Viewing profile — sgerenser

It’s not really intended to be a recurring $9.99/mo. It’s $9.99, and that gives you a month of usage. But the expectation is you use it once or twice, then you’re done for a long t…

Yeah sunrise, when the lawn is soaking wet with dew.

There’s a whole book on Microsoft’s hiring brainteasers, appropriately from 2004 right around when the practice was waning and brainteasers started to get a bad reputation: How Wou…

The Big Mac thing is kinda sad, just a few years ago I used to tell people who complained about the increasing cost of fast food “You just gotta use the App!” Which was true, with …

Yeah, they should have stopped at hogsheads, which is a well understood quantity worldwide.

RIP. I remember he had a column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. Probably at the same time he was writing for PC Magazine. It was the original "ragebait" since he always seeme…

Pre-1990s Macs (Mac Plus, SE, etc.) in good condition are actually worth a decent amount nowadays as collectors items. Not $5000, but quite a bit more than $25.

For many tech jobs, that still wouldn’t help much. Salary alone is often half or less of total compensation. They’d also need to include stock grants and bonuses for the comparison…

Yeah I've definitely heard belt-and-suspenders since way before LLMs were a thing. Probably even used it once or twice myself.

Upvote because AFAIK this is true. Not sure why your comment was downvoted to dead just a few minutes ago.

No, certainly just cutting physician salaries wouldn’t make a big difference. But cutting salaries for everyone involved, including physicians, nurses, and administration would. I’…

How much of these new grad researchers have undergrad degrees in music vs. science or math? I’d suspect there’s very few of the former, and even then they got the position despite …

I have only a bachelors degree from a school ranked #57 in U.S. news undergraduate engineering programs (not terrible, but hardly prestigious). Google still interviewed me a few ti…

You might find those salaries reasonable, but they’re probably double what those same occupations pay in many other (first world) countries with lower healthcare costs. Maybe the t…

Is anyone who was in grade school in the 1990s reminded of Apple’s “simplified” MacOS shell called At Ease? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease

If this kind of stuff interests you, you might want to check into the upcoming “Designed in California” podcast about Apple’s history (still on kickstarter but I think the campaign…

I don't think anyone is really blaming MUMPS for the limitations it had to work with 1970s tech. The story was more about how terrible it is to work with in the 2000s and the surpr…

Yeah, that seems to be the dominant theory, especially since the AppleTV hasn't been updated in a few years and is widely expected to be "due" for a new model within the next few m…

Even better is “defenestration,” a fancy term for throwing someone out of a window.

Mississippi, despite its much lower per capita income than California, has a much higher percentage of housing units with air conditioning (93% vs 72%). AC is now so inexpensive th…

The Economist is not an American publication though.

Interesting, I knew most of Europe wasn’t very big on AC, but I didn’t know permanent residential installations were practically banned in (at least some parts of) Switzerland: htt…

Joel Spolsky coined the term “Shlemiel the Painter’s Algorithm” for this type of thing back in 2001: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/