretty uncomfortable a few times in the last 5-6 years. We began to post the shotguns in a highly visible place in the camp, or in the truck. That definitely helped.

So this is a late comment but I finally clicked the link because I am a DMT addict, and lordy that's a cool thing that looks like it will travel just fine.

Which do you find best for traveling? I travel with one of the big DMT fine hones but if I was resorting to something on my keychain maybe I want coarse? When I said I do a "quick repair" I meant I can't correct each knife with only a fine hone, but I can make them better. In that spirit maybe the optimal travel keychain hone size is coarse. Because I don't have all night, nobody else cares, and sharper is better than "prop knife", as another commenter mentioned.

Very cool about the ceramics, I had not thought of that but since we have many crafty ceramics we know their abrasive properties and once you are given the idea huh that's obvious. Thank you!

I have been sharpening my own knives and tools for 45 years, and have been doing it in the same way since I was in my teens and my dad and I read some article (in Popular Science, maybe?) which Just Worked. My dad was a bit more patient than I have ever been and his edges always shaved hairs, dry. My edges are still quite good though.

Anyway Ima procrastinating today and saw this HN item and hesitated, oh no, have I been doing something wrong all these years? So in the spirit of never stop learning I bit the bullet and read it.

I didn't have to read far though. First came the don't use oil bit and then next the relief and the burr, and nope! Hooray, whatever we read back in the day was the equivalent of this. Maybe it was the same people, I remember a folksy tone.

The sad thing is in all those years none of the people of my acquaintance, with the exception of my daughter, have ever had any interest in sharpening/maintaining their knives, and if they do anything (most don't), it's an electric sharpener. I've passed through some home kitchen horror shows, and now if I know I'm going to be cooking in somebody else's kitchen, I bring my own knives, even internationally. Mandatory for AirBnBs. I remember reading up on packing a set of knives on a Thalys train and reading some worrying restrictions. But decided, well WTF to chefs do in France? I didn't get hassled, maybe I was lucky.

Anyway, even though I don't think I've ever converted anyone, I always encourage people to learn to sharpen/maintain their knives. I will usually haul a big DMT hone along with me on trips to home kitchens and do a quick repair job on the host's knives. Weirdly, quite a few people are very wary of sharp knives! Dull knives are what terrifies me...

"Self-checkout, when implemented in a sensible way, is fast, efficient, painless. and generally pleasant."

As stated, the quoted sentence above says nothing; it has no content because of the caveat. Let's simplify on the way to dragging reality back in:

"Self-checkout is fast, efficient, painless. and generally pleasant."

I have never ever seen an implementation that makes bulk goods checkout, as is required for say vegetables/fruits/grains etc., "fast, efficient, painless, and generally pleasant." How could it be? You have to look up each item on a stupid touch screen, weigh it, and bag it. Lots of potential for callous mistakes that are annoying as hell to fix, so I never fix them, and now I'm a criminal.

Ok, so now they're bagging up the bulk goods so they can barcode the batch, and... I get to buy 3lbs of zuccini, with a bad one visibly lurking in there, or nothing.

Awesome technology thanks bros.

I just went through a few prednisone for a case of bursitis, and it worked fantastic for that. Had no effect on the tinnitus though. Oh well.

Same for me, yup. Wasn't paying attention to it and... I did the dumb thing and read these comments. Oh well.

As for the loud show thing I was already wearing ear plugs back in 1980, never got into the blasting the speakers/headphones, and now I have both significant high frequency hearing attenuation and a 25 year old case of nicely balanced tinnitus. Oh well.

Uhh no don't oh dear I guess I must:

Two lightly toasted slices of NOT white bread, lightly apply very good mayo 1/8 lb of good smoked ham sliced very thin 1 large dill pickle sliced fairly thin

...aaannnnddd a bunch of ruffles potato chips.

Assemble a thin layer of ham, then pile the pickle slices in a second layer, add another ham layer, then pile the chips as the next layer, and add a final thin ham layer to insulate the chips from the top bread slice mayo layer

Eat quickly. Probably need two hands. Likely need to stop walking. There will be crunching noises. I'm not ashamed to admit I've been addicted for 50 years.

We spent 25 years in Prescott, which is 1.5 hrs NW of PHX, and is at 5000+ ft. Due N. a couple of hours, Flagstaff 7000ft. We thought that the weather in Prescott was fantastic: 4 seasons, half dozen 2 day blizzards that melted in 3 days, and July-Sept monsoons keeping the highs under 90F. Flagstaff OTOH, brrrrr. True fact: in late spring early summer Flagstaff is occasionally the coldest place in the US (outside AK).

Most people don't realize that Phoenix and Tucson, where nearly all the people are, are not at all like the 2/3 of the rest N and E.

You might want to look up what happens in Yuma and the Imperial Valley, where it can be even hotter, because 1000ft lower elevation. People have been farming the Salt River and Gila River valleys for many centuries. I see that wikipedia has got a nice article on the Hohokam people, and the large scale network of irrigation canals they built.

