incanus77

While I appreciate the point being made here, a tangential thought:

> A century later, the torments felt by my great-great-grandfather are forgotten. The garage feels like it has always been in the family. My father loved his job like few people I know, as if it had run in the family forever.

Arguably, the internal combustion engine is one of the most unsustainable and devastating technologies invented by humans. The jury is still out on whether our species will survive the environmental impact wrought by its effects. So much benefit, but so much dependence.

A fantastic collection and restoration effort. I highly encourage a visit. I was in Seattle last year and had recently joined and pinged about maybe getting a tour. It was right before a vintage computer festival and despite being busy getting ready, Stephen, the director, encouraged me to drop in.

I would've been happy just looking (and not even touching) by myself for 15 or 20 minutes given the circumstances, but Stephen spent 1.5 hours with me in a hands-on tour, including playing Spacewar. He genuinely cares about these machines, their preservation, and spreading enthusiasm about them. I only wish I was a little closer (3 hours away in Portland) or I'd spend more time on-site helping with the effort.

One of my absolute favorite apps similarly likely got a bid to change.

https://allume.com/allume-faq/

Some fun history on the origin of ‘tweet’:

https://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/

As others have pointed out, this is more about the age of existing buildings than the construction of the city, but it's pretty neat.

About ten years ago when we were working on Mapbox GL, I did a mobile-native viz like this to show off the vector tile tech. The blog post is still up (thankfully) which has a good bit of info on the data processing pipeline as well, ranging from Shapefile to GeoJSON to vector tiles on the backend to Swift on the frontend:

https://medium.com/mapbox/visualizing-an-entire-citys-buildi...

I always loved mirroring a phone to a large TV and showing this off at 60FPS. It was such fun tech to work on.

> Notice that what I would not do is try to start a startup. Instead I'd build the foundation of knowledge to base a startup on later.

There's also this little-known concept called learning things for learning's sake and not always trying to capitalize on it.

> Bicycles in the US almost never have fenders except for old timey / retro style models. Fenders fell out of style in the 1980s and never really returned.

Counterpoint: Portland OR, where I live — enormous bike city (in some rankings, the highest in the country) — and most have fenders due to the rainy climate much of the year.

The best analogy I've seen for this is: maybe you'll make a robot do housework for you, but would you make a robot go to the gym for you?

Thanks. I want to restate: I respect the idea and the ambition. I'm reacting to this feeling I get when there is a lot of text and documentation (and often code) in a thing, stated in the particular style that Claude and other agents do. It asks a lot of the reader's time, when often there is no guarantee that it is internally consistent or (as noted in some other threads here) accurate. My mind wants to work through the text and understand, but there is no guarantee that for invested time in the length of text, I will reach a coherent place.

To put it another way: if a thing is written by a human from scratch, and there is a lot of text (often not the case, because things like this are built iteratively, in the open, so they reach eyeballs before that point), I can pretty quickly ascertain whether the person knows their stuff and if it is worth my time to continue to try to reach understanding with them, to learn from the coherent vision that they have created and are trying to communicate.

Or, if they are the ramblings of a lunatic, I am hopefully able to ascertain that pretty quickly and move on.

In the case of agent-written text at this volume, it feels written to fool the reader into reaching the first case, without the guarantees of the coherent vision. Maybe that gets better with time, but for me, for now, it's enough to note with interest and move on for now.

This looked great, I started reading things, and then I just kept reading and reading the voluminous description details, and it was an immediate indication to me that the whole thing was built up by Claude. Confirmed in the repo. I closed the tab.

I appreciate the topic, interest, and ambition, but if a human couldn’t be bothered to create and document it, I can’t be bothered to spend my time reading about it.

I worked at a mall Radio Shack in ‘98-‘99. A Gateway store opened up at the other end of the mall. This being the times they were, Radio Shack had partnered with Compaq to sell P2 & (I think) P3 desktops, the beginning of its downfall of selling other companies’ stuff and losing out to places like Best Buy.

We used to emphasize that you could buy a computer with us and go home with it today, whereas down the hall, you could buy it but it would come in the mail later. Their store had demos and the big cow-patterned boxes around, but no inventory.

Also around then, I applied for and got a Gateway-branded, Holstein-patterned credit card, which I promptly maxed out to buy my own first modern computer, a P2 build not from Gateway, but from Midwest Micro. I learned Red Hat Linux on it, reading the manual on break at work even before the computer came, and it began my real career.

So lots of adjacency to Gateway, but no real firsthand experience. They were definitely a force.

