My friends and I have been asking this exact question lately. I’m sure people are still working on interesting things that AREN’T AI. I too would love a HN-minus-AI.
Nah. It's got its original 340 V8, but bored, stroked, ported, forged crank & rods, gear drive, roller cam system. Dynoed at 400 hp.
I can't remember seeing another one (Dodge Challenger) on the road for decades.
My original plan was to swap in a 383 big block. I talked it over with a Mopar motorhead, and he said the big block unbalanced the car, and was difficult to work on because it didn't really fit in the car. He said the 340 would produce a lot of power reliably. I took his advice and didn't regret it. The car is terrifying when one steps hard on the gas.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile.
That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears.
Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
My grandfather bought me a $200 Ford Taurus at a car auction. I hated that car. It was this ugly green color and handled like a boat. But I drove it for many years, mostly to part-time jobs waiting tables or working at a butcher shop when I was in college. It finally met its end one winter in Worcester, Mass when the road salt ate through the flange that held the exhaust pipe on. This happened while idling in the parking lot in front of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. If you’ve never experienced an unmuffled V6, think twin engine turboprop loud. A kind employee at Jo-Ann came up with a clever solution to hold the exhaust pipe against the chassis using baling wire so that I could at least drive it without the exhaust pipe dragging on the ground. I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning. I replaced that car with another car that was even worse, but that’s another story.
I am comfortably middle class now. I still buy budget cars because I can’t get past how outrageously expensive most cars are now. But even now I still think, every time I sit in my new (well, three year old) car: wow, this is awesome. I don’t know if my friends think those same thoughts, because I would be honestly a little embarrassed to explain why I feel that way.
I think that anyone who has not experienced the slow churn of driving a car with the engine light on for years, some duct tape holding something in it, is missing nothing. But I still feel like a child with a base modern family car. It is the hint of time travel we are allowed.
It's not fun or bragging-worthy or anything. The "haha the driver door doesn't open" bits are very different from getting stranded in random places. The only good experience is if you manage to fix it for cheap.
I have one piece of junk and one newer (ie 2012) car, so I get to experience the difference every week. Except, the driver side window doesn't work in either car. Wish power windows weren't invented.
It was cheap, but on this car, it was not easy. I tried. I would have no trouble replacing it now, but then, I had no money, no tools, and I could not afford to bring it to a mechanic.
When Visual Studio (not VSCode) incorporated a time travel debugger, that felt like a major advance in an IDE. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2013.
I am still a little stunned by the rapid adoption of VSCode over IntelliJ and the original Visual Studio. Maybe being free was the important part, but I still chafe at the idea that we should configure our tools using JSON instead of just, you know, buttons and checkboxes.
Of course, VSCode and its ilk are jam packed with AI stuff I don’t not want, so it is mostly back to a fancy text editor for me.
Exactly. Mass-market music is not good. It takes effort to find the good stuff, especially if you want to find new good stuff. The last 20 years has seen a shift toward the most bland, formulaic, autotuned music. All the weird, quirky, interesting qualities have been ironed out. AI does not make mistakes, and more importantly, does not make any demands of its owners, unlike an actual rock star.
Fortunately there are still many talented (but struggling) musicians out there. I worry that the flood of passable AI generated content will finally finish them off.
The last 20 years have been an explosion of new music as barriers to making it have gone down. More musicians are making more music and there's more good stuff than ever.
There’s a great and terrifying story by Stanislaw Lem about the endgame of an AI arms race called “The Invincible” [1]. It’s hard for me not to wonder whether AI run amok will play out to make the world uninhabitable more like Lem’s vision than The Terminator’s.
I also went there, shortly before it shut down during the pandemic. A friend talked me into visiting when we’re were in town for a scientific meeting. I am so glad I went.
The museum on the afternoon we visited was nearly empty. As a result, the museum docents were happy to let us monopolize their time. I mentioned offhandedly that I had always wished I could try programming SmallTalk on an Alto, and the docent said with a grin “sure!” He reloaded their Alto with a programming environment and gave me a short tutorial. I quickly crashed the machine, but I had a lot of fun along the way.
I got to try many other machines that night. I often think with sadness about how my students will no longer be able to easily have this experience.
Can you share more about your setup? I sort of hate my laptop. I carry a ridiculously overpowered phone around with me all the time, though, so the dream is just to dock it at home or at work and just use that. It’s a shame that Apple does not make this a better experience with iPhones; I would happily shell out for the most expensive iPhone if it were a real desktop replacement. Being able to develop (for real, with a terminal) is a must though.
Android phone with termux and all the usual Linux tools. I use vim to write code, and I type with the touch screen. Not exactly peak ergonomics, but it works. For me, ability to code while lying down comfortably beats having a physical keyboard and bigger screen.
Set up wireguard in my router and now I've got remote access into my LAN. My laptop has essentially become a Linux server. I just ssh in from the phone and write code. Can also easily launch and use codex.
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