paulrpotts

Truly it was a different world. I learned so much investigating and modifying resource forks!

However old it is exactly, I've used this editor for decades and I love it. Most recently, I use the Worksheet feature to execute a series of scripts that do all the file conversion and make the RSS feed entries for my podcasts. It's easier to understand than a Makefile (although I do use Makefiles to build my blog posts) and it's all archived; if I need to regenerate anything I can just scroll back and re-run the commands right from the Worksheet file.

I know the Worksheet concept wasn't invented by Bare Bones - I think they borrowed it from the original MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), which used to be what the cool kids used to build Mac software before there were competing IDEs. But Bare Bones definitely perfected it.

Read this again:

> the only conclusion you've let me make is you're difficult and unpleasant.

Is it, though? The _only_ conclusion? Really? And not that I’ve often had terrible managers and worked in stressful, toxic workplaces with self-serving co-workers, in work cultures that did not allow collaboration or mentoring to take place, and even wound up with PTSD?

My conclusion is different: that OP read about someone being bullied and did what so many people do, and concluded: "it must be your fault."

Fair enough - I’m 55 and describing the bulk on my career to date. Lately the culture of a couple companies I’ve been in have been much more welcoming to neurodivergent folks but this is post-COVID. I’m not planning to do in-person work in the near future; I already have long COVID and risk factors that make me want to make sure my family and I never get infected again.

I had a boss order me to take down a whiteboard I set up in a common area so we couldn’t discuss code during work.

It’s the normal, default state of affairs when you have seniors and managers who feel they are competing with each other and so hoard knowledge and techniques, and assign themselves all the interesting work while juniors are left bored doing rite work. In several workplaces when I’ve tried to organize shared spaces like a commons, lunch-and-learns, etc., management had been actively hostile. I had one asshole manager who would even shut down any water-cooler conversation. I finally wound up mentoring a co-worker who needed help with C++ entirely off-site during lunches.

I'm 55 years old and I have _never_ been mentored in person by a co-worker, despite having spent most of my career working on teams, and despite _trying_ in many different workplaces to set up mentoring relationships. For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't, and it's also a minefield of things that can go wrong because the norms of social interaction sometimes elude us or we simply can't play-act them (I'll never forget being told by my boss that it always seemed like I was lying because I didn't maintain eye contact well). Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.

Circumstances: I have long COVID and can't exercise much without a PEMS crash; I also need whatever extra sleep I can get. I used to always get up well before work and go for a long walk in my neighborhood, sometimes up to 4 miles.

After a bad night's sleep where my 7 kids keep me awake until about somewhere between 1:30 and 2:15am, having spent the last part of my night's sleep with a pillow over my head which keeps out some of the light but makes my tinnitus more noticeable, and having been overheated all night since our ceiling fan blew out in recent power surge/outage along with most of our other appliances, wake up about 9:15, 15 minutes before alarm at 9:30. (I recently stupidly set the alarm to birdsong, which means I wound up training my brain to wake me up prematurely at 6:15 which is when the birds in my backyard starting making noise.)

Sync my low-end fitness tracker with the app on my phone and see what it shows me about my night's sleep. Look sadly at the "5 hr 51 min" and sleep score of 70 (that's today, it's usually better than that, but I rarely break 80), and resolve yet again to try getting everyone to bed earlier. (Toddlers generally can't be reasoned with about this).

Bathe for 10-25 minutes depending on necessity and whether I need to wash my hair; during the winter I skip this on some days. Half-fill my big steel mug with brewed coffee from our extremely basic coffee maker and top it off with water. Sit at the kitchen table and drink the whole mug, taking seven enzyme pills (serrapeptase and nattokinase), which seems to help with my COVID fingers and toes - pain, numbness, burning. Get to my desk at 9:55 and boot up my work computer which probably underwent a forced reboot against my will during the night to apply Windows updates.

I work fully-remote, and my laptop is managed by my employer's I.T. dept. Most of my team is in Mountain or Pacific time, so my 10am is their 7 or 8am. At 10am Eastern time we have our morning standup meeting. We're supposed to turn on our cameras so I wind up distracted by my appearance in part because I have a fair amount of body dysmorphia. Feel somewhat comforted by the fact that the people who got up at 7am their time are also not overjoyed to be on camera. Get through the first meeting and breathe a sigh of relief when the mercifully short meeting is over.

No, because I couldn't afford to meet my family's basic monthly expenses after that much of a pay cut. If the pay cut and insurance were not an issue, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

For a while in 2000 I went to six hours a day, paid purely hourly, for some audio driver and desktop application development, for a company that made audio interfaces. It was great, actually. I'd show up fully energized to work, put in a _focused_ six hours, get a lot done, and leave. I was single and didn't need to earn that much to meet my needs. It was not sustainable long-term because of the lack of health insurance, but everything else about it was great.

