Unfortunately when I try to shop for them nowadays they're all AI slop. Is it too much to ask to get a nice Encyclopedia of Pastries poster? Apparently it is.

Which is really interesting!

You might do "better" than past you expected. You might do "worse". You might just do "different". But it will very rarely be what you expected you would do.

I know it surprised me when something similar happened to me. (But, alas, not a particularly good story.) And so I think that's worthy of discussion.

Not sure why this one will succeed where its forebears didn't.

When I don't know what you're going to tell me, I lose interest. When I hit descriptions of memory freeing right away, I don't know: are we going to blather in the weeds about pointers or malloc or ... ? When am I going to get to the part that's new to me? Etc. It's just hard to read, if I don't have to read it.

LLMs make this a whole lot worse because they don't need context like human readers and authors do. They can just jump right in. So they don't care, and they won't flag this, and if you end up writing for them, your writing won't be valuable to humans who need to learn.

Though if you prefer a portable one you can stuff in your pocket they have that too, and it also does just what it says on the tin.

And even apart from that and the common law right of name, it's not unusual in America to contract two-initial names like that into a single "word". Not extremely common, but not novel or particularly remarkable either.

Probably the latter.

Like I said, not a good look for Search.

I'd have tried to work out more detailed behavior but I'm poor enough at swiping (at least with Gboard) that there's little point in trying to pin it down that well, at least for me.

(Obviously far from perfect, often far from even good... just better.)

Which is not a good look for the Search teams/execs.

Always-on-screen scrollbars are only useless if you think that indication is useless. Many people find it quite valuable.

(Caveat: I've always been interviewing for members of a small team who I might very literally be sitting next to every day and communicating constantly with. BigCo interviewing is different.)

That said: do not abuse benzos. They will fuck you up.

I was prescribed temazepam for insomnia. It was the only sleep medication that worked, and it was the best sleep I've had in my life. It stopped being effective after around 30 days (or maybe 60, I forget). That was the end of that. I could have argued for a higher dose or a refill or whatever, but... you don't fuck with benzos.

(And congratulations on breaking the cycle. It's not easy.)

The simple act of forcing a roundtrip through your brain and muscles might seem like a small barrier, but I think it's actually a big step in terms of forcing you to interact with the text and take ownership. It's also not practical to do for large blocks of text, and likely will find you putting your stamp on and slightly rewriting even medium-length passages. Both of which are features of the definition.

To give a concrete example, suppose you are doing some image processing and you need to write out something like a BMP image file from the pixel data in memory. Suppose, also, that it's dynamic-ish and you can't really precompute the header and just copy it around. This is a horrifying nightmare to do in an FPGA, generally involving writing a custom state machine and populating different bits of the structure on each clock and so on and so on. (This is not an arbitrary example, sadly; I've had to do almost exactly this.) You can do it but it's just plain hard.

On a CPU you're done in five minutes, for a BMP file.

Now imagine you want to write out a JPEG or PNG. On a CPU this is hard enough that you'll probably grab a library... and then still be done in about five minutes. Maybe thirty if something's unusual or you're being extra careful. Maybe a day or two if you decide to write it yourself (don't do this).

On an FPGA? Holy hell you're in pain. You're either going to spend $$$ licensing something or you're going to be there for weeks.

That is why there are jobs that FPGAs don't do. They're not technically impossible, they're infeasibly impossible.

If it is your core business, yes, great, do them. But you'd never decide to stop making wasteful unoptimized BMP files on an FPGA "just because". It's a major chunk of work. But on a CPU, five minutes.