Viewing profile — alexjplant

For my fellow '90s kids: the Canadair CL-215 [1] was the chief visual inspiration for the plane that Baloo flies in the Disney cartoon series "Talespin". [1] https://en.wikipedia.o…

> In order to lease an iPhone, you must select one of the following carriers (but you cannot use a prepaid carrier plan): ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I suppose I'll keep buying my phones outright...…

I've too many wacky interview stories to list here, but the first time I came to this same conclusion was when I had an interviewer interrupt me mid-answer to correct my pronunciat…

I've been getting into 3D printing recently and while the flagship Anthropic models can regurgitate community wisdom about the hobby they can't do spatial reasoning. They'll tell m…

It's cultural. Rave kids who listen to melodic dubstep drink Ghost because they like everything brightly-colored and artificial. Good ole' boys blowing stuff up in the woods drink …

My favorite college food hack was the 1/4 lb Big Bite at 7 Eleven. The one near my house sold them for $1 and had an extensive bar of vegetables in addition to the machine that sec…

From TFA: > Applied with a handheld tool, the patch stays on the skin for around 10 to 15 minutes You'd notice.

> I know a lot of people use postpaid, but I can't understand why. Two reasons: data caps and device cost. People want iPhones but they cost $1000 outright which isn't a small amou…

I didn't read a good chunk of what we were assigned in high school because I was stuck there for almost 8 hours every day and had jobs and extracurriculars afterwards. In college I…

This was a central plot point of the film adaptation of "Johnny Mnemonic". From Wikipedia: > In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effe…

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Elect…

My grandparents sprung for a subscription to PC Magazine when I was a preteen for a year or two so that I could read his column in the very back of each issue. I'm sure my thoughts…

> home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that ke…

Claude does this too. I asked it recently to compare two versions of a song (the original and '97 remake of EPMD's "You Gots To Chill", if anybody wants to try and replicate this) …

We do. People who, for example, memorize question banks to pass certification tests without knowing the underlying material are equally frowned upon for not having the problem solv…

The Zapp & Roger shout-out in the title is gold too.

> I am in neither of these and nor is any of the many people I know with macbooks. I honestly do not understand why any average person would buy anything else than a macbook today.…

I must confess that I asked a leading question. At no point did I say that the usage wasn't real; by way of dramatic omission I was more pointing to the fact that a common ECMAScri…

> This is the same shape as many other life-cycle bugs [...] Claude-ism detected. IME with Claude Code an object does not have a type or definition, apparently, but rather a shape …

I was about to link to something I'd read in Foreign Policy a few days ago until Krugman beat me to the punch: > I don’t want to overstate the case here. The dollar’s role as the d…