Viewing profile — markbnj

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. …

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…

The John McPhee article that the author references was expanded into a book, and it's a great read for anyone that finds this story interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Oranges-John…

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 …

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 remembe…

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 …

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 lifelon…

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 writt…

https://markbetz.net

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 major…

I think the dangers that LLMs pose to the ability of engineers to earn a living is overstated, while at the same time the superpowers that they hand us don't seem to get much discu…

Ditto, self-hosted for over eight years at my last job. SCM server and 2-4 runners depending on what we needed. Very impressive stability and when we had to upgrade their "upgrade …

I once found a bug in code that was read to me over the phone while I sat in an airport waiting for a flight. So I agree that constructing a model of the program in your head is th…

A type system lets different parts of a program agree on how to interpret a pattern of bits in memory and then enforce that interpretation. I don't think electronic circuits built …

> crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous Given the way death was implemented ("LFG @ EC tunnel for a corpse run to Guk!") and the fact that you could fall …

We're not seeing any connectivity issues between pods and vms in our vpc, but your mileage may vary.

>> Is that a measured observation? Not trying to nitpick - genuinely curious if this is your observation from experience or there are some studies that you are referring to. It is …

As an almost-daily motorcyclist with 15k miles on my current machine (Suzuki DL650), I absolutely agree that the increased proportion of pickup trucks on the road increases the ris…

Like using a throwaway account to accuse someone of cowardice.

Lots of memories from my own childhood and my kids'. My dad took me on my first visit to a Detroit-area store in the mid-60's. Used to love just walking around and checking out the…

Nice shot of nostalgia seeing pictures of the mill in Maynard. I taught C++ classes there back in the early 90's. It was fairly early in my professional career and just being in th…

I have all 21 of the Aubrey-Maturin novels and have read them through twice. At the end of the last time I mentally bid them a fond farewell, sure that I would never devote the tim…

I also still have an original user's guide, and I think the quick-reference pamphlet too.

Sad to read this, but all things pass I guess. Spent a large chunk of my life posting on and reading the AT forum. Last I checked I still have a mod account. Things sort of started…