deltarholamda

>`man` pages are consistently incredible

I love this part of OpenBSD so much. FreeBSD is very good as well on this front. Sometimes the terseness of the man pages gets to me, but it's all there.

I used OpenBSD as a daily driver way back, somewhere around v3.5, on a somewhat elderly Thinkpad. It was perfectly adequate. I still use it for various systems that I pretty much just set and forget. Extremely reliable, and pf is top tier.

I get that running seven different kinds of cables everywhere was a bit of a faff, but honestly I miss those days now that I have to be an electrical engineer, a computer systems analyst and a network engineer just to have my TV play sounds.

(And I still have to turn the subtitles on because I can't quite hear what the people on the TV are saying.)

>more akin to a mid-90's CD-ROM puzzle game

"You can just say 'Myst', it's cleaner."

It was extremely informative; I didn't even know these things existed. It opens up several interesting alternatives for teaching kids.

The value-add for a meatbag CEO is the physical networking they do. They have to do executive functions as well, which could quite possibly be replaced with a well-trained LLM and even possibly exceed in overall quality. But an LLM can't go to conferences; they can't have Top Secret Meetings where a merger or acquisition is discussed; they can't run into Jim Executive of BigCorp Inc. in Vail and scheme up some big new thing; they can't fill a room full of institutional investors with confidence that the future is looking quite rosy.

Now, one can certainly argue that all of that is bad, or not even necessary, but it is a thing they do.

But I still think this is a good project, especially if it is demonstrated to excel at some significant fraction of what a meatbag CEO does. Because meatbag CEOs need to know that they are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing as their employees they so callously discard.

Old Web was extremely self-selecting. If you were in that group or adjacent to that group, it was for you. The sort of person that would read about that crazy guy making Unix from scratch and then download a bunch of floppy disk images.

The new Web is for the median human. The median human is very ordinary.

Single-handed sailing definitely limits your boat size. You have to be able to set and retrieve sails, anchors, etc., and you can't always depend on mechanical assist. Things break at the worst times.

Even couples and small families have to work within those limits somewhat, as during any long passage one person will be on watch, not two or three.

I read this many years ago, it is fantastic. The tale is very matter-of-fact, but interspersed with hard-hitting extremely personal bits. It's a great read.

The boat itself is an odd duck, a Pacific Seacraft double-ender, which was only built for a few years. Somewhat similar to the very popular Westsail 32. Many cruising sailors recommend the smallest boat that will do for you. A larger boat is more comfortable, sure, but expenses do not scale up geometrically in boats. A 60 foot boat is not twice as expensive as a 30 foot, it's more like 4 times more expensive.

Other commenters have noted other similar books (Tania Aebi, Joshua Slocum). The Pardeys, Lin and Larry, have many books on this lifestyle as well. All are very good.

It's partially about how complicated modern Web services can be, and why so many people just give up and ship a Docker container. It's also about how agonizing over the details is sometimes just wasted because all of your users are just AI scrapers.

An art professor I knew used to say about overwrought paintings "too much sugar for a dime". Technical people are often prone to this as well.

In 2005, right after Katrina hit, a lot of people in the Gulf lost power for a long time. All cell towers were overloaded constantly. What kept working was radio.

A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.

Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.

>Branded fleece vests, size: only Medium

I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!

On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.

Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported.

Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot."

I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!

US healthcare is extremely productive. It is also quite expensive.

I'm not even sure how you'd define a great programmer. Like Justice Potter Stewart I sort of "know it when I see it". For example, I don't think anybody is going to put Rasmus Lerdorf on the Mount Rushmore of Great Programmers, but man alive is PHP really important and quite good, even at the time of release.