I can speak to this directly: I've customized a few extensions I use with VSCode, (nearly) completely having the AI generate/iterate over my feature request until it works. I don't have the time to learn the details (or different languages) of the various projects, but I get huge benefit from the improvements.
- PRO Deployer
- MS Typescript
- Typescript-Go
- a bespoke internal extension to automate a lot of housekeeping when developing against tickets (git checks, branch creation, stash when switching, automatically connecting and updating ticket system)
Back when I listened to NPR, I shook my fist at the radio every time Shankar Vidantim came on to explain the latest scientific paper. Whatever was being celebrated, it was surely brand new. It's presentation on Morning Edition gave it the imprimature of "Proofed Science", and I imagined it getting repeated at every office lunch and cocktail party. I never heard a retraction.
Im the other way around and think fractional math isn't used enough because it is so easy and useful. I think fractional maths biggest obstacle is everyone trying to avoid it and not learning it in contexts and methods where it excels.
That said, I still use tons of decimal math because sometimes it is more useful, but not always.
Even the existing-tool-holder is a weak excuse. My socket wrench set came with two near-identical sequences of wrenches, metric and imperial. I regularly the encounter metric variants in the US. Switching to metric, like the rest of the world, would make things simpler.
I keep trying to make myself think in terms of 32nds. For example think of a 9/16 wrench as "18", the 1/2 wrench is just "16", and so on. It's a slow process. I want to standardize on some color code for easy cross-brand identification of wrench sizes too, but I haven't come up with a compelling scheme.
The worst is the hardware. I inherited a full assortment of #2-#10 stainless SAE UNC hardware from a business move (already in nice parts drawers, too). It was pretty awesome for just having whatever I needed on hand to build things. But now as I maintain more and more things that are metric native, I've been building up the assortment of metric threads as well.
I suspect this is one of the real pain points of fabricators (plus taps/dies). And I'm guessing they're still still Imperial native due to existing tooling, making the conversions not clean (it's easy to convert 1/2 inch to 12.7mm and measure that, but it's not straightforward to convert 10mm to 0.3937 inches (25.2/64ths) and measure that.
For me, Wave was the most exciting thing Google ever tried. The requirements exceeded most corporate hardware, but the whole "email as a wiki page" struck me as the future. Replay the messages in order to follow the responses.
(there was a lot of other stuff going on in there too)
Probably never, except maybe during the period when only white male landowners could vote and so the "we" was a much smaller and wealthier group. Voter turnout is pretty high these days though.
In the latter half of the 20th century, while many things were much worse than they are today, it was genuinely possible to support a family on a single minimum-wage job in many parts of the country.
Now, that doesn't mean that everyone used the extra time for civic participation, but when you compare that to today, when far too many people have to work two or three jobs per adult just to keep the lights on, I think it's fair to say that there was more free time.
Young people seem to have plenty of free time to march around the streets protesting, chanting and banging drums (which has pretty much zero effect on policy), but they aren't able to find the time to attend a city council meeting, or even vote, for that matter.
Pretty sure the young people protesting are the ones also voting. But that’s only a small fraction of the total young people.the rest are too busy on TikTok :/
Terminal emulators are a crutch you kids are spoiled by. In my day we had to create programs on punch cards. Copy a file from one directory to another? fifteen cards full of custom assembler code. Print out a file listing on the teletype? Ten cards... uphill... in the snow... both ways.
It's not that Linux is "bad" when the hardware is incompatible, it's not "Linux's fault". It's that, at a certain age, I don't want to spend my precious few hours of free time working _on_ my computer, I just want it to work.
(big fan of MacOS, and esp. third-party Mac software, the quality of which simply does not exist on any other platform)
(Also, I have huge affection for Linux. I used Linux exclusively for years personally, and any place I could sneak it into my work environment)
- PRO Deployer
- MS Typescript
- Typescript-Go
- a bespoke internal extension to automate a lot of housekeeping when developing against tickets (git checks, branch creation, stash when switching, automatically connecting and updating ticket system)