There are a lot of things that aren't dead exactly but are certainly at some small percentage of their peak popularity. Not Internet, but I like to give rollerblading/in-line skating as example. Yes, you may see someone doing it every few months but it used to be a pretty common activity at some point in the 90s. Bowling was very big at one point. There are still alleys but when was the last time you thought of being in a bowling league.

Yeah, I was thinking about pagers. They’re still used in some limited settings, like hospitals, but there are probably entire landfills composed entirely of old beepers.

But that is probably because peak popularity was the abnormal state and these thinhs came back to their normal and warranted popularity.

There are multiple kinds of meetings.

There are the status updates that it's often good for people to know about even if only in a half-listening and simultaneously replying to emails sense. They're at least aware in a way that they wouldn't if they didn't read the memo.

There are decisions that really just need to be made, even if not critical, so they don't get strung out.

And there are meetings that don't require a decision today but do have a timeline and need at least a plan for a plan.

Especially in larger organizations, it's easy to lose track of all the distributed soft costs that DIY can bring (and all the bus factors that may be involved). There are lots of people that kinda want to get paid and get benefits and which require some level of management structure.

At some point, you have people (on here and elsewhere) questioning what all these people in an organization do. PART of the answer is that they're doing internal work that could have been outsourced in various ways.

Infocom came out of the MIT AI Lab which was very LISP-centric at the time. Depending upon you you listen to, the gaming part was something of a side effect as opposed to the ultimate goal.

Though I find it fun on the language family tree that the Infocom team's preferred MDL (and thus ZIL) language was surprisingly closer to (and almost prototyping for) the Scheme split despite being "next door" to some of the most LISP legacy work, too.

Yes, they actually planned to release cross-platform applications in addition to games and actually shipped one (1985's database Cornerstone). The problem was 1985 was a bit late for cross-platform business software to be successful; the IBM PC and compatibles had taken over the business market, and having apps in a VM just meant they were a bit slower than native ones.

And they really went all-in on Cornerstone at a time when PC databases, as you say, had really cornered a (shrinking) market. Even MS Access arguably ended up as something of a footnote. Not that text adventure games, even with some graphical chrome, were really a growing market either.

In the nearest fairly large city, there's a (sometimes separated) bike lane, a bus lane, traffic lane, and turning lane which all intersect to various degrees. It's all clear as mud especially after dark when both bicycles and pedestrians are frequently darting into traffic from behind cars without lights. I'm just surprised there aren't more accidents.

I don't find cyclists especially obnoxious on the rail-trails I often walk on. But I have walked on rail-trails with a lot of bicycles where various people got pretty pissy because I wouldn't step off the trail every minute.

I don't understand: They get pissy, but you don't find that obnoxious?

If cyclists got off the roads every time a car comes by, that would be consistent with their expectations for walking paths.

No, I'm saying most cyclists are reasonable but I've been on crowded trails with elevation changes where they haven't been and have acted as if they had the right of way and have sometimes gotten pissy if I didn't get out of the way quickly enough.

Which isn't unusual in Japan. You see bicycles sometimes trying to force themselves through swarms of people going at maybe 1 mile per hour.

If you're making a right-hand turn in the US as a driver and there's a protected bike lane you're crossing through that lane to turn. And, when I sit outside in the summer at one of my usual restaurants with sidewalk seating, there are any number of horrifying combinations of bicycles, ebikes, escooters, and things that look like electric motorcycles routinely blowing through the red light at the adjacent intersection--cause they're in a bike lane I guess.

You cross through the intersection. You don't treat it like an extra lane to pass traffic on the left which some drivers like to do when there is sufficient space or no curb.

The road signage even says to get in the right lane after the bus stop where the bike lane temporarily ends.

Very cool. Did a very little testing for Infocom back in the day and knew a lot of the folks involved.

Neat! Any cool stories? What games did you work on?

I didn't really work on any games formally. Knew a lot of the folks from school and after and did some informal testing and feedback.

Calculus hasn't changed a whole lot. There are probably better books for learning than I used in the 1970s, but I have to believe that you can find pretty decent older calculus texts for not a lot.

Spivak is a different category of calculus text.