Very similar to my story. Sometimes I feel sad that I'll never know who was the enlightened administrator in my humble district who somehow got my elementary school an Apple computer lab with Logo in 1983, and that they'll never know what an impact it made on my life.

Same here, we had two rooms that had 20+ Apple II computers, each student could use their own machine all to themselves. And our district was not rich, it must have cost more than 150k in today dollars.

In praise of "obsolete" technology: I got my C64 for Christmas 1987, when there were already much more powerful machines available, but the C64 was the only one my parents could afford. Unexpectedly to me, they stretched their budget to get me the disk drive as well.

I used it up into the 90's. There was enough to do and learn with this machine to satisfy a young mind forever, but there was still that nagging inferiority complex that came from not having the latest and greatest.

Despite the fact that genuine hardware improvements have slowed down and software is stuck in the mud, it's easier than ever to get infected by the FOMO that drives the endless churn. But now, a little older and hopefully wiser, I perceive how pointless all that is. When it comes to how I use technology on my own time, I try to mindfully use only what sparks my own joy of learning and creating, and disregard everything else.

Apart from caring that much about docks, this is an inspiring example of how searching for the right language+libraries for a passion project can finally lead to a "just right" solution. It's also very gratifying to see how Guile was able to provide the desired level of performance.

Thanks for your comment! I think indeed a lot of people underestimate Guile's performance, power and expressiveness.

That's funny, because our professor didn't tell us that and I remember doing my projects with four terminal windows logged into the server and three of them running separate instances of emacs :D. I wonder how much I bogged down that mid-90s HP-UX machine.

It's true that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words, as it is in properly typeset text, though not twice as large. Using two spaces is a way to approximate that when you only have monospaced fonts. It's no longer encouraged in electronic text when using proportional fonts because the rendering software _should_ adjust the spacing itself.

edit: monospaced, not proportional.

It "should" adjust, but in practice most software do not render spaces after periods properly. There is no in band signal to distinguish periods for sentence ends vs e.g. Mr. Thus there is a clear argument for double spacing in all contexts

If your ambition is to have lots of free time and not too much responsibility...that's also difficult to balance with having kids.

I guess they meant "blurry" in the sense of "jagged", from using fonts that are 6 pixels wide at a reasonable point size on a 27-inch monitor.

No, just normal font sizes, macOS. 14pt looks huge, had to lower it to 12pt to look physically about the same as 14pt on a 4K/5K 27”, but at that physical size it’s a blurry mess due to low ppi.

Edit: Oh I misread your comment as 6 pixels large, not 6 pixels wide. Yes, you’re correct.

I also was looking for 24-inch 1440p's and was surprised they didn't exist. The closest is probably the 24-inch 1920x1200, which I do like for the 16:10 aspect ratio.

Does anybody else feel that 27-inch monitors are uncomfortably big? It feels less like something to look at work on and more like a movie screen right in front of your face. edit: I see xmodem expresses a similar feeling in a cousin comment.

Yeah, I replaced my 24 inch with a 27 inch and it's too big to have two of them on my desk.

The analogies to prior technologies aren't insightful. The advent of LLMs has some similarities to the appearance of the internet, and very significant differences. Calling it a "tool" is also far too reductive. What kind of tool that existed before just writes everything for you? Is that the same kind of tool as a nailgun or a text editor? The "proper usage" that has to be learned is to learn to think for yourself before you get used to the word-bot doing all the thinking for you.

By the traditional translation of if/then sentences to classical logic, it is. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, several things are debatable here: When people use if/then sentences, do they really mean material implication, where (A -> B) is equivalent to (~A OR B)? Also, people often use the word "or" in a sense that's closer to exclusive OR, as opposed to the inclusive OR that the logical operator indicates. Overall, can the meaning of a sentence with imperative intent be fully captured by a proposition that is just meant to indicate a state of affairs?