Another upside seems to be that every Arab country in the Middle East seems to be on the same side as Israel. Nothing unites like a common enemy!

* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.

* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.

* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.

* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.

(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)

Previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392676

I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…

I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!

Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.

By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.

The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.

Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.

Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!

(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)

I used to use two 27” 1440p monitors, which together are about the same size as the Samsung 49”, and also the same resolution, but the edges were further enough away from my head that they were annoying to use. Not to mention the bezels in the middle. While this dell wouldn’t have the bezels, the edges would still be too far away.

The only drawback of my giant R1000 monitor is that I can’t easily use my laptop’s camera. So I don’t; I use an iPad for video conferencing, it sits happily below this monitor.

My only regret is not getting the 57” 2x4k variant!

The biggest advantage of NG is that we can store months of it. (Currently we can store only seconds of electricity, if that. Citation needed!)

I have a dream that some day we will come up with an efficient process for generating methane from atmospheric CO2, water, and electricity, and we’ll be able to take advantage of our extensive natural gas grid. (Natural gas is essentially methane.)

Roll of very sticky Velcro tape To mount things under desk.

A “toaster” style sata adapter: I treat it like a tape drive, clunk in a “tape” (sata or spinning disk) to back up to.

While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.

It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!

[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.

I like to think of this not as giving an order to the codebase, but as casting a spell.

For example, a brand new Toyota sienna XLE is a little over fifty grand. Carvana have several 21-22 siennas XLE, 40-60k miles, most over forty grand. I do not understand this.

As you practice a craft, you build up positive knowledge - what works. And you build up negative knowledge - what doesn't work. But you also build up humility; the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know.

Knowledge increases sub-linearly, assuming a modicum of curiosity, but humility is like a parabola. The "experts" of this article are those at the bottom of the humility parabola. They have quite a bit of positive knowledge, some negative knowledge, but they don't really know yet what they don't know.

_Many "experts" don't consider themselves experts._ They all too often say "Hmm, interesting question, I don't know, but...". They are defined by humility and curiosity.

Imagine the question "Why is the sky blue?". Somebody who has just finished an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics and happens to have learnt learnt about Rayleigh scattering will sound much more like an expert than somebody who says "Hmm, interesting question, I don't know, but..." and then spends fifteen minutes figuring it out on the spot.

Like the phenomenon of the newish driver: nobody seems more of an expert driver than somebody who passed their test three months ago. They have learnt all the rules, they think they know everything, they often don't have much curiosity, and they have yet to learn humility.

Of course, this often doesn't matter. Many people don't want an actual expert - they want somebody who sounds like an expert _to other people_. Oracle don't advertise to people who buy software. They advertise to the people who second guess the people who buy software.

To quote a wonderful ex-co-worker, "Most people need a generalist. But they want - and are willing to pay for - a specialist."