Dumb watches are now stupid

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A few weeks ago, I was in Zurich and was reminded once again that are watch stores everywhere in Switzerland. Obviously Swiss mechanical timekeeping is a legendary though significantly outdated1, concept, but as I was jogging by a few, I wondered “Seriously, who buys these anymore?” Bit of history: I’ve long thought watches looked cool. I had the original (and now cool again) Casio watch when I was a kid and the Casio calculator watch.…

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What makes a language... "dead"?

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On Hacker News, someone asked if people are still using Pascal in 2023. The responses were mostly of the “of course, Delphi!” flavor. But one response stood out to me, and it was bemoaning that the constant HN hype of new languages that ignores “boring tech” the industry is using the majority of the time (Java, Python, C++ in roughly that order). I sympathize with the commenter’s point because HN commenters generally continue to have a quite naive view on languages and frameworks.…

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Apple Watch Ultra. Yes, Garmin is doomed.

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Note: I originally drafted this for a small group of friends, But I converted this to a blog post because tech reviewers seem to think the Ultra fails to kill Garmin. This is the counterpoint review, with a software person’s spin on it. Summary The Apple Watch Ultra is a great device, and is the best fitness device I’ve ever owned. It brings all of the fitness features I need in a package that’s extremely useful for the 60-70% of the time I’m not exercising or sleeping.…

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Out of an Abundance of Caution, You Should Read this Blog Post

Today marks yet another sad milestone in the COVID-19 fight, where the US government has decided to “pause” allowing willing adults to receive the J&J/Janssen vaccine “out of an abundance of caution”. This is despite only 6 people having clotting issues. In fact, the odds of the clotting issues naturally are apparently similar. So I want to talk about out of an abundance of caution. This phrase has become popular with politicians during COVID-19.…

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World of Beeps

I recently upgraded the family Canyonero to a more recent model. The old one was a 2009 model, so I decided I wanted a newer one with better gas mileage, bluetooth audio, Android auto, and other modern features. This car beeps at every possible thing that can happen during normal operation of a car. Get close to something, cross over a line on the road, etc. I pull up behind a car in a drive-thru line and it starts beeping.…

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Consoles, what they are, were and could be.

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Update: It’s been brought to my attention that I left out discussion of the contentious PS5 SSD technology. I should have mentioned it. Believe it or not, my intention here wasn’t to make a flame war. The demo looks cool, but I don’t have much of an opinion on it except to say that consoles can generally offer a more optimized platform for developers than general PC hardware. And since that platform is standardized, developers can micro-optimize over the lifetime of the console.…

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Disable ⌘-C and change programming forever.

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I told some friends tonight about an idea I had years ago: disable copy-paste for all software engineers and you’d improve code worldwide overnight. Cut-paste is still totally cool. Feel free to refactor and move code around. But copy-paste… well, it’s just deadly. Copy-pasting leads to so many bugs, unmaintainable codebases and general code bloat. If everyone was forced to think more building reusable abstractions, these could be avoided. An example of a critical error probably (I don’t have proof) caused by copy-paste would be Apple’s SSL Key Exchange bug.…

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Getting Fit... the Peter Drucker Way

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2015 is coming to a close, and although it wasn’t a specific New Year’s resolution, I was able to get fit this year. Here’s what worked for me, it may not work for everyone, but I hope it helps give you ideas. I call it “The Peter Drucker Way” thanks to the apocryphal quote of his “What’s measured gets managed.” I started this process with a lot of myths in my head:…

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Rewrite speed is a terrible, no-good, very-bad metric

Someone on the internet is making the point that Go is awesome because they rewrote a Java service in Go in ¼ the time it took to write the original Java service. This misconception must be stopped once and for all. Off the top of my head: I’ve rewritten Ruby code in Java more quickly with more features than the original Ruby code was written. Same for Python. I’ve rewritten Python in C# more quickly than the original Python was written.…

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Typescript weirdness: function vs. => and "this"

Alright, I ran into a non-obvious problem with Typescript and want to share. I guess it can also be chalked up to “Javascript weirdness” but the second layer of Typescript confused me. I have basketball games and I want to create a quick dictionary of a team to all of their games. I wrote code like this: class Season { teamsToGames: { [teamName: string]: Array; } = {}; addGame(g : Game) { .…

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