inejge

"Properly" is doing a lot of work here (Claude would say it's load-bearing ;) If one's needs are modest, then no, the 4-5 basic operations don't need a 400-page book to understand, and are quite proper for version-controlling one's software.

"Let's go get sushi and not pay." -- Repo Man, 1984.

That's into the absurdist territory, but it reflects the real pattern of behavior. People do go around committing petty crimes for various reasons.

> Oliver Heaviside [...] even claimed Germans would get short sighted by reading Fraktur

Well Heaviside was a bit of a kook, especially in his later years, and that claim seems entirely in character :) My contacts with Fraktur are intermittent and brief, so I don't really have an opinion; I mostly encounter it in an old German-English dictionary which I occasionally consult, where the German text is printed in Fraktur. I don't have too many problems reading it.

If the pill has a score line, it's designed for halving (or quartering, if it has two.) Otherwise, no guarantees.

> It’s been established that LLM-generated code is not copyrighted

If that's a reference to Thaler v. Perlmutter, the only thing that's been established is that an LLM can't be considered an author under the Copyright Act, only a human being can. It says nothing about the consequences of a human claiming authorship of LLM-generated code, which would be relevant here.

One out of two isn't catastrophic, but dear gods, wouldn't it be nice if people consulted the map instead of going off by the vibes. Poor Moldova, it got roped into the Balkans just by being a small impoverished country in the general neighborhood.

Any party can win if it gets the majority of candidates across all parliamentary constituencies. However, a Prime Minister must be elected as an MP somewhere. If Reform got a majority without Farage being elected, they would be in a strange situation where the leader of the party couldn't become the PM. It's amusing to think about, in a schadenfreudish way, but the chances of that are slim. He would certainly stand in a general election for the same seat, other major parties would contest it, and it seems that Clacton-on-Sea supports him over the others. This by-election is special because the major parties are boycotting it for being a self-serving stunt that it is.

Couldn't help noticing:

In other words, it’s not just a tool problem, any more than it’s a human resources problem or a leadership problem. Instead it is a systemic problem [...]

Shades of an LLMism, a bit padded, a quarter of a century ago. These days someone could easily give it a stink-eye. I'm sure that training has ingested this along with countless similar examples.

> are there people that use the caps lock key?

I for one do. Old habit when typing in longish C constants (ECONNRESET) or shell environment variables. I'm used to typing capitals by holding the Shift with the pinky of the other hand than the one entering the letter, so with long strings of capitals sometimes I'd have to switch for every other letter, which gets old fast. With Caps Lock, I press it, type in the letters, press it again.

Completion mostly works these days if you have it, but you don't always.

Domino theory as applied to business, plus one should never underestimate the lengths to which a company will go to wring the last ounce of profit from a market.

> This is what they don't tell you about continuous/transition/progressive bifocals: optically they don't work.

I'll defer to your judgement re optical properties, but I want to offer a counter-anecdote about practicality.

I've had myopia and have been wearing negative diopter glasses for over half my life. I've never needed vision correction for reading. This is not an unusual combination, and if you want a celebrity example, watch some old Apple keynote videos with the late Steve Jobs, who would repeatedly lift his glasses to read something on the phone in his hand. This "works", but can be inconvenient in some situations.

A while ago, I started thinking about progressive bifocals. Cursory web searches told me that my particular combo was impractical. My optician didn't see a problem, so I decided to trust him and got a pair made. The TLDR is that they work for me much better than the old ones. There was a period of adaptation. Going downstairs and looking at the floor/ground were a bit disorienting for a while, but i don't notice it any more. Switching between the monitor and the phone or paper in front of me works, which is why I wanted the bifocals in the first place. I only use the old glasses for watching TV, probably meaning that my TV-watching posture sucks, but fortunately I don't watch a lot of TV. I still take off the glasses for sustained book reading.

> But the 15c 'Collector's Edition' had some issues, and I wonder about the build quality and reliability of this new one, too.

Build quality deteriorated (from impressive heights) more than 25 years ago, when HP's calculator manufacturing moved to China. Not on account of China itself, but it was definitely a cost-cutting measure, and higher-end calculators were becoming an endangered species even then. For example, keycaps used to be double-shot injection molded, so the legends could never wear out; no more, now they're silkscreened like with everyone else. The new key mechanism could never reach the robustness and reliability of the old one, which is a problem if you're used to every keypress felt in your fingertips being correctly registered.

(Not everything was premium quality. On my late 15C, the faceplate logo wore out and the soft sleeve crumbled to dust after a couple of years. But the machine itself continued to work flawlessly until an unfortunate accident with a space heater.)

Additionally, the new Voyagers (1x series) are not running on the original, custom HP "Nut" CPUs, but on ARM microcontrollers, presumably via firmware emulation. It's impressive that the whole things works so transparently, but as I dimly recall, there were problems with that emulation in the first 15C Collector Edition runs, supposedly fixed now.

So, if you buy a new Voyager these days, you're getting a convincing replica of the originals from the '80s, nothing more. Caveat emptor.

Yes. Bell Labs are a shadow of their former glory, when Bell could lavishly fund it, having a quasi-socialist telecommunications monopoly. Private companies don't like to fund research outside of their own domain -- that has been offloaded to federal funding, but (as seen here) it's getting a lot more strings attached.

> I almost never write code directly (it's always Claude)

Who, then, understands the code? If the answer is "no one really", entropy will overwhelm your codebase sooner or later. Otherwise, you need to read the code, and for that the knowledge of language is still relevant.

> Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”.

It's a bit more varied, even in the Indo-European family. What does tend to happen is that the words for handedness get positive (right) or negative (left) associations in idioms, but additional meanings are not universal. In French, "droit" additionally means right (as human right), but not "correct" (yes it does have a bunch of adjacent meanings). In German, "recht" gets to mean "law" or "justice", shared by some Slavic languages ("pravo") -- but not all of them, which have the word "desno", without any association with rights/justice/correctness. The Latin "dexter" gave us "dexterity" and "dexterous", but also nothing alluding to justice. Et cetera.

As an aside, "left" originating from "left over" sounds like folk ethymology to me. Dictionaries point to "weak" as the original meaning.