Not sure if you ever make it over to HKG but there are quite a few cargo 747s that still seem to be making the rounds. CX and others have them on the GA / cargo side, and when on Lantau you often see (and hear!) them on final or takeoff.
I think CX would hate to retire them because from what I understand their load capacity is unparalleled. And you can load horses in them! There'll always be money from that for HAECO to keep them aloft.
It's even better when you're at the bus terminal at HKIA and watching them fly overhead...
Your story also reminded me of the early LUG scene, distributed all over the world. We believed and all we had access to were the dirtiest ratshit computers but hey they could boot Slackware or Debian and maybe if you said the right incantation you could get that 10Mb card you got for free but was still the most valuable part to work with cat5 Ethernet so you could download stuff from a local sunsite mirror so you could join in the future.
I was a little disappointed with the results I was seeing in F#. I thought the .NET + GPT-5.* pull through would be sufficient but it never seemed to work out. Maybe I just wasn’t approaching it correctly.
My pipeline for this is vscode + prompts + markdown templates + GitHub copilot -> markdown docs -> pandoc to produce.docx -> copilot in word for “nice” formatting -> copilot in ppt for nice decks. LLMs all the way down.
I find it’s easier to version control and diff the .md artefacts, those remain my authoritative source.
Copilot Cowork in the M365 ecosystem. It inherits all the permissions from my account, has access to exchange to send me emails, and OneDrive to save each day’s summary for posterity and future refinement.
In business: using coworking tools to review and propose filing of emails; manage my files and folders; on a daily basis scour the intranet for interesting and relevant content.
Personal: my wife tutors in her native language to non-native primary and high school kids. They are all using these tools now generate fresh content for practice based on school lesson plans. The kids are improving much more quickly now than they were just a few months ago.
Cue the development of a limpet drone that would be enough to take down one of these birds in a non-destructive way… although perhaps these ones in particular would be uniquely positioned to deal with such adversaries.
I am somewhat relieved to be working in a regulated industry where deterministic outputs are still needed. Maybe when someone has a validated AI model there will be trouble ...
both my kids are using my old Filco TKL keyboards with blues. Absolutely no complaints from either of them. Only issues are that the footpads are getting a little worn down, one is missing, and I think I spilled beer on one many years ago before I gave them up.
I also have the Filco keycap puller. Keyboard cleaned and saved!
I now use a Keychron K2 with browns. My fingers are getting too old to use blues on a regular basis.
I still remember how cool I thought raster was with his vaio and everything. This was the future! Transparent eterms and tasteful backgrounds everywhere.
I think CX would hate to retire them because from what I understand their load capacity is unparalleled. And you can load horses in them! There'll always be money from that for HAECO to keep them aloft.
It's even better when you're at the bus terminal at HKIA and watching them fly overhead...