xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

I’ve been really impressed with Immich, can’t recommend it enough.

I’d put substitute first, but yours sounds better :)

(I’m a big Immich fan, and I’m taking and sharing photos more than ever before, in part because Immich is awesome, self hosted, and open source [the other part is that I have kids now so I’m taking way more photos that grandparents want to see].)

Not sure I agree.

First, stocks tend to be highly correlated with “the market” (see financial “β”/“beta coefficient”). For example, look at, say, The Home Depot or Ford Motors. From January 2000 to January 2003 (spanning the dot com bubble) they each lost about a third of their value, yet these are not “dot com”-centric companies.

Second, the promise of AI is that it will help every company that has desk jobs. So every company has this expectation now priced into their stock, and if the bottom falls out, well…

Not an analyst/I don’t pick stocks, but just my 2¢.

…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.

Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)

I have some bad new for you about Linux…

My recollection is that the DVD included that library, but it’s been a while…

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).

Maybe there’s some interplay between amd64 and x64 architectures.

AMD64 and x64 are the same thing. Do you mean AMD64 and x86? There is definitely interplay there, as AMD64 implements the x86-32 instruction set.

I just wish we’d have neither inflation nor deflation.

Some tech has followed this pattern. For example: entry level Mac laptop in ~2000 was the iBook, priced at $1599 ($3k+ in today’s dollars). The current entry level Mac laptop (M4 Air) starts at $999 — cheaper in absolute dollars, and way cheaper in relative dollars.

(Macs are just an example since Apple doesn’t have a very extensive product list, so there’s only one “entry level” laptop to choose from. And yes it’s fair to ask if the relative specs have just gotten worse, but I think this is also the opposite — the iBook was iirc criticized as being underpowered, whereas the M4 Air is afaik well regarded.)

Compensation for engineers in the Bay area will average much higher than $200k, and that’s not counting benefits (medical, etc.). So cost to the company will be way higher than 200k/employee.

For a project that has hardware, there will be large expenses associated with that — custom silicon has huge setup costs, for example.

You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

They specified 1 significant figure — at that level it’s the same.

This is the same argument used for blaming the cost of college on government loans for education, for $$$ housing prices in cities that offer low income subsidies, for food prices due to food stamps…