Was that in 2000? My own vague memory was that Linux started picking up some steam in the early 2000's and then branched out to a new audience shortly after Firefox and Ubuntu hit the scene around 2004, and actually saw some adoption when Windows XP's poor security and Windows Vista's poor hardware support started breaking things.

So depending on the year, you could both be right.

That's why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.

Plus domains should've gone left to right in terms of root, tld, domain, subdomain, etc., instead of right to left.

My anecdotal observation is the same. Most of my friends in Silicon Valley are using Macbooks, including some at some fairly mature companies like Google and Facebook.

I had a 5-year sysadmin career, dealing with some Microsoft stuff especially on identity/accounts/mailboxes through Active Directory and Exchange, but mainly did Linux specific stuff on headless servers, with desktop Linux at home.

When I switched to a non-technical career field I went with a MacBook for my laptop daily driver on the go, and kept desktop Linux at home for about 6 or 7 more years.

Now, basically a decade after that, I'm pretty much only driving MacOS on a laptop as my normal OS, with no desktop computer (just a docking station for my Apple laptop). It's got a good command line, I can still script things, I can still rely on a pretty robust FOSS software repository in homebrew, and the filesystem in MacOS makes a lot more sense to me than the Windows lettered drives and reserved/specialized folders I can never remember anymore. And nothing beats the hardware (battery life, screen resolution, touchpad feel, lid hinge quality), in my experience.

It's a balance. You want the computer to facilitate your actual work, but you also don't want to spend too much time and effort administering your own machine. So the tradeoff is between the flexibility of doing things your way versus outsourcing a lot of the things to the maintainer defaults (whether you're on Windows, MacOS, or a specific desktop environment in Linux), mindful of whether your own tweaks will break on some update.

So it's not surprising to me when programmers/developers happen to be issued a MacBook at their jobs.

Year of birth matters a lot for this experiment.

Macintosh versus some IBM (or clone) running MS DOS is a completely different era than Windows Vista versus PowerPC Macs, which was a completely different era from Windows Store versus Mac App Store versus something like a Chromebook or iPad as a primary computing device.

Installing MacOS on Intel Macs is really easy if you still have your recovery partition. It's not even hard even if you've overwritten the recovery partition, so long as you have the ability to image a USB drive with a MacOS installer (which is trivial if you have another Mac running MacOS).

I haven't messed around with the Apple silicon versions, though. Maybe I'll give it a try sometime, used M1 MacBooks are selling for pretty cheap.

I don't really mind when a cloud-connected device gracefully falls back to an offline-only device. It seems like it retains all of the non-cloud functionality: reading and setting temps, including on a schedule.

It'd be nicer if they gave the option to let people run their own servers for the the networked functionality, but it doesn't seem like they've reduced or otherwise held back on the offline functionality one would expect from a thermostat.

Why do people Google questions anyway?

Because it gives better responses.

Google and all the other major search engines have built in functionality to perform natural language processing on the user's query and the text in its index to perform a search more precisely aligned with the user's desired results, or to recommend related searches.

If the functionality is there, why wouldn't we use it?

Search engine algorithms are way better than in the 90s and early 2000s when it was naive keyword search completely unweighted by word order in the search string.

So the tricks we learned of doing the bare minimum for the most precise search behavior no longer apply the same way. Now a search for two words will add weight to results that have the two words as a phrase, and some weight for the two words close together in the same sentence, but still look for each individual word as a result, too.

More importantly, when a single word has multiple meanings, the search engines all use the rest of the search as an indicator of which meaning the searcher means. "Heat" is a really broad word with lots of meanings, and the rest of the search can help inform the algorithm of what the user intends.

Browsers are configured to pass off tel: links by a designated handler. In Safari on Mac, the default handler is Facetime, or at least was, for a while.

On a mobile phone most browsers just open the phone/dialer app to handle tel: links. In Chrome, back when I had Google Voice, I had it configured to do Google Voice calls (including for a time, Google Hangouts as the interface for my Google Voice account).

I can travel forward in time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute, and I think the US government can, too.

Which is is such a high dollar count that this simply cannot be USD

So I haven't used Windows on my own machines in about 20 years, but back when I built my own PCs that seemed about right. So I looked up the price history, didn't realize that Microsoft reduced the license prices around Windows 8.

I remember 20 years ago, Windows XP Home was $199 and Professional was $299 for a new license on a new computer. Vista and 7 were similarly priced.

Since Windows 8, though, I just don't understand their pricing or licensing terms.

I think back to the late 90's investment in rolling out a shitload of telecom infrastructure, with a bunch of telecom companies building out lots and lots of fiber. And perhaps more important than the physical fiber, the poles and conduits and other physical infrastructure housing that fiber, so that it could be improved as each generation of tech was released.

Then, in the early 2000's, that industry crashed. Nobody could make their loan payments on the things they paid billions to build, and it wasn't profitable to charge people for the use of those assets while paying interest on the money borrowed to build them, especially after the dot com crash where all the internet startups no longer had unlimited budgets to throw at them.

