squeedles

I believe that HD (and Lowes) massively subsidizes their delivery ops simply because they don't want to cede the space to Amazon. It allows them to under-stock the stores but still maintain a reasonable range of products. However each time I have ordered, they have delivered a ~$2 part via Fedex, at no extra cost to me.

They are a bigger fish than the mom and pop stores but that just means that it will take a little longer for the Amazon Prime monopoly cash flow to devour it.

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

I do this as well, but put in about an inch of water with a few drops of dish soap. Instant wasp kryptonite. I have a few extension tubes so I can just lean it up against the house and watch as they are sucked in coming in or out.

It is absolutely hypnotizing.

It won't kill an entire nest late in the season, but will knock down their numbers so that they aren't as prevalent.

I happened to buy an Atari 800 at the peak of this and was amazed at the metal castings that surrounded everything. That little 6502 could survive small arms fire! That shielding was far beyond anything else at the time.

And you make a good point about the SIO bus - this was when every other machine had unshielded ribbon cables everywhere. Their devotion to daisy chained serial really crippled them in terms of speed, and when USB finally arrived, I initially scorned it due to the prejudice formed by my experience with the Atari peripherals! It turns out they were on the right track all along!

Well, if it was that way, it certainly isn't any longer. They keep adding new alien races, storylines, and sectors of the galaxy, and some of my best ships were franken monsters with tech from a half dozen races. There is a core storyline that is primarily human, but if you play to the end of that will suddenly discover that there is significantly more around you that becomes reachable with some interesting new technology (trying not to spoil anything)

They have done a good job balancing the numbers so that everything requires some tradeoffs. More species/tech gives more choices and interesting variability. Some species make very efficient drives, others inefficient, more powerful but produce tons of excess heat, those folks also produce good passive cooling, others great active cooling but power hungry, etc. The ship hulls tend to match the sizes of the drives and weapon hardpoints of that race, but often work much better when outfitted with different kit (perhaps with some wasted space)

Plus the fleet management is pretty good. You fly your flagship, but you can park ships and switch your flag to different ships. So I might fly a fast little scoutship, then switch to an armor-clad behemoth surrounded my 20 of my heavy-hitting henchmen for some different missions.

I played a ton of EV and EVO back in the day and still have them on a Basilisk II VM, but Endless Sky has really captured the spirit of EV (because everyone who made it also loved EV) and offered it up in a modern incarnation.

https://endless-sky.github.io/

Why is this in the least surprising? It's just the natural successor to what everyone used to do with the trade magazines thirty years ago. Back then you filled in a profile questionnaire to get a free subscription, so every basement hacker turned into the manager of a 500-person division with control of a $1m capital budget. The magazine didn't want to check because it would damage the demographic numbers that they pitched to advertisers. The advertisers knew that there was some liar's poker being played but everyone just rolled with it.

Thanks for that. We seem to have lost sight of the importance of "commercial biodiversity" in the past 40 or more years of continuous M&A concentration.

Happily, I saw a little discussion of it in 2008 when the advocates of letting the auto companies fail were pushed back by statistics showing how many second and third tier suppliers would be destroyed. But the fourth tier, the shenzhen / radio alley-type stuff is still ignored. Very similar to how most companies want to simply hire skills and assume that they will magically appear when in years past, companies took an active hand in creating them by having a career development path in-house.

Perhaps the AI bubble will be viewed in the future as the last gasp of companies that depleted the soil that they grew in and now struggle to survive without anyone that knows how to do the work anymore. Maybe LLMs will be all that remains, our Moai.

Seconded. Big fan of network optimization rail games like the Empire Builder series, but Mini Metro is just simple fun!

One week too late for me. Didn't feel like scratch building a new machine and finding a low TDP mobo with a bunch of SATA ports. Wanted to go Synology but dragged my feet for months watching this play out.

In the meantime, I became enamored with the Jonbo cases and started seeing white label N100 ITX mobos pop up with a bunch of SATA ports. Eventually figured out they were Topton when Brian Moses included them (and a Jonbo case!) in this year's NAS build.

So my parts are arriving in a few days and Synology has lost one potential new customer.

That's exactly how periodicals worked for a hundred years. A letter to the editor that is published in the next edition. That's how I always mentally viewed blogs and expected most niche sites to eventually do that. In fact, a local "neat things" blog was successfully doing that for quite a while.

Multiple nethack ascender here (~50x in 20yrs). I usually play in the traditional November tournament (originally devnull, now tnnt). Never set aside the time to learn any of the other roguelikes mentioned in the article, but wanted to mention that nethack itself is a class of games. Many people have written variants to scratch a particular itch (the article briefly mentions spork, which was one of the very first). Some of those are wildly different from the base game. There is even a separate tournament in June dedicated just to playing as many of the variants as you can (junehack)

Reminds me of xroach back in the day. First time I moved a window and they ran around I nearly plotzed.

Of course I cc one file quickie programs all the time. What I am talking about is a whole directory of source files, and just "knowing" which ones are out of date and building the object files manually.

I still remember years ago trying to convince one dev to use make on a package with 20-30 source files.

That's one of the reasons I loved Ansible from the moment I saw it. As the OP points out, traditionally machines accumulated ad-hoc changes over a long period of time. Describing the "known good" state and running this "checklist" to make sure it is in that state both documents the checklist and evaluates it.

Same reason we haven't typed "cc" on the command line to call the C compiler on individual files for about 30 years or more.

