Yes, just to keep a current version in the decade. My first repurchase was either because moving from powerPC to Intel compatibility or wanting docx files with a big Office shift.
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
Methane >> carbon dioxide as a polyethylene/linear polymers feed stock. Double bonded oxygens are hella higher affinity than four loose hydrogens. Also as pointed out, even in a concentrated combustion effluent stack CO2 is low concentration at atmospheric pressure.
I don’t know about methane as an aromatic/hybridized ring building block. Anything is possible with chemical synthesis but is it energy feasible.
There’s always plant hydrocarbon feed stocks but I think using arable land to make plastics is dumb and also carbon intensive. (I do wear cotton clothing tho because you need to make trade offs).
The carbon isn’t valuable elementally as much as it is structurally and molecularly. I mean that as aromatic rings and other ready made building blocks that conveniently can be fractionally separated with pressure and temperature conditions in a column as a gross generalization. All of this is energy intensive but much less so than building up from three atom molecules with strong bonds. And much much less energy intensive than separating a trace % molecule from the atmosphere at low atmospheric pressure and translating that to complex molecules.
There needs to be more appreciation for the laws of thermodynamics when discussing technology. Everything is not a 1-dimensional reduced abstraction.
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
Nah, I like organizing and packing my own bags to unpack into my refrigerator and pantry. And I appreciate the reprieve from small talk to the cashier or feeling the person behind me being inconvenienced by my slowness putting bags in the cart. Plus it helps me get a secondary feedback on relative costs of items in my cart. I’m all for self checkout as an awkward dude that appreciates some quiet time when shopping.
I go to wholefoods (self checkout) and trader joes (cashier) and other local branded stores with cashiers. I feel the least amount of rushed at wholefoods and the most at trader joes.
Edit - I hate the self checkout at home depot in my area where they show the facial recognition bounding boxes on the screen. Like I know that’s happening behind the scenes but home depot makes the whole experience so blatantly loss-prevention and customer profiling motivated vs a good transparent customer experience that I’ve made a point to go to smaller branded hardware stores.
Latitude may affect the eddy currents and resulting convective shear on the film surface imparted by angular momentum from the earth’s spin.
This is what humors me about analytical minded computation focused people vs dumb simple engineer and physics (practical) people. That is imagining all the infinities of what may change a physical result vs knowing by experience or education.
ANOVA: analysis of variance from linear fit parameters will show you in experimental data or simulation the contributing factors. Or you can read a chapter in an undergraduate heat transfer book.
Decay rate of (T(t) - T_inf)/(T(0) - T_inf) is probably dominated by the wind speed in your room. For an 8-12oz cup a sphere or cylinder will get you pretty close.
Non-scientific anecdote here but I feel like the lawlessness is due to lack of enforcement for traffic violations vs an uptick in weed usage. Possibly covid scrambled our brains and promotes aggressive impulsive behavior. Maybe cops are afraid to pull people over because they might inadvertently shoot them and become a national news story. Maybe the adoption of big trucks makes people feel invincible (two distinct trucks on my drive have cut in line at a left turn lane with a red arrow and crossed 2 lanes opposing traffic at different lights, what would possess someone to do that(?))
Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.
I think this says more about how much of our tasks and demonstrations of ability as developers revolve around boilerplate and design patterns than it does about the Cognitive abilities of modern LLMs.
I say this fully aware that a kitted out tech company will be using LLMs to write code more conformant to style and higher volume with greater test coverage than I am able to individually.
I’ve always worked in a datacenter (non cloud) with separate db servers to the app servers. Besides network latency, what is the advantage of collocating the http server and database server on one machine?
It’s always given me a separation of concerns good feeling by seeing a dedicated db and app server and doesn’t seem like much overhead, given they are nearby machines in datacenter.
Also, our main reason was sharing a database license to have a well resourced multi-tenant/app db sever serving peripheral web app servers.
This is a QVC product with the name of a US tech city slapped on it.
Signed, a guy living nearby the home of QVC in a decidedly non-tech area of the US.
Ps. don’t buy future e-waste kitchen ware unless you have accessibility reasons. You can get a good-enough victoronix 8” chef knife for $65 (I paid $36 a long time ago) and a world class chef knife for less than $250.
I think that has more to do with our willingness or ability to value labor in a highly abstracted overseas and automated economy. In addition, there has been a complete disconnect between $1USD purchasing power and generation ability based on capital scale. I don't know what financial crisis or tax policy or free trade agreement or visa program that stems from.
I think that in the knowledge worker class, people tend to confuse their learned skills and inherited starting point to their innate abilities. Illusory superiority is best mocked in prairie home companion's Lake Woebegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" [0].
Give kids a stable home environment with loving supportive parents, three square meals a day, 9+ hours of sleep and opportunity to pursue their creative or sports interests and you'll have a class of highly functioning humans of different abilities.
It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current job, housing, and grocery market though. I cannot imagine the stress of being a sole provider. My point is to not conflate genetic superiority to the multitude of factors that go in to making a talented skillful worker, where I think nurture cannot be discounted.
Lower and median IQ people still benefit from literacy, numeracy, and art to function in society. The point of education systems isn’t to boost individuals’ dimensionally reduced 1D metrics but rather enrich their lives and contributions to society. There will always be distributions of abilities and means but that doesn’t justify neglecting the bulk of tax paying people.
This is my favorite video using the poor rendering in the game to make cool art effects. Full disclosure there may be an artistic license and post processing but it’s hilarious you can get these visuals in a modern game.
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.