So thousands of telecom companies went into bankruptcy and sold off their assets. Those fiber links and routes still existed, but nobody turned them on. Google quietly acquired a bunch of "dark fiber" in the 2000's.

When the cloud revolution happened in the late 2000's and early 2010's, the telecom infrastructure was ready for it. The companies that built that stuff weren't still around, but the stuff they built finally became useful. Not at the prices paid for it, but when purchased in a fire sale, those assets could be profitable again.

That might happen with AI. Early movers over invest and fail, leaving what they've developed to be used by whoever survives. Maybe the tech never becomes worth what was paid for it, but once it's made whoever buys it for cheap might be able to profit at that lower price, and it might prove to be useful in the more modest, realistic scope.

For example, as a coding assistant, a lot of people quite like them. But as a replacement for a human coder, they're a disaster.

New technology is best when it can meaningfully improve the productivity of a group of people so that the group can shrink. The technology doesn't take any one identifiable job, but now an organization of 10 people, properly organized in a way conscious of that technology's capabilities and limitations, can do what used to require 12.

A forklift and a bunch of pallets can make a warehouse more efficient, when everyone who works in that warehouse knows how the forklift is best used, even when not everyone is a forklift operator themselves.

Same with a white collar office where there's less need for people physically scheduling things and taking messages, because everyone knows how to use an electronic calendar and email system for coordinating those things. There might still be need for pooled assistants and secretaries, but maybe not as many in any given office as before.

So when we need an LLM to chip in and reduce the amount of time a group of programmers need in order to put out a product, the manager of that team, and all the members of that team, need to have a good sense of what that LLM is good at and what it isn't. Obviously autocomplete has always been a productivity enhancer for long before LLMs have been around, and extensions of that general concept may be helpful for the more tedious or repetitive tasks, but any team that uses it will need to use it with full knowledge of its limitations and where it best supplements the human's own tasks.

I have no doubt that some things will improve and people will find workflows that leverage the strengths while avoiding the weaknesses. But it remains to be seen whether it'll be worth the sheer amount of cost spent so far.

You cant remove that double negative without making it incorrect

Sure you can: The IP Laws That Reinforce Enshittification.

I'm pretty sure every federal executive agency has been on Active Directory and Exchange for like 20+ years now. The courts migrated off of IBM Domino/Notes about 6 or 7 years ago, onto MS Exchange/Outlook.

What we used when I was there 20 years ago was vastly more secure because we rolled our own encryption

Uh that's now understood not to be best practice, because it tends to be quite insecure.

Either way, Microsoft's ecosystem on enterprise is pretty much the default on all large organizations, and they have (for better or for worse) convinced almost everyone that the total cost of ownership is cheaper for MS-administered cloud stuff than for any kind of non-MS system for identity/user management, email, calendar, video chat, and instant messaging. Throwing in Word/Excel/PowerPoint is just icing on the cake.

"actual image your camera sees" is a term that is hard to define with astrophotography, because it's kinda hard to define with regular digital photography, too.

The sensor collects raw data on its pixels, where the amount of radiation that makes it past that pixel's color filter actually excites the electrons on that particular pixel and gets processed on the image processing chip, where each pixel is assigned a color and it gets added together as larger added pixels in some image.

So what does a camera "see"? It depends on how the lenses and filters in front of that sensor are set up, and it depends on how susceptible to electrical noise that sensor is, and it depends on the configuration of how long it looks for each frame. Many of these sensors are sensitive to a wide range of light wavelengths, so the filter determines whether any particular pixel sees red, blue, or green light. Some get configured to filter out all but ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths, at which point the camera can "see" what the human eye cannot.

A long exposure can collect light over a long period of time to show even very faint light, at least in the dark.

There are all sorts of mechanical tricks at that point. Image stabilization tries to keep the beams of focused light stabilized on the sensor, and may compensate for movement with some offsetting movement, so that the pixel is collecting light from the same direction over the course of its entire exposure. Or, some people want to rotate their camera along with the celestial subject, a star or a planet they're trying to get a picture of, to compensate for the Earth's rotation over the long exposure.

And then there are computational tricks. Just as you might physically move the sensor or lens to compensate for motion, you may just process the incoming sensor data to understand that a particular subject's light will hit multiple pixels over time, and can get added together in software rather than at the sensor's own charged pixels.

So astrophotography is just an extension of normal photography's use of filtering out the wavelengths you don't want, and processing the data that hits the sensor. It's just that there needs to be a lot more thought and configuration of those filters and processing algorithms than the default that sits on a typical phone's camera app and hardware.

They were largely unaffected by the tariffs targeting China, because US trade policy distinguishes between mainland China and Taiwan. Problem was that Trump announced huge tariffs on everyone, including a 32% tariff on Taiwan.

I wonder what the use case is for 480W though. Gigantic 80" screens generally draw something like 120W. If you're going bigger than that, I would think the mounting/installation would require enough hardware and labor that running out a normal outlet/receptacle would be trivial.

content-aware filling

For what it's worth, GIMP has had the resynthesizer plugin since the mid or late 2000's, and at the time it was significantly ahead of Adobe's Content Aware Fill.