michaelsmanley

I thought that as well and then realized I had inserted the word "of" before "using" where there's an implied "by."

I had my doubts about my pressure cooker when I received it, as I recalled the monstrosity my mother used when I was a kid. But that thing gets used several times a week now.

Combined with a recipe from Kenji, I'm going to have to try it. I have yet to make anything from Serious Eats, and particularly Kenji's recipes, that I didn't enjoy making and eating.

Same here. I scan the post titles to decide what to look at, and only open the HN discussion if the article looks like the discussion will be at all useful. That's increasingly rare.

Oh, that's funny. The only ISP that services my current domicile blocks sites all the time in the name of "safety," including several I need to access for my job. I have to use a VPN just to get things done. There's no appeal process or channel, either. Thankfully, I'm a month out from moving somewhere that has actual choice in providers, though I'll probably still use the VPN anyway.

Pronounced, "effin," right?

We just finished a 6-week period where my mother-in-law was cared for at home 24/7 by personal assistants, with three shifts per day. Whole dumb, long story on why we had to do this, and I am very glad it is over (she's in memory care now), but I can say:

First, the PAs from the agency who employed them did a better job than we could have. Most of them were current nurses picking up extra money or former nurses who had retired from active work. Save for one who was new to the job and clearly in over her head (and removed from the account after one short shift), they were all competent and conscientious caregivers, if maybe struggling personally one way or another. Not a job anyone chooses to do, I suspect, but one they're often driven to by circumstance.

Second, that kind of care is prohibitively expensive long-term. The memory care facility costs 25% to 30% of the in-home care, and is far safer. We got lucky and had access to a smaller facility with a very low resident-to-staff ratio.

In the US, at least, I don't see the prospects for this kind of care getting anything but worse. I worry that once the Baby Boomer volume of elders passes through the system, the capital that has swallowed so much of elder care up will pull out and a lot of it will collapse and what survives won't be particularly good or affordable, even compared to current levels.

I just want to comment on how clear I find Filippo Valsorda's writing on this kind of thing. Even for an old dunderhead like me, his mathematics and examples were easy to follow. I really appreciate that kind of clarity in technical writing.

Bisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."

Oh, so sad to read. Everyone knew him when I was at Purdue. A rare mind. RIP, ghg.

"All art is ultimately about the creation of art," was the kind of reductive thinking that made me drop any pretense of continuing in academia after I finished my MFA. While I thought that was a marginally better stance than taken by the folks who insisted that all "texts" were fungible (which led to one student, when we were assigned to write a review of a short fiction collection published in the last year, instead wrote a scholarly paper covering his thesis chair's years-old volume of television criticism, which the professor accepted as equivalent), the whole discussion put me off literature for years and I scuttled back to programming, where at least when things didn't make sense there was some chance of fixing them.

Oddly enough, I happen to be reading this book right now (though my edition is titled "An Island Called Moreau"). I had just finished re-reading Wells and Silvia Moreno Garcia's "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" (a re-telling of the story set in colonial Mexico), and thought I'd try Aldiss's version. I am still trying to decide if he wrote it as a satire or not.

Yeah, when I say "nice" about the screen, it is all relative. Mine was nice compared to the original screen on the Model 1.

There are very few pieces of laptop/notebook hardware that I really enjoyed. The 5140 was one of them. I doubt I'd enjoy it now, but 40 years ago I found it just lovely.