sprinkly-dust

Every house there (that can afford the essential $200 or so) has a Reverse Osmosis water filter because the municipal water supply (if any) is not considered potable.

F-Star and Dijkstra Monads (which are apparently not really monads?) might get you to what you're looking for

The OS-wide Emacs bindings are one of the main things still keeping me on macOS; in editors like Helix (or Zed with Helix mode) I invoke these really cursed combinations of the Helix(vim-like) shortcuts in the editor with the Emacs ones from the OS and it feels really natural as a means of moving around text.

I haven't put in enough effort to replicate the experience on GNOME but once I jump ship from Apple I'll have to.

The way macOS treats shortcuts thanks to the separation of Command and Control is great. It even makes Google Docs pretty painless to use because it's mostly like Emacs. Word still tries to hijack the shortcuts so that's suboptimal.

I have fond memories of fiddling with the wave simulations on this website during high school!

A couple hundred lines of regex for a full email validation might disagree with you there.

I hope to see these seemingly mundane unknown unknowns raised in space travel centered hard science fiction. I think The Martian and Seveneves almost captured these but not quite.

> the guy who makes one watch a month

That's the thing, though. Most people alive today will never be able to possess such an object, no matter how prized and beloved it is. Still, if people want to be able to tell the time from their wrist in a reliable fashion, there are _plenty_ of far cheaper options available to them. The craftsmanship does have inherent value, yes. That does not mean the practical solution is worthless.

There can be practices incorporated in the production of software, involving AI use in a responsible fashion (difficult, of course), that produces practical solutions to real world problems far faster than a group of industry-hardened veterans painstakingly polishing their codebase in pursuit of craftsmanship. Those who appreciate how it is made will pay for the crafstmanship. Those who cannot afford to do so, and only care about a solution working well enough for the tasks they want to accomplish, the production line is good enough.

There are still free as in freedom software hardliner folks out there. The idea that every piece of revoked source code is an affront to computing rights might be less applicable in Obsidian's case since the files are still portable, and the system may be sufficiently extensible through custom plugins (you can load anything you want through the developer plugins option) that source code itself is not necessary. Though perhaps one might want to re-assure themselves that there is nothing 'malicious' happening in the software, that's only achievable with auditing it oneself and using reproducible builds. Perhaps the freedom to fork is also not as thoroughly infringed since the files are portable and reverse engineering is not impeded.

Club Penguin always held a special place in my heart but I never reflected on why. I'm sure part of it is a yearning for simpler times and a childhood unawareness of the nature of the world.

However, playing this reminded me of exploring hidden parts of a map imbued with love, the joys of finding other souls just lounging around or moving excitedly, and the cute little games and things strewn about every corner.

Agreed, I really prefer using my reMarkable 2. I see it less like an iPad and more like a bottomless pit of scratch paper and printouts that I can carry more conveniently than individual dead tree products. This is probably furthered by my not using their cloud subscription and using a USB cable or SSH to transfer files instead.

A lot of lower division math and computer science courses now presuppose iPads or other digital pen devices for working through handouts during lecture. Printed handouts are often available at request, but not the expectation / default.

On the other hand, I've seen more professors — especially in the humanities, but also upper div CS — start banning devices in lecture partially or altogether. Complete distraction (scrolling Instagram, etc.) during lecture is extremely prevalent, and they keep citing noticeable improvements in engagement after banning devices. This also coincides with a shift back to less take-home assignments and more exam-style assessment since they want greater assurance people aren't completely offloading their cognition to LLMs.

David Huffman too, made some very complex paper folding models from relatively abstract mathematics, although apparently did not like them being likened to origami.

I would disagree that a smartphone without a working camera is perfectly usable. A lot of the world — especially in developing countries — runs on QR Codes for everything from restaurant menus to electronic payments. Without a camera, other stuff too, like KYC, just doesn't work. These are the sorts of changes that, as you mentioned, are forcing people to use smartphones. And they rely on the camera.

comma.ai is an autonomous driving add-on (fully open source software and hardware IIRC) for cars that don't have (full) autonomous driving but do have hardware like radar cruise control, etc. that can let software control the accelerator, brakes, steering, etc. so that the add-on can take control of the car.

The OP brings up testimony of someone other than himself who prefers when software drives their car rather than him.