michaelsmanley

I had my doubts about my pressure cooker when I received it, as I recalled the monstrosity my mother used when I was a kid. But that thing gets used several times a week now.

Combined with a recipe from Kenji, I'm going to have to try it. I have yet to make anything from Serious Eats, and particularly Kenji's recipes, that I didn't enjoy making and eating.

Anecdotal, but I have built from scratch a fairly large OpenAPI-compliant service using the Goa dsl (https://goa.design) and a coding agent and I've suspected for a while that the reason I've been as productive as I have with few blind alleys is that Goa kept the mistake surface pretty constrained. I also like not having the model generate boilerplate, as Goa's tooling does all that so much more cheaply. YMMV.

Same here. I scan the post titles to decide what to look at, and only open the HN discussion if the article looks like the discussion will be at all useful. That's increasingly rare.

Oh, that's funny. The only ISP that services my current domicile blocks sites all the time in the name of "safety," including several I need to access for my job. I have to use a VPN just to get things done. There's no appeal process or channel, either. Thankfully, I'm a month out from moving somewhere that has actual choice in providers, though I'll probably still use the VPN anyway.

Pronounced, "effin," right?

We just finished a 6-week period where my mother-in-law was cared for at home 24/7 by personal assistants, with three shifts per day. Whole dumb, long story on why we had to do this, and I am very glad it is over (she's in memory care now), but I can say:

First, the PAs from the agency who employed them did a better job than we could have. Most of them were current nurses picking up extra money or former nurses who had retired from active work. Save for one who was new to the job and clearly in over her head (and removed from the account after one short shift), they were all competent and conscientious caregivers, if maybe struggling personally one way or another. Not a job anyone chooses to do, I suspect, but one they're often driven to by circumstance.

Second, that kind of care is prohibitively expensive long-term. The memory care facility costs 25% to 30% of the in-home care, and is far safer. We got lucky and had access to a smaller facility with a very low resident-to-staff ratio.

In the US, at least, I don't see the prospects for this kind of care getting anything but worse. I worry that once the Baby Boomer volume of elders passes through the system, the capital that has swallowed so much of elder care up will pull out and a lot of it will collapse and what survives won't be particularly good or affordable, even compared to current levels.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Mac apps ever, Feeder:

https://reinventedsoftware.com/feeder/

Literally, the only app I miss after leaving the Apple ecosystem.

The question I always have is how to keep a permanent archive of entries for long-running publication histories. You don't want the feed to grow without bounds, so paging (by time period or sliding windows of X entries) seems useful. Atom feeds have RFC 5005 links. I don't recall such for RSS 2.0, but it wouldn't be that hard to extend, I guess.

I just want to comment on how clear I find Filippo Valsorda's writing on this kind of thing. Even for an old dunderhead like me, his mathematics and examples were easy to follow. I really appreciate that kind of clarity in technical writing.

Bisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."

Oh, so sad to read. Everyone knew him when I was at Purdue. A rare mind. RIP, ghg.

"All art is ultimately about the creation of art," was the kind of reductive thinking that made me drop any pretense of continuing in academia after I finished my MFA. While I thought that was a marginally better stance than taken by the folks who insisted that all "texts" were fungible (which led to one student, when we were assigned to write a review of a short fiction collection published in the last year, instead wrote a scholarly paper covering his thesis chair's years-old volume of television criticism, which the professor accepted as equivalent), the whole discussion put me off literature for years and I scuttled back to programming, where at least when things didn't make sense there was some chance of fixing them.

Oddly enough, I happen to be reading this book right now (though my edition is titled "An Island Called Moreau"). I had just finished re-reading Wells and Silvia Moreno Garcia's "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" (a re-telling of the story set in colonial Mexico), and thought I'd try Aldiss's version. I am still trying to decide if he wrote it as a satire or not.

Yeah, when I say "nice" about the screen, it is all relative. Mine was nice compared to the original screen on the Model 1.

