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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Toshiba used to sell a laptop (IIRC the model name was R500) back in like 2008 that had a mirror behind the screen, meaning that bright sunlight would be reflected back through the LCD and always respond to external lighting conditions no matter how bright. The image quality and color was shitty, but you could use it in the sun. Battery time was also extremely impressive.





  • Typical Linux distributions are almost objectively harder to use than Android. I’d be surprised if anyone really disagrees with this. When someone complains about Linux being hard to use, it’s the POSIX-based Linux distributions that must support arbitrary hardware (often poorly so) that they refer to. I don’t need to care about installing NVidia drivers and whether they’re compatible with EFI handover when I buy an Android phone.








  • I downloaded more RAM in the 90s. It was a product called RAM Doubler for the Macintosh. At that time memory had to be pre-allocated for applications through a setting in the resource fork, always used exactly the amount you set, and couldn’t grow beyond that. It was static, making it hard to run multiple programs simultaneously. RAM Doubler did wonders to work around that OS limitation.




  • The cognitive ceiling. Research by Ericsson, Mark, and Newport shows that 3-4 hours is the daily maximum for concentrated effort. Beyond that, diminishing returns.

    “Diminishing returns” is not the same as zero returns. You’ll get more coding done if you work eight hours a day than four hours a day. There’s certainly a point where the quality gets so low that the returns are negative (by introducing bugs / technical debt / stuff you have to rewrite the next day), but in my experience 4 hours is not it.

    In fact, if the problem is very complicated then it might even take you three hours just to get up to speed with what you were doing the day before.