Never MUDed, but November (and now June) are my nethack months going back about two decades. Actually started playing about fifteen years prior to that (hack on SunOS 4 machines) but didn’t get good for a while.

They turned it around by not being GE anymore. The stock trading as "GE" now is just GE aircraft engines, aka "GE Aerospace". The healthcare stuff went to "GE Healthcare" (GEHC) and power systems went to "GE Vernova" (GEV)

Thanks for the history! Been driving past that plant for almost 40 years going back and forth across the state.

I was surprised when the article opened with what it said was the worlds first transistor radio, because I always thought that was the TR-1. It looks like GE made a prototype, but never took it to market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1

As an engineer I always had just blamed nebulous “MBAs” as the reason we can’t have nice things, but the Gelles book makes a very strong case that it was Welch specifically that changed the rules of engagement to what they are now and follows the thread through his career showing the weaknesses he exploited, the benefit that he gained from it and how he spawned the modern cult of the Imperial CEO.

Many people have tried to run the same playbook with some success, but Welch had unique resources that let him continue the game far longer than anyone else.

As an aside, Gelles publisher made him add a hopeful last chapter on the social benefit corporate movement and the few corps that were able to resist welchism just so the book wouldn’t leave the reader feeling hopeless!

Recently read The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles which is an excellent review of the Welch years, how he worked, and how he sent his minions out across the corporate world to wreak havoc. Wonderful read and really provides perspective on why modern corporate America is what it is.

Light Out by Gryta and Mann follow up by focusing on the Immelt years and how he tried to keep the ball rolling despite the hole that Jack left him in. Also an excellent read.

Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.

Been doing engineering software since late 80's and this article hit me in the feels. I always wondered what the obsession with Harvard Graphics was in the early versions of PP. Now I understand.

Never had to ship software on 9-track tape, but remember receiving the source distro for C++ v1.0 from AT&T on one (cfront, no MI, etc)

Did ship plenty of software on QIC tape though, and man what a PITA. After much experience, we ended up retensioning every tape before writing. Sending releases to 100+ customers generated a Borg-cube of tapes that had to go into individual boxes for shipping, along with the rainbow of other tape flavors like TK50s and the various 4mm and 8mm tapes.

Documentation was a big deal, because once it was printed, you had a Borg-cube of shrink-wrapped paper and binders that were not going to change until the next release. I still miss proper documentation. Endless web pages are a lot more difficult to sit down and read start to finish.

This article helped me realize that I was shaped by this in the same way that many peoples grandparents were shaped by growing up in the great depression.

Alas, thought the original article was going to have some juicy details about the vector hardware. But since it was a survey of games inspired by the original, I feel compelled to mention "Maelstrom" by Ambrosia.

For my money, this was the absolute best take on Asteroids since the original. Originally Mac, but the source was later released and was ported to PC. We even had a tweaked version that we called "Carnage" that generated many storms of presents, comets, spiky balls, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom_(1992_video_game)

It's a MAME cabinet, with an all purpose set of controls.

Google has reached out to Nextcloud and offered to restore the permission. Wonder if the decision was motivated by the technical arguments or if the antitrust trial and various mentions in the press were a persuading factor.

You are of course correct. The game is neither S100 or Multibus, but a similar cage. And I was misremembering the Sun2 as 68020 when it was actually just a 68010 -- which I could have verified if I only looked at the picture that I posted at the bottom of this page -

https://david-loffredo.github.io/lowcloud/encrypt.html

Wow! Great deep dive! I haven’t seen S100 boards in the wild since we retired our rack mounted 1980s Sun 2 decades ago (also 68020-based)

Quite so, and I think he does address that, but those are all second level factors, along with activity level, exercise, and their effect on your caloric requirements. He puts together a bunch of excel spreadsheets for tracking many factors, but I have found the simple discipline of accounting for what I eat in a little txt file on my phone sufficient to align my choices with my desired outcome.

As this article shows, there are incredibly complex feedback mechanisms around weight and metabolism, but thermodynamics are still fundamentally a thing.

After he died last year, I ran across this engineering and accounting approach to weight maintenance and loss written up by John Walker (one of the Autodesk founders). It worked very well for him and changed the way I thought about weight and eating. It is interesting reading because he is "one of us"

    https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

Basically, he uses a first level approximation of the body as a control system with a feedback loop, and tries to pin down some techniques to bring the system to a known good state (target weight) and manage that loop for long term stability.

I'm wondering about Wednesday April 15, 1840 -- "Much flatulence"

Sometimes history provides too much information to future generations.

Just decided to do it one day. Had done some utility sewing (bags, pillows, odds and ends) since I was little so knew how to at least thread a machine and straight stitch. As mentioned in a previous comment, shirts mostly have the same basic construction, so I just got a pattern, some fabric, and started trying.

Instructions on patterns are obtusely written, with a lot of extraneous steps about basting and other nonsense that can usually be skipped, but everyone here is an engineer of some sort and should be able to figure it out. You cut out shapes, pin them together so they don't slide around relative to each other, and then sew in a line a fixed distance from the edge (seam allowance, usually 5/8"). Most machines have guide lines that help you maintain that.

There are a few trickier bits, like sewing along curves where fabric is bending two different ways at once (like sleeve/body joints) and using the "burrito technique" to topologically invert the yoke of a shirt for easy sewing, but youtube has plenty of videos to help.