The computer was ok, but it was basically a flood of cat pee seeping in into the memory expansion slot underneath.

Tried everything to get rid of the smell. Including perfume. Didn't make it better. Especially when it got hot.

Still today, when I smell cat urine I instantly think of Motorola 68000 assembly.

I did not expect to read that today. Or ever.

Ooops, I forgot to put the paste on the processor

The smell of burnt silicon in the morning is what keeps me waking up everyday.

Yep. The specific smell of the VOCs burning off a new Commodore 64 or 1541 brings back a flood of memories of cold, dark Winter evenings standing in the driveway waiting for the UPS guy.

Walk through a library and a dozen different books can all have distinct smells. Perhaps this book was taken to the beach a few times while that that one used a slightly unusual glue. Based on book age and the publisher involved you can even encounter similar smells looking at different copies of the same book at different libraries.

So yes a computer has a distinct smell the way a library does but that smell doesn’t change based on the knowledge you’re browsing.

HN posts could deliver your favorite fragrance for high points articles or deliver something undesirable for articles, say, about Rust (I kid, I kid).

How come I'm never able to identify where it's coming from?

I'd make a candle out of it if I ever found it

Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I'd probably only sell one

It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose

Same clothes, homegrown, a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam

But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered

Out of student loans and tree house homes, we all would take the latter

“So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.”

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_de_Proust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_memory

"Proust Effect" or something like that in English.

I guess there's just not anything new that's advancing so rapidly.?.? Like my computer is 13 years old and is still overpowered for 99% of tasks. And they are still selling brand new computers with far lower specs. Imagine in 1997 being satisfied as a developer with a computer from 1984!

I also have other interests and it feels like they have plateaued similarly. I guess I'm still getting some dopamine from solar and battery tech, price drops at least, and some neatness around microcontrollers and IOT but like even food has stopped seeming innovate. It used to be worthy of a day trip to drive into the city to eat at new exotic offerings and now every small town has mostly the same stuff and there's nothing really new in the city either.

Smart phones as well.

Many of these things you don't notice till they're everywhere.

If I spent more time I could list many other things I think but I don't know your filter

We've had smartphones for fifteen years and they haven't really improved much. Better camera, a few more sensors, more durable glass. Incremental improvements. About the same for laptops and desktops.

3D printing has come a fair way, but we're still not printing cars at home. (I totally would download a car.)

Now all of a sudden we have AI/ML, self-driving cars, high fidelity consumer mocap, AR/VR. The types of things coming out now seem way more sci-fi, cutting edge, and optimistic. A return to the imagination and dreams of the 1950's - 1990's.

2000 - 2020 was a speed bump.

That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...

Just as the application space has begun to stagnant, suddenly our data is speaking back to us through LLMs. Such models will be the next space we'll 'optimize', but these models will also be optimizing themselves. Strange loop.

I would argue these are all worse outcomes than I'd hoped for.

I dreamed we'd have utilities based on RDF and bittorrent that could pull down any data we liked. Track any authors across the internet, highlight all content about topics we liked, pull in all new astronomy photos. Automatic ranking and scoring to fit our preferences. Better collaboration, much higher signal, much less noise.

I thought we'd control the data, the pipes, the routing, all of it.

We have a product manager internet, not a magical utility knife internet.

Underrated reference. Well done.

For the past few years they've been experimenting with foldable screens, with hints of rollable screens maybe coming soon, so that's something at least.

Between the processing power, battery life, storage space (100x), ram (50x), screen resolution (20x pixels) and refresh rate, not to mention network speed…

I can record 4K video at 60fps. On my phone. How is that an incremental improvement?

I consume a huge amount of the web on my phone (and not hate myself or constantly zoom in and out), can type meaningfully fast with swipe/trace, copy/paste to/from my laptop, can use my phone as a webcam (realtime), useful realtime navigation, I pay for the majority of my purchases by holding my phone to a sensor, I put completely wireless incredibly light earbuds that last hours in my ears for listening and talking that actively cancel noise.

Today's phones are incredible.