There are very few pieces of laptop/notebook hardware that I really enjoyed. The 5140 was one of them. I doubt I'd enjoy it now, but 40 years ago I found it just lovely.

That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tech manuals (as opposed to the hardware reference book I had for everything else), and I got lucky and the lab had requisitioned a Model 2, so the screen was nice and they'd gotten the full 640Kb RAM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_Convertible has all the details on that machine you could want.

When I was a co-op student employee at IBM in the late 80s, I was given a desk in what was otherwise a storage room piled with stuff that had been used and then set aside. One box contained a 5140 convertible laptop with one of each peripheral "slice" -- printer, modem, expansion ports -- and the full set of technical manuals.

I was allowed to take that beast home with me. I learned so much tinkering with that machine. Eventually, I sold the whole set at a ham fest and I have regretted it often.

Nice to see an appreciation of it, though I would never have looked at it as alligator-like.

That made me laugh when I read it, too.

Thanks for pointing this interview out. I've really enjoyed Mattie Lubchansky's comics. I first ran into her work on The Nib, which was as close to a successor to the zine World War 3 Illustrated as I've yet seen. I miss that site.

Only a single data point, but my father, who was Vietnam-era USMC in "special weapons," wore his wristwatches this way all his life. He never really said why other than that was what he learned in the Corps (he had never owned a watch prior to then). I always assumed it had some practical purpose in the field, but I'm not sure what that might have been.

This so accurately describes the last week of my life. Years of shrugs and "we will get to that when <moving goalpost>" when security concerns are brought up. Thankfully, we had done some of the work anyway and were teed up to do the rest quickly enough. Still sucked pretty hard.

Others have said it here, but I read this and thought, "Why not just prioritize spending time with them now, while they're still alive?"

I'm not convinced that the human condition would be improved by simulation of the deceased. I could be convinced that would be a project with unexpected consequences that aren't so good.

IIRC, that decision has been covered in one of the many documentaries covering Nuclear Waste Disposal Area 2 and the 9/13/1999 accident.

As a lifelong (congenital) anosmic, I often think about the practical consequences of lacking that sense. A whole therapeutic avenue cut off, if I'm thinking about this correctly, is a new one.

I was about to post the same thing here. BBQ mutton from Moonlite in Owensboro, KY is one of my favorite foods, second only to their burgoo made with mutton. Long, long ago, Owensboro was a major wool production center and river port and there was often a surplus of sheep, so they ate mutton.

I'm so glad there are still sites like this.

That's close to what I did. Major in software engineering, equivalent of a second major in English (back then, the university I attended didn't have the concept of "minors" for engineering students, or recognize double majors). That led to a fellowship offer for my MFA. After three years of intensive writing, I went into software development.

Given the cost of higher ed these days, I would imagine that path is not nearly as feasible now as it was in the late 80s/early 90s. (Definitely not at that university, which just discontinued its MFA program in writing.)

This is how we manage things as well. Support is a totally different stream of work from product development.

I've often had a difficult time getting non-engineering management to understand the difference between proactive work that can be planned and reactive work that is unplannable by its nature. All of it looks like deficiencies in the product to a certain cohort of stakeholders. Eventually, once they see things smooth out by separating those workstreams, they catch on.

YMMV.

This seems to surface once in a while. I recall it was originally constructed with Flash, 20-ish years ago. That's some longevity.

I'd like to know which of the Area 120 projects did make it. I have been looking forward to Tables either becoming a Workspace product or getting rolled into Sheets (or AppSheet, worst case). It had just the right set of functions to replace some other tools for our team.

If you just open the file in a browser, it provides deployment instructions.

I thought it might work like Tiddlywiki, so I tried that first. Not a bad little hack.

Every time I start work in a different business, I start a glossary. I have considered a specialized web application for that purpose, but always end up just creating a Google Doc or a wiki page, depending on what the company uses.