I frequently use one-time alarms for early morning travel a few days away. What makes them great is that the alarms in general are much more robust in their requirements to turn them off; I can accidentally dismiss a calendar alert, but I have a much harder time accidentally deactivating the clock alarm in a sleep induced stupor at odd hours.

More importantly, alarms don't get silenced by my nightly do not disturb schedule.

Software archaeology in its most literal form would be a fantastic course addition for anyone going into a company with a medium-large codebase > 5 years old. Especially if you end up at a FAANG or something akin to it.

Being able to navigate not just a codebase but bugs/tickets attached to it, discussions in documents, old wiki pages that half work, extracting context clues from versioning history, tracing people by the team they worked on at the time...digital detective work is a serious part of the job sometimes.

I just realized that I spent at least ten years as a professional software archaeologist.

That company develops most of the court software used in the US.

And it's very unlikely that they have improved their practices in the three years since I had to leave due to burnout.

I heard older TVs being turned on and off as well as CRT monitors. Now, its that very range I 'hear' all the time. Part of me wonders if it was sensitivity to that spectrum that damaged my hearing when I was around multiple CRTs so much.

I have known people that have it much worse than I face daily.

Me too!

I genuinely could hear CRTs when I was 5.

Tinnitus sound now is very similar for me too.

Hearing test showed high frequency hearing loss in that range which is well above human speech and a lot of music.

Yeah, for me it sounds almost exactly like the squeal that CRT TVs make. Like, it's basically indistinguishable from that for me.

I got into coding at home when I realized ctrl-break gave me a BASIC command prompt on my Apple //c. It was really cool, and I spent a lot of time learning to code. There was one small problem: doing so on startup meant I didn't get a DOS. In other words, every program I wrote like that meant I couldn't keep it.

I eventually learned to get a ProDOS disk setup, and save my work, but it was still fun.

If I hadn't seen it in action countless times, I would belive you. Changelists, line counts, documents made, collaborator counts, teams lead, reference counts in peer reviewed journals...the list goes on.

You are welcome to prove me wrong though. You might even restore some faith in humanity, too!

I'd love to know the kind of phone you're using where the voice commands are faster than touchscreen navigation.

Most of the practical day to day tasks on the Androids I've used are 5-10 taps away from a lock screen, and get far less dirty looks from those around me.

My favorite voice command is to set a timer.

If I use the touchscreen I have to:

1 unlock the phone - easy, but takes an active swipe

2 go to the clock app - i might not have been on the home screen, maybe a swipe or two to get there

3 set the timer to what I want - and here it COMPLETELY falls down, since it probably is showing how long the last timer I set was, and if that's not what I want, I have to fiddle with it.

If I do it with my voice I don't even have to look away from what I'm currently doing. AND I can say "90 seconds" or "10 minutes" or "3 hours" or even (at least on an iPhone) "set a timer for 3PM" and it will set it to what I say without me having to select numbers on a touchscreen.

And 95% of the time there's nobody around who's gonna give me a dirty look for it.

Hmm. Maybe something useful will come of this after all!

"...and that is why we need the resources. Newline, end document. Hey, guys, I just got done with my 60 page report, and need-"

"SELECT ALL, DELETE, SAVE DOCUMENT, FLUSH UNDO, PURGE VERSION HISTORY, CLOSE WINDOW."

Here's hoping this at least gets us back to cubes.

This assumes said email is properly filtered and doesn't get lost in a sea of work spam. I also assert email is actually terrible at context; unless that is part of an existing thread, or again your filtering/sorting is great, you will often spend at least a paragraph just establishing context.

> It is well structured, well documented and offers coherent discourse.

You must have great coworkers who know how to communicate. I cannot say the same for everyone at my company. Email at many of the places I've worked can quickly devolve on more than 3-5 replies.

Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam - at least the email spam was work-related. Too many people substitute work for a social life and treat Slack like they’re on a group chat with friends.

> Worse than the work email spam at some of my previous jobs was the Slack spam

It’s annoying if not muted and you need to work. Why not do that?

A workplace with no chat and zero talk would be pretty grim.

If the company Slack doesn't have a #memes channel, I don't want to work there.

There's nothing wrong with social chat on Slack. It just needs to be either in a thread or, better yet, in a dedicated social channel.

Saying people shouldn't have social chat on Slack is like people shouldn't have social chat in the office kitchen because it's part of the same office complex.

And if they did that, I’d have nothing to complain about. That’s never been my experience though with Slack at work.

That’s unfortunate but it’s not a universal trend.

The problem here isn’t Slack, it’s poor Slack etiquette. However you can change etiquette at a company level.

@here I need an update on a ticket

@here were doing some it maintenance over the weekend in the middle of the night on a system no one uses

> Before AI, I rarely created diagrams because of the effort involved. I didn’t want to spend time deciding box sizes or fidgeting with visual formatting details.

IMHO the author is missing out on a key part of learning here. If you are concerned about box sizes and formatting, you are (a) not actually using a pen/marker on physical medium, and/or (b) getting caught up in making it look 'nice'.

The point of whiteboarding a design is forcing you to think about it, whether it's existing code or something new. Having AI do it for you is akin to having a LLM with speech synthesis talk aloud to a rubber duck on your behalf to debug something.

If you want to document something, sure; roll those dice on a diagram. I personally haven't seen such solutions do well on more than a handful of components before associations and groupings get weird.

Not sure how this argues their moat. The context window in pretty small (at best 192k on 5 with the right subscription). Once you run past it, history is lost or becomes gimmicky. Gemini 2.5 Pro by contrast offers 1M. Llama 4 offers 10M (though seems to perform substantially worse).