daveaiello

You make good points here. But I want to point out some issues that I have with what you are saying, because I see a few assumptions that I would not myself make.

I graduated from RPI with a degree in Management and a concentration in Information Systems. I began in Computer Science, and didn't like it because RPI CS at the time was loaded with professors who were mathematicians who had transitioned over to CompSci and because the 100 and 200 level courses were excessively math-heavy in my view.

Since this was the late 80s, there may not have been an easy way to teach B.S.-level computing without it being heavily math-based, but I digress.

No matter what degree we achieved or what work we ended up succeeding at, we have a tendency to look back at people rising in the ranks below us, see differences in their experiences and struggles, and say, Look! That is evidence of a lack of rigor or a lack of understanding of fundamentals that we had to learn in order to succeed.

The only thing is that some of what we learned to become successful just isn't necessary to be learned when we learned it.

I do a fair amount of low-level software engineering with Claude Code now that was above my level of understanding of data structures and algorithms because I never took those CS courses at RPI because I switched to Management IT.

But as someone who could be described as a solopreneur at some level, my new system designs reach a certain level of complexity or code maturity, and I hit problems that I would not hit if I had more understanding of data structures and algorithms.

So-- I end up having to learn aspects of those disciplines at that point, rather than before I actually needed them.

I run into these situations often enough where I now say to myself, gee, I wish I had taken Data Structures. And I think, could I effectively take Data Structures at this late date and get better at specifying how I want data stored, or perhaps knowing the shortcomings of simplistic database structures that are the ones I end up with initially because of my lack of spec-writing skill?

Aren't many of the less experienced folks who come up now, whatever age they are, going to hit problems that show them their weaknesses in this fashion?

Is the issue that these people will never get jobs because the seniors and managers who are interviewing them will design interview questions that keep people with their level of understanding out of the workforce?

What happens when somebody who sucks at the fundamentals but is really motivated bangs their head against their shortcomings and eventually succeeds in building something that takes off? Aren't those people great assets because they learned some of their critical skills the hard way?

Perhaps my choice of the phrase "neutral political position" was not what others would have chosen.

I am trying to take a fact-based perspective in what I say and do.

Facts don't belong to either dominant political party in the United States.

As someone who lives in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania that Stu Faigen calls home, I say that half of the county, which is about 325,000 people, should agree but will disagree because of how strident his politics generally are in favor of politicians and causes from one side of the aisle.

I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.

You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.

If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.

Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?

I just got a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and have been looking for a way to use for Live Translation of a language other than Spanish.

I don't feel like I 100% needed to hear the English translation, because the animation tells the story almost without words. But it was a bit more interesting to have my AirPods tell me bits of the words exchanged between the adults and the boy, leading into and out of the video.

We see this around us every day, in every way.

I just realized that you can connect the two with another maxim that we've all heard a million times:

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

This puts further weight behind the intellectual arrow that embodies Franklin's ideals.

I started using LLMs to refactor and maintain utility scripts that feed data into one of my database driven websites. I don't see a downside to this sort of use of something like Claude Code or Cursor.

This is not full blown vibe coding of a web application to be sure.

I can appreciate that perspective as well.

This deal is for four (4) jets, according to the SCMP.

With respect to everybody reading this, I'm not prepared to read anything into a purchase of four jets.

If Apple released an M-Series AppleTV 4K with sufficient RAM, it would be an AppleTV with Apple Intelligence. It could also be designated as an Apple Home Preferred Home Hub.

The groundwork would then be laid for HomePods and HomePod minis to receive voice queries and respond with Apple Intelligence-powered answers.

My family and I moved to a house with 3/4 acre of land in late 2020. I knew I needed a chainsaw, so I bought a Makita 36V 16-inch saw with four 18V lithium ion batteries.

When I am not using the chainsaw, those batteries power 9 or 10 other tools that are necessary around my house and perform very well. The charger I got with the chainsaw package charges two 18V batteries as fast as they can be safely charged.

Around this same time, I bought a Honda gasoline-powered mower. The reason I went with a gasoline-powered mower and lithium ion power tools for other purposes was running time.

At the time, the gasoline powered mower was the only one available that would run for the time I need to cut the entire lawn.

Now, most of the lithium ion-powered tool brands have 40V/80V systems that are more powerful than their 18V/36V product line. If I needed to replace the Honda gas-powered mower, I'd probably consider an 80V lithium ion mower.

But most of the tools I already own couldn't use the 40V batteries, so I'd want to consider buying at least one other tool that powerful in order to capture greater value in the new battery and charger investment.

I think a lot of tech companies are getting lost in a situation where Venture Capitalists ideally want to invest in companies that will eventually fit in the large capitalization growth stock category. But many tech companies will never fit that model.

Squarespace is an example of a company that was never going to fit that model, for a host of reasons.

Furthermore, if a company is highly unlikely or never going to become a large cap growth stock, providing extra working capital, acquiring ancillary services, funding additional advertising and marketing, will not change those prospects. Only revolutionary increases in functionality will.

Matt Petgrave accidentally made skate blade contact with Adam Johnson’s neck during a professional ice hockey game in England in late October.