markbnj

When I first added it as "respectGitignore" it had no effect and my ignored folder did not show in the @ list. I changed it to "respectGitIgnore" and saved settings.json and the folder did show in the @ list. Then, after a claude restart, the folder stopped showing up. I edited and saved settings.json (but maintained the spelling "respectGitIgnore" and the folder started showing up again. Then after a coding session it stopped showing up, and changing the case of the 'i' and saving hasn't restored the behavior I want... so it just seems flaky at this point.

Very useful. Minor typo in the post if you're adding the claude code flag: it's "respectGitIgnore" not "respectGitignore". [probably not true, see below]

This article basically captures my current professional life to a high degree of accuracy. I still enjoy the work. I still get the satisfaction of conceiving a thing and seeing it realized. That has always been at the root of the pleasure that I get from this job. Like the author I find myself drifting away from the underlying layers that the agents has so thoroughly mastered, and like the author I wonder about its eventual mastery of the parts I still consider my domain.

Good story, and surprising that there was so little assistance from the OEM. As an aside, I got to test out Asus crash free BIOS a couple of weeks ago. A strong thunderstorm hit and before I could get to my office a rapid series of deep voltage drops occurred. I shut down my systems and waited out the storm. When I powered my Asus tower back on it failed to POST, automatically restarted, recovered the BIOS (CMOS settings I assume), restarted again and booted Windows. Pretty slick, and instantly removed that cold lump of lead that had formed in my gut.

I grew up in the 1960's. We lived in a suburb of Detroit where my father was a mechanical engineer who worked on drive trains and suspensions for Cadillac. My mom was a homemaker. We had one car. The house where the six of us lived was 1/3 the size of the one just my wife and I live in today. We had a black and white TV that got the network broadcasts, a single dial phone, a washer, a dryer, a stove, a toaster and a small refrigerator. My mom had a plug-in steam iron. My dad did the lawn with a push rotary mower and trimmed the sidewalks with hand clippers. We kids had bikes and board games. I did not know anybody with air conditioning. The most luxurious things we had were time, leisure and the outdoors that nobody minded us losing ourselves in for hours at a time. This isn't nostalgia by the way. I wouldn't go back. But if you could, somehow, you'd be shocked at how much less of nearly everything material there was.

I feel like the author has another disappointment coming. Alexa has been annoying in this way for a long time now. Still very useful as well, but yeah, annoying. It has always been too proactive about suggesting things I don't want or need in response to simple questions like "What is the outside temperature?" ("It's currently 46 degrees, with a low of 32 degrees expected overnight. Did you know you can turn your lights on and off according to a schedule? Would you like to schedule turning some lights on or off?") But recent AI-oriented updates have just made it worse. Now its chatty and full of attitude, and having raised a few teenagers let me tell you, that's what we want more of in our lives. Chat. And attitude.

I've got one sitting on the shelf above my desk, a 33 Mhz dx, I don't even remember what machine it came out of.

Adoption of a new technology has always sorted itself into buckets by early adopters, mainstream adopters and late adopters. I think this post is just demonstrating the mindset of the latter.

Ha, little fall down the memory hole. I had a Harris 20mhz 286 back in the late 80's. I thought that thing was a beast at the time. Paired it with a Conner 100MB disk and I remember my brother laughing derisively, "Who the hell needs 100 megabytes?"

I suspect that my recent experience confirms this. Our daughter shipped two suitcases home from the UK, paying some local company for "door-to-door" delivery. They contracted with UPS who demanded an additional $32 when the first bag showed up. For the second she paid the same fee online so they wouldn't require a check at the door.

Like the author I've been in the process of archiving family memories since my parents passed away. In my Dad's case his early fascination with super 8mm film gave way to a lifelong quest to own more Kodak slide carousels than any other human. It's sort of an odd place to be, when you're in possession of so much that _seems_ emotionally, viscerally important, but that ordinary people living their everyday lives take very little actual interest in. I scanned all the slides with a Kodak thing I bought on Marketplace. There were more than 6500 of them and the archive has passed 20GB in size. Now I have a stack of plastic kodak carousels taller than I am and thousands of slides that I can't just put in the trash because it feels wrong.

I'm working on loose documents and photos now with a great Epson flatbed scanner that I've had for years. It's something of an obsession for me now: to finish the job and tie their lives and a good chunk of ours off neatly. When I'm done I'll pack it all onto thumb drives and send copies to my siblings and they will look at a few of them and then put the drives in a drawer and that will likely be the end of it. But I will have done my duty to the old folks, even though it took long enough that I became one. It has all reminded me of how I mourned when I lost a hard drive years ago, and then came to the realization that I hadn't looked at any of its contents in years and that if I lived to be 100 probably none of it would ever have been important again anyway. You can't really keep anything, so do your kids a favor and dispose of your stuff while you can :).

For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a good start :).

I would not say your list is anything like complete, although those topics are often discussed here. Apple is a huge player in the general computing ecosystem, and probably a majority of front- and back-end developers these days work on macbooks, so it isn't surprising that the things they do resonate in this community.