massysett

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.

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.

“ 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.