massysett

I can't claim to be very very experienced, but I learned a lot from this piece. In particular it convinced me to try Common Lisp precisely because it is stable and boring. Common Lisp has allowed me to focus on solving my problems rather than keeping up with language or ecosystem changes. It's nice to be able to read decades-old books and have them still be good, in contrast to the much newer books I have for other languages where those books are already ready for the trash heap.

But I'm the sort of person who shrugs when someone says "this software is not updated anymore, it must be out of date." I say: maybe that's good, cat(1) hasn't been updated much, isn't that good?

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/

Don't buy a TV. Buy a monitor.

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/samsung-65-inch-commercial-4...

If you want stable, try Common Lisp.

So you’ve roughly doubled the number of parts, with risk of separating and losing them. It can be attached, but after locating and using an after-market device of unknown quality that requires initiative to set up. And then you have a power button in some weird place, not to mention now having to mind two power buttons. Some people will be confused when they turn on the monitor and nothing happens.

Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.

Have you tried Samsung? They have designs that mimic Apple, though probably plastic.

People already do a lot of thinking for fun. They read novels, they write software, they do crossword puzzles, they play chess.

My experience at home and work is the more “thinking” these tools do, the more it frees me up to think about something else, usually something harder.

The mention of exercise brought this to mind:

https://youtu.be/O6SEXp3-lo8?is=jJ55WL3ZvFoG6G8u

I spent countless hours poring over the multiple man pages for zsh, along with books such as "From Bash to Zsh" and the book Peter Stephenson wrote. I wrote up decent completions for some software I wrote for personal use. My software is completely non-interactive and relied on complex trees of commands. My thinking was that completions would make it usable. But my completions were buggy and I didn't fix them for years (I'd use the completions, hit TAB, get some error messages, and say "oops, let me do this without the completions." For years.)

Years ago I thought this was fun. Now I've given up on learning zsh _arguments and the like. Instead I have made my software more interactive (an LLM helps here) and wrote it in Common Lisp (even without an LLM) so that I get decent completion behavior in SLIME for free.

I actually do like reading these things. But big shells like Bash and Zsh are brutal, especially with their random grab-bags of features that come from multiple shells of years long gone.

My theory is that the "house" consists of two things: the land and the building.

The land goes up in value when other people spend money. More retail is constructed nearby, transportation is improved, schools improve, jobs are created, etc. My land captures some of that value even though I paid nothing. That to me explains some of the fairness of property tax: the owner should contribute to the government services, such as schools and police, that help make the land appreciate in the first place.

Then there's the building. It's a wood box that sits out in the rain and rots. Water soaks in from the outside and pipes burst on the inside. Termites eat it and insects and vermin invade. Carpet and walls slowly degrade. HVAC systems wear out. Appliances break. Concrete breaks apart. Even on the land portion, plants die and need maintenance. (Trees are the only thing on a property that get better with time.) This building needs constant maintenance and I'm always spending money and time on it.

So I figure the land might go up slowly in value over time. I figure I'm lucky if the building appreciates at all after I consider the money I sink into it.

On paper my house is worth a lot more than when I bought it. But I don't know how much of that is nominal price change due to inflation.

The robot drivers will be worse than the human ones?

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/semi-truck-driver-dead...

“ Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?”

You’re going to get a lot of affirmative answers here, which is maybe what you’re looking for. Maybe you’re brainstorming.

But I’ll affirm what you’ve probably been thinking all along: It’s not worth it. I set up a Lenovo ThinkCentre to be my personal Linux server running on my home network. I could use it for backups, ssh, taskwarrior, etc. It did solve some problems.

It also creates problems. The biggest is that it’s another computer to maintain. It needs updates. Critically, it needs security. You need to secure the ports and services, use vpn, etc.

I found that none of the gains were worth the maintenance. For my problem set, it’s easier to keep multiple cheap laptops in multiple locations and use a flash drive (rather than network) to move data between them.

