That said, anything with a floppy drive scares me because it undeniably indicates how old it is. My SDS7102V is no Tektronix, but an honest 1 GS/sec and at the time, under $200 on eBay.

Here in Texas, electricity is only about $0.11/KWH so heat pumps work out like this:

Heat Pump 5.0 COP : $6.50 per MMBtu Natural Gas : $12 - $15 per MMBtu Propane at $3.00 / gallon : $32 per MMBtu

The unfortunate characteristic of heat pumps is that they become less efficient the more you need them, i.e. cold weather, but if weather is generally above freezing, heat pumps are close to their spec range that is based on 47F outdoor temperature.

A buried heat exchanger or a water well makes it a weather-proof geothermal system- this seems like the ideal; if you also need air conditioning it will make your cooling more efficient too.

I think in general, there are too few people putting in the deep time that prepares them to be an engineer in their near future. You're practically there already: it will feel the same after perhaps you decide to call yourself a degreed "engineer" but you will have more mental tools, broader knowledge, confidence from having been able to make what you envision, understanding across disciplines. You have a lot to look forward to! As I told my kids: don't let imposter syndrome take hold of you for a moment! You are a rarity in any group.

Today, that family plan, even as a HMO, can easily be $3000/month. I would guess that mythical apartment is maybe $1200/month now.

So what happened Health Care? how has the caregiver:administrator ratio changed in the past 30+ years? You've performed about 3x worse than Real Estate in terms of value, yet you're not quite as visible and complained-about because you hide behind employment. Hmmm.

Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.

Contrarily, open source can be easily observed to take resources in the form of created capital (ip) for less than full value or no value from the arguably more needy (individuals) and gives them to the not-needy-at-all (business).

Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?

I was an employer for a decade in the 90s and I didn't think to haze any candidates or demand huge amounts of their time on speculation: I wanted honest people who were great problem solvers; you know them when you meet them. The first clue is they know about a lot of things outside of the field you are working in as well, this shows up as a very visibly and broadly capable person, making them notably self-reliant. Everyone I hired got up to speed and stayed until well after we were acquired.

As for my opinion on Agile: creating a management system to corral people without these skills doesn't magically create these skills for you in the aggregate; it might be more robust to the influence of one individual but that is a side effect of the real goal of hiring from a much broader pool, and ensuring that nobody is overly critical at the cost of headcount and ironically, agility in the business world to quickly follow opportunities.

As for AI-written code, I wouldn't fly on a plane controlled by AI-designed and AI-tested code, but much of development is busy work, not problem solving or design. AI excels at turning a protocol spec into a parser for example. I'll take that any day. AI excels at finding stuff, particularly non-code, thesis-level ideas for algorithms and also at about the same level, what's been shown not to work when solving a non-deterministic problem.

If we're lucky, AI will fill in after exposing who is only doing busy work and who is creating.

Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x since the 4.77 MHz 8088.

In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!

This is only "true" if the energy stored in the vehicle's battery got there without any relevant conversion inefficiency; If those joules came from a gas-fired plant, overall efficiency is only about 35-40%: comparable to a typical internal combustion powered-automobile or actually worse than a diesel automobile.