Michigan pays a maximum of $362 a week. Earlier in the pandemic, they waived the job application reporting requirements, _and_ I got the enhanced unemployment, which made it much more worthwhile - enough to cover at least my mortgage, especially combined with the now-also-expired child tax credit. But waiving the reporting requirement has now expired and it's $362 a week, and has been since 2002. You have to fill out antiquated forms which include things like the phone number and address of the hiring manager you interviewed with - information that often isn't even available, when so much of the application process for most positions is now via online forms. Slip up slightly, and you'll lose weeks of pay. Given that this jumping through hoops takes a lot of time that I could otherwise use for my job search, last time I opted to not even bother - better to get to a new job faster than work to earn a small fraction of my usual pay, which won't even cover mortgage alone. This shouldn't be a huge mystery.

This is my biggest barrier to finding decent bulbs. The search engines on sites like homedepot.com offer very little help, especially since they always show promoted items higher in the results, even if they don't match any keywords I put in my search. Then, if I do find what looks like the right thing, they're invariably out of stock everywhere.

My family has a home library and we treat it like a regular library. My kids pull anything off the shelves they want, and read it, and then it goes in a box to be re-shelved (since otherwise some of the younger kids will put them back in semi-random places). They also have access to a huge CD library and a CD player/amplifier. The only rule there is they have one CD out of the case at a time (because they tend to drop cases of they are piled up). This is strictly a practical matter to limit the amount of repair work I have to do. I know the cases are replaceable; I've replaced many dozens of them and I"m sick of it!

There are also some "special collection" things: mineral collections, electronic kits, etc. The only rules with those is they have to be put away. They've got a low table, a high table, and couple of comfy chairs, and reading lamps.

We ask them not to read them while eating or drinking (other than water bottles) and to keep the library items downstairs. It's because we have toddlers who don't have access to the library and they like to tear up books. We also ask them not to fold over pages (in paperbacks this results in the pages eventually breaking off, sometimes shockingly soon due to acid paper becoming brittle). I ask them not to write in the books. We have a huge supply of yellow pads and other notebooks of various sizes and they are welcome to use them, and an endless supply of pencils and pens.

I make a distinction between honest wear and carelessness. I love it when I see the books showing wear from reading. A lot of the books are somewhat rare and were hard to obtain. They can read those just like the others. I do have a special collection of signed books upstairs in my bedroom but most of those books have "reading copy" mates in the library. I don't love it when I see that someone's left it upside down on a dirty floor and the spine is split or a cover has been torn off. That's not honest wear - someone let a toddler at one of the library books without supervision.

This was part of our routine in Junior High and High School in Pennsylvania 1979-85. We would make book covers for our hardcover textbooks out of paper grocery bags.

Thanks - we're going to first see if our homeowner's insurance will do something for us, at least enough to cover some kind of authorized repair.

Did I miss the news that they have a new 3nm process working, even badly? Or have they just defined a variation on their 4nm process and are calling it 3nm?

Thank you for explaining "aperiodic" in a way that makes sense to non-geometers!

I mostly agree with this, with a few caveats. My personal blogs/newsletters over the years have sometimes really just been rambling journal entries. That content, I just look over for web typography, grammar, spelling and things like correct HTML entities for accents. I will always fix typos as I notice them but in general I don't put a lot of effort into tightening or improving the content.

But in the same "stream" of content there are often reviews, long essays, or discussions on programming, often including snippets of source code. In those pieces I often will go back and tighten up my arguments, edit for clarity, and update code for bugs or style issues that bug me later. I've done this especially as I migrate my material from Blogger blogs to my own server and turn it all into Markdown source that I maintain and build with my own Makefiles. Once it's in this personal system, it also goes into Git, so if I want to compare versions over time I can at least do so that way, going back to the point it was migrated. Or I can look at Internet Achive's snapshots.

It's "fundamental CS," sure, if what you mean by that is: only a very small number of the people who actually design, implement, build, optimize, and debug databases know anything about it at all, have read the foundational texts, use the terminology of relational algebra, or contribute papers or research in the field.

These things aren't necessarily considered Computer Science per se. Database systems generally are, which would include some projects on database design and optimization, but those things could be elective and not required for a major. A graduate's understanding of concurrency might be largely theoretical - I'd expect them to at least heard of mutexes, semaphores, etc., but how much they have used these tools in realistic programs and not just toys, not just to solve the Dining Philosophers' problem, probably varies hugely. As network programming was in its infancy when I got my undergraduate degree I can't really speak to it, but I suspect a similar split between academic topics and practical programming is at play.

