It’s always bemused me that I did better in electronic engineering than computer science. I studied them simultaneously, receiving degrees in both after five years (some classes counted towards both, thus why it wasn’t seven or eight years). I grew up playing on, dabbling with, and programming computers. From BASIC II to Hypercard to RealBasic… Read more
You might have heard the aphorism “Perfect is the enemy of good“. If you’re in a technical field, you’ve probably used it, or had it used against you, to shut down a conversation. It’s an effective way to do so because it insinuates that the target is thinking impractically, not focused on the problem at… Read more
I had an argument last night with someone as to whether altruism exists or not. Their argument was essentially “of course it does”. They used the example of a car accident they were in a while ago, in which they were very nearly killed, but they still consoled the driver of the other car (whom… Read more
It bothers me that the iiUsage menu item, which takes up an entire 50mm^2 on my menu bar, uses 20 meg of memory. All it does it connect to a web server periodically, perform some sort of [probably trivial] parsing to extract it’s numbers, and display those in it’s menu. What on earth does it… Read more