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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • IMO there’s little need to buy new in the computer world unless you want to do something silly like have a snapdragon x laptop or have the disposable funds to go the gaming rig route.

    My desktop is a retired business workstation, a HP Z420. I bought it for $250, installed a smaller SSD ($100 new) for the OS + apps, upgeaded to the “best” Xenon that fit the socket ($150 used), upgraded to 64 GB RAM ($107 used, yay ECC memory being dirt cheap on the used market), and a 1070TI ($225 used, purchased just before covid).

    It’s more than fast enough for my needs still.

    This was all about 4-5 years ago, so you could probably do even better with more modern hardware.


  • Hair color changes with age. My mother in law and wife were both blond when they were kids, but their hair slowly turned browner with age. They both highlight their hair to split the difference.

    We have two fairly young kids. Their hair is pretty light blond on the top layers, but their bottom layers are quite a bit darker. I suspect the biggest contributing factor beyond genetics is sunlight. Both of them spend a pretty good amount of time outdoors when the weather permits.





  • I hope you get a decent answer. When we last visited 10 years ago a similar idea passed our minds.

    I did some poking around at the time out of curiosity. From what I recall, a decent amount of manufacturing moved there in the 70s to claim made in America, take advantage of cheaper labor, and take advantage of some tax incentives. The incentives were phased out and manufacturing started leaving. Wikipedia .

    I am not sure what their economy is like these days, but as with all moves a chunk of it is going to come down to the work you can/want to do and the jobs available, but with remote work living somewhere like Puerto Rico does seem appealing.

    I suspect you’re going to have the usual island pain points (hurricanes, expensive imports, limited economy, a large swath of the economy tied to tourism) and benefits (consistent weather year round, natural beauty which PR has a ton of, beaches, interesting culture).

    Again, I really hope someone with first hand experience chimes in - even if the moved in the other direction from the island to the mainland.


  • Keeping a woodworking hobby from devolving into tool collecting can be a trick.

    This can be true of most hobbies, lol. Amusingly, three others of yours fall into that pattern.

    Electronics? If only I had a bigger power supply, higher speed/more channel scope, hot air station, logic analyzer, etc. Guitars? I have friends and coworkers who play. No one only owns one guitar, pedal, amp combo. Gardening? I have quite the setup in my basement to get seeds going, but I live in zone 6 and need to compensate some for the short growing season. Cooking can also be it’s own equipment rabbit hole.

    Beyond that: Cameras? Choosing which brand of body to use, sensor size, lens collection, tripods/flash/accessories. If you play a tabletop game do you really play a tabletop game or are you looking for an excuse to make and paint minis? 3D printers can be just as much about messing with the printer as actually printing things.

    I think it’s important to recognize the pattern so you can consciously decide if you want to fall into it or avoid it. For some people, the collecting around the hobby is even better than doing the hobby.














  • I currently work on software in automotive. Everything seems completely insane. We have tons of process and technical debt, executives that are super out of touch and all have their own pet projects, we have hundreds of executives so we have 100 number one priority pet projects, we have a very distributed hardware/software footprint due to the affirmationed process/technical debt, each vehicle has a different hardware footprint which means we constantly have to make our distributed software work when a piece of the software needs to be rebuilt in a new controller, etc etc.

    There’s also the whole mess of trying to run agile at scale, managinga very distributed backlog, trying to balance priorities across teams that have to coordinate work, everyone leading with “how they want it” instead of “what they want”, total disregard for WIP limits, etc.

    I know where I work is a shit show. I really wonder if it’s much better elsewhere. I also wonder if this place has always been a shit show and I just have more exposure to it now.

    And yeah, alcohol. I’m trying to cut back but the mood here seems to violently oscillate between “this is OK” to “what the hell” and back again. We’re probably due for another swing soon.

    Some days I do think about going back to waiting tables. It took me years of working elsewhere to stop having the waiting weeds dreams though…