Models are such a great tool, artistically, culturally, and scientifically. Joe's NYC model really helps put the scale of the city into perspective.

"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."

I used nothing but emacs for several years (well, xemacs, but close enough), because I was using an old Thinkpad, and long-term use of the trackpoint gave me RSI in my finger. Being able to use nothing but the keyboard was nice.

Eventually I went back to BBEdit and have remained there. You can make it mostly keyboard oriented if you want, but sometimes using the mouse is easier/faster, and I have a lot of reps inside of BBEdit. It just seems more like home to me. A nice balance between GUI and keyboard-focussed IMO.

Every construction admin, supervisor, field inspection guy, etc. has a top of the line iPad Pro, in an Otterbox, with a kind of sling that helps you hold it with one hand, and an Apple Pencil, and they spend all day in Plangrid.

This setup has completely eaten the entire market.

But as a guy that teaches kids about computing and system administration, having another option to demonstrate is excellent. For many things something like nano is fine, but for something a bit more robust? And is available for many platforms? And is small and self-contained? It's a great option. The Lua extensibility is also a bonus.

Teaching teenagers how to use vim or emacs is, not surprisingly, a bit of a chore.

For certain types of work, they are excellent. I used an SE/30 as a dedicated writing and light programming machine for several years. It presents a friendly face, and the intimacy of the small screen is nice.

The small screen discourages distraction, though the small resolution was a bit of a chore while programming (lots of scrolling).

I'd like to see a toaster Mac-style box, perhaps with a slightly bigger screen, say 12", and with a decent resolution.

If a company like Google, with its ability to attract the best of the best, cannot handle the complexity of security and safety with SaaS/PaaS products, at what point do we say that perhaps this sector needs much more oversight?

Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just a giant wad of binary data.

This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.

By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make your primary physical.

America has followed a similar tack, and for many of the same reasons. High-minded ideas like "international cooperation" sound especially good to those nations who are not sitting at the top, but for those that are it does seem less than ideal. I.e., I'm sure that Montenegro is big on international cooperation, but China will justifiably ask "cui bono" (but in Chinese).

There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.

On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.

At a certain point, the professional piano player can make much better use of the arpeggiator button. But the novice piano player benefits greatly from all the slogging arpeggio practice. It's certainly possible that skipping all that grunt work will improve and/or advance music, but it's hardly a sure thing. That's the experiment we're running right now with AI programming. I suppose we'll see soon enough, and I hope I'm utterly wrong about the concerns I have.

The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel, so he does not overload a phase. But he was not born with them. These are acquired over many years of labor and tutelage.

If AI removes these barriers--and I think it will, as AI-enhanced programmers will out-perform and out-compete those who are not in today's employment market--then the programmer will learn different skills that may or may not be in keeping with language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition, etc. They may in fact be orthogonal to these skills.

The effect of this may be an improvement, of course. It's hard to say for sure as I left my crystal ball in my other jacket. But it will certainly be different. And those who are predisposed for programming in the old-school way may not find the field as attractive because it is no longer the same sort of engineering, something like the difference between the person that designs a Lego set and the person that assembles a Lego set. It could, in fact, mean that the very best programmers become a kind of elite, able to solve most problems with just a handful of those elite programmers. I'm sure that's the dream of Google and Microsoft. However this will centralize the industry in a way not seen since perhaps IBM, only with a much smaller chance of outside disruption.

I won't take it for granted now.

As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)

Snapshots on ZFS are extremely cheap, since it works on the block level, so snapshots every hour or even 15 minutes are now doable if you so wish. Combine with weekly or monthly snapshots that can be replicated off-site, and you have a pretty robust storage system.

This is all home sysadmin stuff to be sure, but even if you just use it as a plain filesystem, the checksum integrity guarantees are worth the price of admission IMO.

FWIW, software RAID like ZFS mirrors or mdm is often superior to hardware raid especially for home use. If your raid controller goes blooey, which does happen, unless you have the exact same controller to replace it, you run a chance of not being able to mount your drives. Even very basic computers are fast enough to saturate the drives in software these days.

I guess the McDonald's ad didn't need words either, but it was just depressing and awful.

For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.

Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.

This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.

Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.