For backups, specialized cloud services (currently Arq going to B2) does the job better, along with Carbon Copy Cloner to a local volume.

For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.

So in the end you may be right: just run things on your laptop.

I read the first “bug” about some icons being microscopically off-center and then I started to scroll through the rest, trying to figure out if the whole piece was some sarcastic response to someone who is baselessly complaining about the release being a buggy mess.

But I guess the author is seriously complaining about an icon being off center and saying that makes it buggy mess. Seriously?

Yes, it’s possible for a person to create software he doesn’t understand himself. In the old days this was pasting from Stack Overflow and changing things until it worked.

In the old days even if I knew how the software worked when I wrote it, I’d have no idea how it worked when I looked at it weeks later.

It’s also easy to modify software without knowing how it works. This produces modifications that hopefully appear to work, but that break other things, sometimes unknown things.

This is even worse now that tap to pay has proliferated. Customers who are not Walmart regulars (and some that are) will wave their credit card, phone, or watch over the terminal and wonder why it’s not working.

Cashier must explain: No tap. Best case is the customer shrugs and inserts card. Bad case is the customer is confused or argues about it. Horrible case is that the customer must fish through his belongings for a credit card or cash and takes minutes to realize he has neither.

I guess Walmart figured that these scenes repeating daily was not worth whatever its strategy was.

Which makes it all the more bizarre that LLMs have this problem. Claude Code runs the code it generates through a compiler, why can’t an LLM run its product through a cite checker? I’ve seen LLMs fabricate citations.

If it's good antique furniture, your executor will auction it. I used to frequent an auction house in DC (it has now moved to Rockville) that auctioned this sort of thing all the time once a week. Clearly there were regulars who scooped stuff up, I suppose to sell in their antique shops.

It is difficult for people to throw things away.

Many things invoke "but this is a perfectly good..." I had a LaserJet monochrome printer. I knew I would never use it because I now have a color model, and if the color one broke I would replace it immediately. "But this is a perfectly good printer." It sat for a few years on a shelf before I finally tossed it. Resale nets too little to be worthwhile.

Other things represent work. This is old files in the office. My workplace was full of file cabinets with drawers of papers. It was decades of accumulated knowledge. No one would ever read them or use them. But throwing them away seemed disrespectful of all the work that went into those papers. For these things, I think of my daughter's math homework. It is extremely valuable and lots of work went into it, and there is zero reason to retain it the instant it comes home.

Other things represent memories. They embody a long friend or lost relative, or a vacation, or an occasion, or a feeling they caused when worn, used, etc. Discarding it seems to disrespect the memory. I try to keep these things to a minimum - keep representative samples, and digitize to the extent possible.

This is why discarding things is hard. I don't want storage space and have none, but I completely understand why people would rather shove apparently useless things into a storage locker. It's easier to pay to store it than to discard it. I go a step farther and say that it's worth it for folks to pay to store these things. It's worth $80/month or whatever it costs to have that stuff sitting in a storage box, even if they know they will never ever use or even look at them.

I don’t see why it is interesting to claim that a piece is AI generated, especially in light of the concession in your last paragraph that you liked the article.

AI is a tool. It outputs things only when asked to. Asking it requires skill. Saying “This is AI generated” is like pointing at furniture and saying that “power tools were used to build that” or at a program and saying “that’s not assembly, a modern garbage-collected language was used to build that” or at a meal and saying “this was cooked in a kitchen with a modern temperature-controlled oven” or at a paper and saying “this was obviously typeset in LaTeX, not roff or plain TeX.”

So what? Give me a shop full of power tools and I can’t build any furniture, give me Python and a bunch of libraries and I can’t write Mercurial, and give me any LLM and I couldn’t have written this piece.

Does the conceit come from the idea of “some LLM wrote this, so anyone could”? This is like walking through a modern art museum and seeing some obvious-looking piece and saying “I could have done that.” Well, you didn’t.

