Fr. There was that small window back in the early ‘10s where data was slow and expensive in India and 4g wasn’t yet pervasive in China. Execs were still receptive to my pitches that we needed to spend some engineering cycles on rework to improve initial load times / weight after showing them simulations of absurdly slow first paint / first content over simulated 2g/3g from India / China data centers.
Once 5g became pervasive and data cheap, no one gaf about a cold load weight fitting on a floppy.
I’m still clutching my iphone mini, which after ios 26 just boggs down under the absurd weight of many pages and turns in to a space heater before reloading entire page b/c of error. No need for forced obsolescence when the enshittification of basic websites takes care of that for you. :-/
Similar, read Crime and Punishment earlier this year and it took me a few pages to realize two different names were the same character. Felt silly when I realized lol.
Also just started Brothers Karamazov, but decided to switch translations and am waiting for new copy to arrive.
Just picked up an x3 from prime day sale (yeah, Amazon, sigh, I know). Super stoked to see how it is in practice. I’ve always espoused to my kids to be mindful about what they do during the “between” moments, but I increasingly find myself defaulting to HN/reddit for those little 5-10min chunks of waiting and I dislike that reflex. Looking forward to trying to build a habit around a pocketable e-reader. If nothing else, looking forward to attaching to a pocket notebook when traveling.
Sometimes more, sometimes less. Either way, those days are the most precious time you will have.
If you’re lucky, sometimes you get a few bonus days sprinkled in later on as well.
My oldest just came back from college for summer. I got to spend an evening sorting/assembling the border of a massive puzzle, listening to their 90s music playlist, and sharing some fancy whiskies I like.
Just so I’m not misunderstanding, you felt that science funding should be the first thing to give? And that other recent controversial expenditures should take priority?
Sure, but I think it’s also b/c the target audience for these keynotes has shifted. Given their immense market cap, now there’s an increased fiduciary responsibility to control how presentation lands, such as earnings reports, which comes at the expense of the fun.
lol, I have a few other memories of Steve for when there were technical issues during the keynote. WiFi congestion and dead digital camera still pop up in my memory every now and then.
> Creating false narratives like they use huge amounts of water, when in fact the cooling is a closed loop system and use less water than a single busy restaurant
My understanding was that often multiple cooling methods are employed and the ratio of use shifts seasonally; however, that evaporative cooling was still primary method, especially in hotter climates like CA and AZ.
Can you help me understand what type of data center (size, location, etc) uses less water than a busy restaurant?
> I remember figuring all this out as a self-taught teenager (pre-internet) with some books, a whole lot of time […] but man did it make me feel like I accomplished something magical.
As a parent with kids in college, high school, and middle school, I lament (worry about?) how many obstacles youth now have reaching this dynamic. That thread of curiosity, discovery, struggle, and sense of accomplishment (or just learnings) is so profoundly formative. I’ve had mixed success creating space for it across my kids, but I sure miss the “pointless” threads I followed b/c of empty time when I was a kid.
Heh. I’m not in the trades, but ~15 years ago I decided to rock/tape/mud ~800sqft of my house myself… to top it off, my lighting design included wall grazing lights and a satin sheen finish and another wall that gets hit lengthwise for 10’ at sunset. That was a long, long period that tested my sanity and marriage. It was probably good enough after first pass, but my standards were far beyond unreasonable and I had to live with results.
I eventually got rather good, albeit slow, and now can easily finish a wall where you can’t find butt or tapered seams with a flashlight, with minimal sanding. It took many hundreds of hours over the years, and a clear idea of what the bar was, for me to get there. The results still bring me joy, but more also the intuition built up around working with mud translated to a quick ramp up for more ambitious projects with stucco and concrete.
Due South… now there’s a name I have not heard in many years.
Youth in the 90’s had all sorts of quirky content available and we had enough free time to consume it all while doing a lot of nothing along the way (in a good way).
FWIW, ST:TNG only used the faux 3D effect for the season that aired on the year of Star Trek’s 25th anniversary. Subsequent seasons reverted to the 2d text.
I was going to make a joke that they should have just taken a page from the military and said “Rapid Unscheduled Maintenance”, but I guess that’s actually the phrase for it.