> Most OSS software favors power users instead of total beginners. And even Blender is not a great exercise in discoverability. You need training to use it.

I think it’s more subtle than that. I am a power user — I was compiling my Linux kernel in the 90s, I wrote my own SSH tunnel manager 20 years ago, I always fiddle with settings, etc. etc.

However, I am constantly frustrated with a lot of OSS software because it expects you to think like the developer of the tool, instead of having empathy for the user. What feels obvious to the developer of the tool (I am making up a hopefully-representative hypothetical here, but finding the change of font under “Theme” because it’s how “it looks” but finding the font size under “View” because, well, you view it) feels frustrating and nonsensical to a normal human who relates both the font and its size the same way in their mind. Again, generally — I’m making generalizations here and not calling out any specific software, but trying to illustrate the feeling that I get.

When I switched to the Mac in 2002, it is because these sorts of things made sense. Yes, there were and are frustrations because of this sort of opinionated design mentality, but I judged the benefits to outweigh the positives. Unfortunately, Apple squandered this culture and skill and nowadays I often find the platform as frustrating as OSS ones, to the point where I have switched back to 50/50 time split between platforms.

Why is this marked as 1998 when it references Khan Academy and Go, among other things?

Did they ever put its photo on the side of a milk carton?

Nice! This warms my heart — I used to make a Mac GUI app for SSH tunnel management back in the day.

https://codesorcery.net/2009/12/04/meerkat-15-great-ssh-tunn...

One time?! That's amazing.

> Next year I'll definitely be planning an out-of-town vacation for the 4th to some location with firework restrictions.

Then like me you can just worry about whether some dipshit is going to burn your house down while you're away.

I've had a 2016 150cc LXVie in silver with maroon leather since new; have put about 6,000 city miles on it. It's a wonderful machine. I bought it when my wife died after we had taken the motorcycle certification together in anticipation of getting one someday soon. I'm in the process of selling it now, though, as it's time. But it's such an iconic brand and I constantly get thumbs up and even notes left on it.

I have one! It's fun for retro PCs that don't have speakers or a mic, as it provides everything you need right there without having to setup the Altec Lansings.

Also LOL:

> it has the advantage of packing the best sound system I have ever come across on a keyboard

USB floppy drive on the modern computer side. I do this for old machines.

How do you mean “these kind”?

Tried it today. Don't think it will have my comments, but I'd probably have to write a custom thing to fetch those anyway. I have about 6,000 photos on there so I'll see what happens.

No, because I am dealing with this right now. I stopped paying for Flickr Pro after 20+ years and can only download my photos in bulk as 1024px resolution in order to get back under the free plan limits unless I pay for Flickr Pro… which is $82/year. My photos are held hostage unless I pay.

I too learned about 9/11 on the radio. I was driving to work, had stopped to get breakfast, and when I got back in the car and started it up, my in-dash CD hadn’t re-started yet and NPR was tuned in and the news came on. Was most of the way in, so headed in and read about things online the rest of the morning. There was no decent web video to watch, so only when I got to a TV later did I get the full picture.

I visited Athens in 2006 shortly after the Olympics were held there and the city had been refreshed. The Syntagma Square subway station did exactly this, with layers of archaeology revealed behind glass as you descended the stairs. It was magnificent!

I'm reading on that resolution right now! MacBook Air 11" running Linux that I use as a quick hacking/reading machine in bed.

This scourge is so bad.

I drive a 40 year old vehicle and a friend created an aftermarket adjustable headlight frame allowing it to move from all-in-one rectangular headlight/high beam sealed units to modern LED bulbs and then an accessory of choice on the inner spaces left over. I chose a classic-looking LED that does regular, high beam, DRL, and amber turn signal all in one and then put off-road fog lights on the inner spaces. But I would not leave the house after night with the vehicle until I adjusted them to DOT spec. Because they are so much brighter and sharped-edged than factory, I can see that they don’t go above oncoming windshields and are aligned properly horizontally.

The excellent guide that I used to align my lights:

https://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/aim/aim.html

The more time goes by, the more wondrous the recollection of my grandfather (1909-2006) telling me about growing up living across the street from a livery stable (i.e. horse commuter parking). Men would come into town to work at the steel mill and leave their horse for the day. He would say that after about 1922, cars were much more common, which in retrospect given the relative cost makes me think more that they crowded out horses, rather than the common mill worker upgraded from a horse to a car.

Ok, anyone care to gather at a coffee shop so that we can discuss the print version?

Still using mine for occasional hacking, running Mint. Gets about two hours of battery. Great keyboard.