My cable internet is 2.5G. So it’s nice to get that full speed when I have a wired connection.

To be honest though, my usage does not benefit from the speed. The only benefit is to the reptile part of my brain that says “speed. Must have the fastest possible, and since I’m paying for it, even though maybe I should downgrade it, I want my speed.”

The expansion cards always seemed a gimmick to me: it's just a USB-C port, loaded down with the extra plastic necessary to claim it's an expansion port. I guess some folks find it more convenient than a dongle, but when I'm using a laptop for portability it's rare I want anything other than USB-C. (When the laptop is sitting at home or in the office on a desk, just plug in a Thunderbolt dock and get all the ports I could want.)

I’m surprised that anyone would love Amazon so much that they resort to using third-party search so they can continue buying from Amazon. Rather than just shopping elsewhere!

There are many product categories where I know that shopping on Amazon will be a miserable experience riddled with crap goods and useless search, so I go elsewhere. Never even occurred to me to use an LLM to make up for Amazon’s own deliberate decision to serve me crap.

This all supposes that the sports team owners really are that: independent owners. Sure that’s what we call them, but it’s more accurate to say they are equity partners in a common enterprise.

It’s not interesting to say that a sports league controls whether there is a new team. Of course it does, just as an existing supermarket chain decides where to open new stores, or an airline decides what cities to fly to. Competition for a sports league comes from other leagues (not necessarily in the same sport) or from different forms of entertainment entirely.

In case the author is, like so many people, sensitive to this kind of criticism, I will say this:

Thank you for giving the world your free software. Feel no compunction to undertake extra work to please people who criticize your work. They are not paying for your software and are not paying your bills. If your install eats enormous amounts of ram or uses a programming language they do not like, that is their problem. In your case for example they are free to get Bloomberg.

If you want to do free work to please critical people, ok. But I wouldn’t bother. Thank you for all the work you did to write your software and then the even more work you did to share it. I write my own software but don’t bother sharing it because it’s a lot of work, so I appreciate you.

? I’ve done hiring and we review all undergrad and graduate transcripts every single time, so I am hardly grasping at straws.

But will an LLM write dense Common Lisp? A lot of that density comes from well-designed domain-specific macros. An LLM will have no incentive to write these on its own, though it could if a human prods it sufficiently.

> You really think and employer is going to look at UofM and say "Oh, they gave their students a 1 semester reprieve, obviously they are of lower quality"?

Yes. This will be evident on the transcript. It won’t reduce a student from “must-hire” to “do not interview.” But it could make a marginal difference when two students are compared.

One has all A and the other has all P. If the all A is Ohio State and the all P is Michigan, if I’m otherwise indifferent I might hire Ohio State.

I read NYT. Perfectly usable with ads.

Meh. My tinnitus is a result of high-frequency hearing loss. The hearing loss is not noticeable - maybe I can't hear something just below what dogs can hear? - but the tinnitus is noticeable.

I have no idea how it happened - I never used headphones much, I don't work around machines or jet engines, etc. One doctor said it's just wear and tear.

It doesn't bother me though. I figure that nobody has a full stack of bricks when it comes to health, and here's one of the places I'm short. Compared to some of the places where other folks have health problems, this is not a biggie.

I read your link and still don’t agree that these ads are “bad”.

I think these ads built brand awareness. The point of the MidWest Micro “Clue” ad was not necessarily to spur you to buy a MidWest Micro system today. The purpose was so that when you were in the market to buy a system, and you saw one of theirs on a magazine cover or (in the case of Gateway) at a mall storefront, you said “oh I’ve heard of them,” and then you buy one.

12 pages of marketing gimmicks builds awareness. Two pages of specs doesn’t. That I remember Gateway and MidWest Micro but not many of the others of the reams of price lists in Computer Shopper is a testament to this.

So random youtuber gave you something of value - something that saved you hundreds of dollars from not having to get a professional repair - yet you have something against random YouTuber getting paid?

Or you could not consume the content.