Yeah that seems silly. I was a quiet-room sleeper until I met my wife, who needs some kind of white noise to sleep. I eventually adapted and now sleep much better with noise than without (at least subjectively), but that change took a while, at least several months. I found it quite difficult to sleep with for a while.

I slept without noise for years until I needed it for a while for (reason) and now it feels difficult to sleep without noise. Acclimation’s a real effect

On the off chance you’re in the Bay Area, look into Walk N Roll: https://walknrolltoschool.org/

I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).

Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.

We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.

I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles.

Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.

And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.

Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.

Remembering state is a giant oversight on many apps for content consumption, Apple News included. I sometimes read long articles on Apple News. I could be interrupted by a call or some messages. When I return to Apple News, it displays my half-finished article for a split second and returns to the home screen.

This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.

Unfortunately all of my male relatives suffered from hit by a bus itis.

My kids are in elementary school in the SF area (although pretty far in the ‘burbs) and this is not my experience.

The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and production of larger written projects and presents—the kind of things you’d expect. The younger one doesn’t have any school-supplied device yet.

Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the majority of homework.

I’m fine with this system. I wish they’d spend a little more time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing exercises in the 90’s; my older one doesn’t seem to have those kind of lessons). But in general, there’s not too much homework, there’s good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and create projects using the tool he’ll use to do so in future schooling.

I’ve been working on archiving a bunch of old hard drives and floppies that my parents found and gave to me when they were cleaning out their garage.

Aside from the fun of seeing all of the old contents of the drives, it’s also been fun to walk through the progression of storage devices through the years. Lots of cool sounds and form factors, including an early Conner hard drive (that I have unfortunately been unable to archive), which is built like a tank and makes some great noises as it spins up and seeks.

Also cool to learn a little more about how the various storage media worked. It all feels very simple when you abstract it all away into bytes and blocks, but there was some wild engineering in those things. If you stop to look back, it’s impressive that we’ve made it this far.

Kind of! https://www.pcmag.com/news/hacker-gets-doom-running-on-a-vap...

I find the opposite to be true. Once you know the problem you’re trying to solve (which admittedly can be the biggest lift), writing the fist cut of the code is fun, and you can design the system and set precedent however you want. Once it’s in the wild, you have to work within the consequences of your initial decisions, including bad ones.

... And the undocumented code spaghetti that might come with a codebase that was touch by numerous hands.

Oh come on. There are plenty of uncharismatic rich people who have still managed to persuade him.

My friend Ben is pretty charismatic... especially when I give you several copies of his portrait.

I think the point is that in this case, the choice is between the infrastructure being pay-to-use or just not existing, not between the infrastructure being free and being pay-to-use

That was my suspicion, but I'm not sure. Obviously, they have other valid options. Raise taxes. Have the state borrow, build, and operate the road as a toll road at cost, etc.

Sure. I think the point is that in Texas, those are valid but not viable due to politics.