Viewing profile — michaelsmanley

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. Combi…

Anecdotal, but I have built from scratch a fairly large OpenAPI-compliant service using the Goa dsl ( https://goa.design ) and a coding agent and I've suspected for a while that th…

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 rar…

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 V…

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 thi…

This reminds me of one of my favorite Mac apps ever, Feeder: https://reinventedsoftware.com/feeder/ Literally, the only app I miss after leaving the Apple ecosystem. The question I…

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…

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 …

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 thou…

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 "T…

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 th…

That was almost 40 years ago, so little I recall other than it was an 8088 variant in there, the peripheral bus was unique to that machine and the only documentation was in the tec…

When I was a co-op student employee at IBM in the late 80s, I was given a desk in what was otherwise a storage room piled with stuff that had been used and then set aside. One box …

That made me laugh when I read it, too.

Thanks for pointing this interview out. I've really enjoyed Mattie Lubchansky's comics. I first ran into her work on The Nib , which was as close to a successor to the zine World W…

Only a single data point, but my father, who was Vietnam-era USMC in "special weapons," wore his wristwatches this way all his life. He never really said why other than that was wh…

This so accurately describes the last week of my life. Years of shrugs and "we will get to that when " when security concerns are brought up. Thankfully, we had done some of the wo…

Others have said it here, but I read this and thought, "Why not just prioritize spending time with them now, while they're still alive?" I'm not convinced that the human condition …

IIRC, that decision has been covered in one of the many documentaries covering Nuclear Waste Disposal Area 2 and the 9/13/1999 accident.

As a lifelong (congenital) anosmic, I often think about the practical consequences of lacking that sense. A whole therapeutic avenue cut off, if I'm thinking about this correctly, …

I was about to post the same thing here. BBQ mutton from Moonlite in Owensboro, KY is one of my favorite foods, second only to their burgoo made with mutton. Long, long ago, Owensb…

I'm so glad there are still sites like this.