I've seen it as fast as 24 hours my unique email address is being used by others even though their privacy policy says that they will never share your info.

o1 preview gave a much more in depth but completely wrong answer. It took 5 follow ups to get it to recognize that it hallucinated a non-existent law

This theory makes the most sense to me.

I used to fly up the East Coast and back every other week and I couldn't imagine doing it without it. Seeing the 1-hour standard line and instead making it through PreCheck in less than 5 minutes. I would totally use a self-service system.

When people get PreCheck the normal reaction is "That was easy, why doesn't everyone do that?" I joke that the real "test" when you sign up for PreCheck is can you successfully book the appointment and show up?

Lots of cool functionality like:

Lenses: Allows you to run a search to prioritize certain domains to give you a particular "lens" to view it through.

Personalized results: Allows you to give additional weight or decrease the weight of certain domains.

Search Bangs: Shortcuts for executing the search somewhere else like Reddit, Wikipédia, Google, etc.

I decided to pay for it not because of the ads or privacy or anything else but because it allows me to make "search" work better for my needs.

The prototypes he built so far are very impressive and he’s been using them as part of his workflow.

Kernigan mentioned the dilemma To Ken Thompson—of Unix fame. The next day he came to work with a new program that could quickly find strings in a text document without having to load the entire document into memory. It became known as grep.

Where I work, employees can work from home or in the office, THEIR choice. There are no mandates. As long as you’re getting done what you need to get done, no one really cares where you do it.

I know several who thrive in an office environment and that is where they are most productive. I’m a Director and for me, I am far more productive at home because I have fewer distractions and without the commute I can start work earlier and get a lot done while I’m my most productive then end my day earlier. and enjoy my afternoon. I still do 1 on 1’s and various team activities but a big part of my job requires focus which was nigh impossible in the office.

I also have been in far better shape mentally and physically. I no longer have the stress of a 1 hour commute (each way), sometimes 2 hours coming home due to traffic. And I am in better physical health than I’ve been in a decade because I can cook a healthy lunch and not rushing for dinner whereas in the office we ended up eating at restaurants or fast food. I can make better healthy choices. The extra time I have because of no commutes has allowed me to take up cycling which has done wonders for my physical and mental wellbeing.

Now, I know everyone isn’t like me and different people have different challenges but it’s the CHOICE for employees that is so powerful.

Lastly, from a company standpoint, I love my job and I love where I work, the extra flexibility just makes me want to stay that much more.

To quote Michael Gary Scott: “It’s a win-win-win!”

If you’re printing code for others to read, stick to standard characters. If you’re choosing a font for your editor, do what you want.

I really like ligature fonts. I was an early adopter of Fira Code and later moved to JetBrains Mono. I like it because I find it’s much easier to skim and understand the intent vs a standard character representation.

At the end of the day, it’s your editor, do what you want.

For most of human history, we didn’t need a standardized calendar, you just needed to agree with people that you interacted with. Religion pushed most of the standardization and later reinforced during the Industrial Revolution—helped along by colonialism.

Now that we are a globalized society, it would require parties from every nation and every industry to agree to the change and coordinate a simultaneous migration. Given we can’t get close to that level of cooperation when faced with potentially existential crises, it’s doubtful we could do it because it’s a “better” system than the current one.

I’d love to be proven wrong though!

A lot of software today is built to drive a specific user behavior to generate revenue instead of being designed from the start to provide customer value.

User-hostile behavior, dark patterns, etc. are all a symptom of this. Additionally time-to-market and marketing bullet points are often more important than user experience of bug-free software because many companies have found they can make the same revenue without having to focus on the customer experience.

Classic software was not as big-free as people like to think. There was lots of BAD software. The difference was that with higher prices and the inability to push updates (aside from mailing floppies) meant that the incentive was to produce software that had fewer bugs.