On the other end of the spectrum, the cheapest smartphones can be purchased for less than $10.

Now, you find out about a new technology or product instantly, and you learn about them constantly. It is rare that a company develops something new enough that it's significantly differentiated from something you already know about (or even have) that it's exciting.

Even Apple had a lot of leaks before Vision Pro (which is potentially the most exciting new technology product, at least for me, in years). They had to balance when to announce it with the leaks - to maximize the impact while ensuring you didn't have to wait too long to get one.

Hololens had 1268x720 per eye[1] or 1.8MP across both eyes. Vision Pro is 23MP across both eyes. Are you seriously saying that's "incrementally better"? It's a literal order of magnitude more pixels!

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/419869/we-found-7-critical-h...

Then again, sometimes incremental ends up sneaking up on us and being revolutionary in the end. There are many technologies that appeared in the 80s (if not earlier), yet did not turn out to be practical until several decades of incremental development happened.

(That said, the Vision Pro is a bit young to tell how much of an impact it will have.)

In terms of what they do for the user the difference is, in fact, incremental compared to when VHS first became available. VHS enabled you to choose what to watch whenever you wanted. Prior to that, you got whatever was on whatever channels you had access to.

I will definitely grant that enabling subtitles was a profound difference for a subset of viewers (those who enjoy foreign media and the deaf) but even that came about with DVDs, not Blu-ray.

Closed captions were available on many, but not all, VHS tapes. Not all DVDs had subtitles either. The problem with CC on VHS was that it was often the first thing to degrade before the picture and then the sound.

Foreign films often had subtitled releases "baked in" to the video. Here's another hit of nostalgia. There were times you'd walk into a Blockbuster in the USA and the only available version of a hot new release was the Spanish or French subtitled version. You had to deal with the lost sections of image dedicated to subtitles in a language you might not even understand!

Even though we see a lot of technological progress these days, we are mostly out of the revolution phase. The computer is a part of our lives, much like electricity, the automobile, and the airplane. Those who love gadgets will be excited about each new step, yet it is nowhere near as exciting to everyone else. That is not to say that we are out of the revolution phase. People were genuinely excited about developments in mobile phones until a few years ago. This current hubbub over AI may stimulate people imaginations if it doesn't end up stalling again.

I chuckled at your comment about a 1997 developer being satisfied with 1984 technology. It seems like some 2023 developers are excited about 1984 technology. In many cases, it is because the tooling for things like build your own computers at the component level has become more accessible (rather than being an exercise in pure nostalgia).

If you're doing more than the once a year small project you should have fume extraction, occupational (or hobby-based) asthma sucks. As does metal flu (zinc for welding and tin for soldering although I expect that's rarer).

I'm sure it was the VOC's in the glue.

In all seriousness though, there is a lot about textbook publishing that is inexplicably different from other non-fiction books. For instance:

- Why not use the conventional paperback size if the textbook is not reliant on large diagrams? Why do textbooks always have to be massive?

- Why are there so many 'infoboxes' and 'did you knows' and 'warnings' (a characteristic that textbooks share with do-it-yourself and self-help books)?

- Why do almost all textbooks start with lengthy 'How to Use This Book' chapters? If you're in a course, you should have already been told, and most of those seem pretty common-sense anyway.

My favourite business textbooks that mostly avoid these disadvantages (as I see them):

- Managing without Profit, Mike Hudson: an almost complete guide to the mechanics of non-profit organisations; perfect if you already have a good grasp of for-profit business fundamentals.

- A Manager's Guide to Self-Development, Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell: mostly tests in the same vein as Myers-Briggs, explaining various aspects of personality, behaviour and strategy.

- Interpersonal Skills at Work, Maureen Guirdham (not the John Hayes book of the same name!): very academic look at the social dynamics of workplaces, with proper citations to actual studies for further reading; very thought-provoking and genuinely useful if applied carefully.

Those weren't in any of my Caltech textbooks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismell

I guess it never caught on (maybe the name :/). Following the first link it sounds like there are a few more that have tried something similar.