At that time our son was using it for games. He goes away to college and came home for the first school break. I get a phone call from our internet provider asking if our son was home. I was so shocked and handed the phone to our son.

Apparently at that time bittorrent was optimizing for the most efficient path to a host. Since we had relatively good connection, the mighty weight of the internet was funnelling through our tiny internet provider to our son's computer. The provider (without our knowing it) had made a deal with our son that he would only turn on bittorrent between midnight and 6 AM. I doubt other providers would be so generous.

I have been sceptical of bittorrent since that day.

I was at Apple when we worked with engineers from Kodak who were working to change various format standards to allow digital photos. This was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

I think the opposite is true. I first read Jane Austin as a teenager. I had no concept of the economic environment of the book. I thought meh.

Now that I am retired and re-reading Austin, I view them more in terms of the economic environment. I didn't have this context when I was young, and the books are awesome. In several passages she give a critique of the economic system so sublimely that it passed over my head when I was young.

A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25245686/h...

Netflix's Sandman was also disqualified. On Bluesky Neil Gaiman said he was never told why it was disqualified. He also said he was one of four disqualified authors.

The lesson learned is do not have a world-wide vote in a country with censorship.

R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!

I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.

In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.

My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.

She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.

Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.

The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.

The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.

Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.

Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.

I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/rosalind-franklin-lega...

My take away was that Rosalind Franklin did support the Watson Crick paper but that there was some conflict leading up to the paper. She did not seem to think her ideas were stolen.

It did not help that after Franklin died - Watson wrote a hit piece on Franklin. I think that is what caused people to question if Watson was above board while Franklin was alive.

BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.

The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF. One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.

I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?

I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.

EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.

Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.

What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.

I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.

Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.

My experience was not as bad as some others on this list. I believe that is because girls are psychological bullies, and boys are physical bullies. My husband was chased and beaten up until he the beat up the lead bully.

I met my lead bully as an adult. I was surprised to find out that she did not realize she was a bully. She acted as if we were childhood friends. One of her friends apologized to me, so others certainly realized.

Her life did not go as well as my life. I suspect it was because the traits that made her a bully as a child did not work for her as an adult.

How about the early days of Covid when Zoom came out of nowhere to dominate Video Communications? They were nowhere near the market leader.

Facebook (as you recall) was also not the market leader on social media when the VCs decided they were going to be the winner.

I am taking a wait and see approach to Twitter. I wish them the best, but history is not on their side.

I was in school and working in the computer lab when we switched from batch processing (cards) to a time shared system with terminal labs. I was part of the team that wired up the campus and connected the campus to the ARPANET (precursor to the internet).

As we rolled out the terminal labs, each CS class was either assigned to batch processing or time sharing. Since I was part of the lab, I could schedule my classes to be time share only. I was only stuck with 4 classes not in the time share lab. 2 were batch processing. For some reason my LISP and AI classes used a teletype interface. It was not as bad as the cards, but still weird. Some classes allowed me to use my personal computer (TRS80) and work at home.

At the time my uncle was a programmer. He said that there was no future in CS and I should switch majors. I could already see the wave coming and ignored the advice.

You are a backpacker so you already embrace the spirit of the article. You already have a purpose to your trip that takes you outside of tourist traps. Tourism packages destinations so they all start to look the same.

You are not a contrarian. You have an alternate path to the same goal.

You can even do this locally (no need to travel). My husband and I started biking and often this takes us to unseen parts of our own community.

The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer.

GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists.

When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.