Not much happens in the summer, that's true, but since all SW ag is irrigated, a lot is grown during the rest of the year.

Now I can't stand Sonoran Desert summers, not possible to be outside comfortably, but a lot of people really like the rest of the year there.

"As for medical, the only coverage I want is catastrophic, and if I could just just get that then health care would be way cheaper. Health care providers generally have much lower prices when you have no insurance and pay out of pocket."

I've had several chronic issues, including cancer surgery and the followon therapies, that I in no way wanted, that stretched out years, ensuring that we (the family) spent our ~$10K deductible for several years running. I've seen this with quite a few other people, as well. It is certain that we would have been bankrupted w/o middling quality corp health insurance. We have also had many $1000s in dental bills, in a year, quite a few times.

The idea that you could self finance these yearly cash flow (up to, what, $100K?) is absurd, unless you are really rich, but you seem to be somewhat price sensitive, so I dunno.

OTOH my sister-in-law makes > $500K/y as an anesthesiologist, and her spouse is a pathologist sadly making somewhat less, so on average the family must be doing great!

Yeah no, my Euro-fruends are aghast at the medical situation here in the US, and we all do view it as a massive effective tax on the unlucky that Europeans more or less don't have to worry about.

Jeebus every time I get attention grabbed into diving into redbean I end up just getting on my knees and putting my forehead to the floor.

I would say game knows game but here barely game groks stratospheric game. I am again in awe.

Two short phrases seared into my brain almost 4 decades ago:

"Et en Arcadia ego" and "Ruder forms survive". Different books.

I'm doing a complete tear down remodel of the kitchen so I bought some devices to make our 95% cooked from scratch meal lifestyle bearable through the awful times.

A top of the line Breville toaster oven was the first, it's fantastic, but it is also silly to compare it to our 25 y/o Viking duel fuel range, waiting to reenter our life.

A week ago I got my Instant Pot Pro, and I've been putting it through its paces. I boiled some eggs. This is what really irks me about IP fans: it does not take 5 minutes. It has some indeterminate amount of preheat, the 5 min., and then a cool down. The eggs are just fine, as flawless as the following method on a quality gas burner stove: Put eggs and water into pot to just cover, turn burner high"ish"; when bubbles just start, turn down to a very very slow bubble generation and set timer for 10m (12-13min at 5500' elevation), scoop out the eggs when the timer expires and put on the counter, peel when cool enough. I very rarely had to spend any attention monitoring this. The IP is just, but only just, as good.

BUT ITS NOT FIVE MINUTES.

Shouting because why do instant pot fans do this?

Now, I am quite interested in the yogurt thing. That sounds very cool, we love yogurt and industrial yogurt, meh. Also strawberries are cheap right now and I'm thinking of making some exotic French confitures, and mixing that with the yogurt.

Risotto? No brainer on a decent stove. Dried beans? I also have a 30 y/o Magefesa pressure cooker that has a thicker bottom than the instant pot "pot" and does dried beans perfectly. No magic, or even "instant", there.

Another gripe: compared to the Breville that roller knob in the center is a gawdawlful POS. Reeks of cheap.

Compared to the 15 y/o electric range that is going to be tossed out the back doors, and then shot multiple times with 12 gauge 3" buckshot loads, the IP is great, so maybe I'm a little sad that the inevitable PE bankrupt/shitify it happened to it too.

Lord gawd almighty.

Let me tell you a story. If you go off road just about anywhere in Mexico that's dry enough and interesting enough, and it's possible to go slow enough to have enough clearance, you will find cheap 2WD rear drive cars that are already there. I have seen some amazing accomplishments from these vehicles that almost no US driver would dream of taking off road. Still, I wouldn't trade my 23 yo lifted 4wd truck for them at all. Over time, I'm going to come out ahead, there's simple no dispute.

I don't doubt that you could caramelize onions on the shittiest stoves possible, probably you could do it, with enough patience and care, with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day. But the OP was emphasizing that it's really no big deal, you don't even have to pay attention. I at least have great equipment, but I've stayed in dozens of AirBnBs that didn't have great equipment, same with friends and family. Got to pay attention then.

The idea that there is no difference is completely ridiculous.

I disagree completely! There are preferences of course but for instance US Southwestern cuisine with the burnt flavors ("charred") appeal to a wide swath of people and the French AFAICT from a lot of visits can't stand it.

If you read Julia Child she is emphatic that onions should almost never be browned.

Guess what? I brown onions in my French recipes (rustic, eh?), and I char my peppers. I would submit that la comida de la gente is likely more plebian than fucking elitist French cuisine, no?

Yeah that works on my Viking stove with my competent pans, and is basically how I do it, but people with shitty stoves, i.e. the majority, have burners with hot spots and/or mismatched pan widths or even too thin pan bottoms. I suspect that's where the constant stirring/too short time business might originate.

I never realized how widespread this was until I brought dishes to group meals (as in Slow Food) and people complimented me for my caramelized onions.