Does Dostoyevsky really need the slow treatment? Some parts of crime and punishment merited rereading but, at least in English translation, I didn't find much in the style to savor. Really it was more thematically interesting and suspenseful.

In the original Russian, Dostoyevsky requires the slow treatment. He loves the sort of 1/3 page long sentences that perplex the fast-path parser and force the reader's brain to swap; as if he wants to drive you mad so that you can better understand the madmen whom he writes about.

Were you reading it in the original Russian?

Haven’t gotten around to re-reading Dostoyevsky. But Turgenev’s English translations absolutely benefit from slow reading.

Fathers and Sons were absolute masterpiece.

Yes, in the English translation

Wait until you get to The Brothers Karamazov.

There is so much to unpack, which requires very slow treatment.

One of the things is savour so much is the time I read Idiot, we were on a cruise completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No distractions and just the sound on waves.

Good to know!

A Radius two page display was just not that expensive. Neither was a Mac II. By 1992, you could buy a Mac IIci for $2900 and a TPD for $900-1100. You couldn't buy it on your allowance but it was reasonably common.

The finder was always a multi-window interface.

I just don't know where your memory is from.

Indeed, an early use for hydroelectric power (1886) was the Cowles process for reducing aluminum. Using solar or wind power is more difficult, but does not have, IMO, insurmountable complications.

Doesn't/didn't iRobot have a defense business as well? Or am I confused here. I don't see anything about it in the article.

I never knew the back story behind Millenium (1989). I was impressed by the concept of the movie but even as a kid I didn't think it quite worked. It is a shame that he wasn't able to get the concept he wanted through to the directors and producers. Now I have another writer to add to my reading list.

His short story, Air Raid is amazing. I wish you had read that first and not seen Millenium.

As a film, probably it needed to be 20 minutes long and that was the problem.

Outside of the odd anthology series, a film really need to, in general, be at least 90 minutes for commercial viability.

The same thing goes on with non-fiction books. Yes, you can have magazine articles but a published book needs to be a good 250 pages.

All Systems Red says “Hi!”.

You might like the IBM 1620.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620#Anecdotes

Just output odd and even for each pass and increment by two. Need to make sure you have the right starting value, and check for off-by-one errors.

I have heard many software developers confidently tell me "pilots don't really fly the planes anymore" and, well, that's patently false but also the jetliners autopilots do handle much of the busy work during cruise, and sometimes during climb-out and approach. And they can sometimes land themselves, but not efficiently enough for a busy airport.

Autopilot based on a LLM would guarantee I’d never fly again

That would be scary, thankfully I don't think anyone would seriously consider it. But I could see other systems based on similar models being useful. Obstacle avoidance, emergency decision-making, etc. There are many places where a private solo pilot can get overwhelmed and make poor decisions or ignore important information.

Or, for me, yak shaving. I start a project with enthusiasm and then 8 hours later I'm debugging an nginx config file or something rather than working on the core project. AI gets a lot of that out of the way if you let it, and you can at least let it grind on that stuff while you think about other things.

For me, the yak shaving is the part where I get the next project idea...

I strongly disagree. If you double-click on a CSV, excel usually opens it in your local code page instead of UTF-8, but they got rid of/hid very well the old text import function so now it fires up PowerQuery when you import a CSV instead. PowerQuery is OK but it doesn't like irregular data. It also saves the query connection automatically. If you massage the data in PQ before you import, it's unlikely that someone who comes after you will know what to do with the query you made. They don't make it easy to can the query to use in the future with similar files. Actually, they make it pretty difficult.

LibreOffice Calc just gives you an import window with some pretty good defaults, like UTF-8. It could be better, but at least it is not worse.

Excel added useful array functions. Good luck finding anyone who can handle that.

Tables in Excel are not really first class citizens. They move differently than everything around them but they don't have an obvious interface for working with them from other parts of the spreadsheet. Within a table you can refer to rows by name, but not outside, really. If you click on a pivot table for a reference, it gives you a GETPIVOTDATA function, when you might have actually wanted E3 or whatever.

And don't get me started on "dates", "numbers", "text", etc., excels weakly strict datatypes.