None, unfortunately, suitable for home use. I looked into these a couple years ago because I also really wanted tabloid size. The only printers I could find it were huge and had huge prices. I wound up buying a LaserJet with an extra high-capacity sheet feeder and it was great, until a power outage/surges a couple of weeks ago killed it along with our refrigerator and dishwasher.

I think the concept is good, but the name is pretty bad - I mean, we have "green threads," "POSIX threads," "kernel threads," "user threads," etc. Given that this concept from software engineering has absolutely nothing to do with execution threads, it needs a less confusing name.

Alternate view: perhaps you could learn something from people who try to apply ethics and responsibility to their life choices?

It will be interesting to see whether Apple can continue with M3s, etc. I think they are facing pretty hard process limitations and I'm not sure that adding parallelism will get them huge gains on normal workloads, so they may be stuck at a plateau for a while, but we'll see.

Just to take on one of your points: the RAM you are talking about is not truly comparable. Sure, you can add DIMMs to a PC motherboard. M2 "unified" memory bandwidth to the on-chip RAM, LPDDR5-6400, exceeds 100Gb/sec. That's incredible bandwidth. So yes, there's a cost tradeoff, and the lack of modularity means the upgrade path is "get a new device." That's frustrating. That's actually been true of high end PCs for decades, given the constant churn in socket standards and power requirements, but fans of building their own PCs generally don't like to acknowledge it.

The criticism of the onboard flash is more valid - it's costly and if you don't get the dual bank setup, paying yes, a big premium like I did for a 512Gb version, performance isn't great. https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-... The lack of an upgrade path is, again, not great, but ask yourself honestly, aside from some ThinkPads which really were nicely upgreadable in the past, how many laptops are upgradeable and what can you upgrade?

Your bias ("Apple charges an absurd amount," for "tiny little features that real computers have in spades") is showing and it isn't pretty. Show us the modular laptop with comparable performance or shut up; you're stuck in the nineties.

Go on - find me a PC laptop that performs better than an M2 and let's look at prices, weight, and battery life. Oh, and modularity.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_proces...

Or even show us your PC build that is comparable to the Mac Studio and let's talk about how big, noisy, and power-hungry it is; these are things that people who want to use real computers in real offices and studios care about, more than PC hot-rodders who, let's face it, are mostly gamers bragging to each other about their frame rates rather than professionals using computers as tools.

Are you talking about chip errata/issues that rise to the level of interfering with getting a kernel working? There have been some issues including security issues, but from what I've read to date, no real deal-breakers; and it's not like Intel and AMD parts don't have errata and things kernel developers have to work around too.

I've used a lot of laptops over the last 30 years going back through generations of ThinkPads running Linux and Windows, some HP boxes, PowerBook Duo and G4, and probably some I've forgotten. I now have a "midnight" M2 MacBook Air, 512Gb flash and 16Gb RAM, and it is, hands-down, the best laptop I've ever had. It's far faster than my 8-core Mac Pro. I run VS Code, OpenOffice, tons of tabs in Firefox, and terminals. I can even run Stable Diffusion on it using the "Diffusion Bee" packaged version. I think your bias about expensive and "faster... for less money" is out of date. Some of us appreciate things like length of time we can use it before having to recharge, and this thing leaves other devices far behind.

This is strange. I've had an eBay account since 1999. I've used it very irregularly over the years - sometimes I'm buying things regularly, occasionally I'll do a "burst" of selling for a few months, then go for years without selling anything. I've never seen anything remotely like this suspension.

It's not very similar. It snaps firmly into place, and the contacts are quite a bit larger, which makes it less likely to short to adjacent contacts.

I don't like USB C. Just recently I bought a couple of dual-ported flash drives that fail dangerously on my new MacBook Air M2. When connected via the USB C port they get extremely hot, almost hot enough to burn my hand, and they somehow lock up the Finder and several other apps. Oddly, they work fine on an Intel NUC mini-PC I have running Windows. Fortunately they don't seem to have done any permanent hardware damage to my machine. Is this a driver bug or something? Who knows? But I don't trust USB C, especially with its high-current charging nightmarish mess of standards. Do I have to use it sometimes? Absolutely, but I'd prefer not to, and I try not to use it for charging or high current needs.

Personally I like Lightning. I've never had a Lightning cable fail unless a baby chewed on it. I like the way they snap securely into the sockets. I like that they DON'T support high current. I think the idea of getting other vendors to adopt it is very unlikely, but I'd be fine with Apple continuing to support lightning for phones and tables indefinitely. It would mean I could avoid replacing a few hundred dollars worth of cables and adapters.

This article comes at it from the perspective of the Android ecosystem but it's not wrong. https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-c-870996/

Bonus points for the King Crimson reference!