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Rod Canion.

Practical, but radical enough to take on IBM when their PC looked unassailable. Being first to the table with a 386 and working with others to make sure micro channel was DOA set the standards for the industry for decades.

Edit: 2nd was Gary Kildall


And good riddance too.

Agile was always aiming to solve the wrong problem (that code is the bottleneck) but it turned out to be a massive lie exposed by LLMs.

It’s always the poor specs, terrible analysis and release constraints that kill projects.


"Agile was always aiming to solve the wrong problem (that code is the bottleneck)"

No, it aimed to solve the "out specs are bad and we need to iterate faster" problem.

"a massive lie exposed by LLMs"

No. LLMs add no insight about the problem and they expose nothing. They just help to engage this well-known problem with another tool.


Not in my experience. AI exposes the truth that agile as it is practised is a huge waste of time. All the bullshit ceremonies and short sprints were designed to get code squeezed out faster, no matter if the code actually addressed the goals of the project. The stupidity of agile is in its iteration speed since you can be handed utter crap, implement it to hit your story points and find out the drooling shitgibbon who wrote the specs phoned it in so your work is now wasted. Rinse, repeat.

> always the poor specs

But that is fundamentally what agile is about. It's not about coding faster, it's the recognition that the specs are incomplete or wrong because fundamentally, a lot of customers cannot tell you what the want until they see it. That's why "build something simple and iterate on it" works. Regardless of how good your spec is, once the coding is done the customer is going to realise that that's not what they actually wanted.


This is a weird backwards logic to justify terrible analysis

No this is literally in the agile manifesto. It's not logic at all, it's the written word of what agile is.

What that means is that Agile and agile are not the same thing. Most companies practice Agile, very few are agile.


Agile never claimed that.

Agile is about working code instead of hundreds of pages of spec nobody reads.


Ironically the AI guys are now saying good spec is what we need for the agents to code. So which one is it

>It’s always the poor specs, terrible analysis and release constraints that kill projects.

So most of the problems are related to business people and not the development teams? Who would have guessed?


Holding analysts to account would be a good start. Agile lets them get away with laziness. It’s always “oh sure we got that wrong better luck next sprint”

Now is the time to practice following a horse pulling a plough, because soon all the other farm hands will forget the nuances of handling a plough manually and your skills will be sought after by those who want you to drive a tractor. Wait, what?

Hmm. I feel like it isn’t over the history of the US and there was a period where US governance tended toward an ideal but the last 50 years have reverted to the norm. E.g Oliver North

So exactly when was that? Before 50 years ago, “Separate but Equal” was the law of the land as decided by the Supreme Court, laws against interracial marriage and laws against “sodomy” (homosexuality) were also upheld by the Supreme Court.

There is absolutely no point in US history that the US was “ideal”.

My still living parents grew up in the segregated south.


So perhaps the US was always an unjust shithole but I prefer to think the direction it was going was positive. It certainly isn’t positive now.

In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.

Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free


That’s because they adulterate it with methanol. Methanol can be derived from natural gas cheaply. I wrote a long comment above about why this isn’t a risk with home distilling.

The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.


> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.

This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?


Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.

(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)

The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.

But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.


> Like tenish gallons (~40L).

Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon.

Thanks for the info.


Yeah, the thing is as you distill you’re saving it bit by bit as you go along. You toss out the very first stuff (called foreshots) because it contains a number of chemicals with lower boiling points you don’t want (methanol, acetone, etc.) in higher concentration.

Then you get the heads, hearts, and tails and blend them together according to taste. You just wouldn’t get much separation if you distilled a small amount unless you were collecting in really tiny quantities.

So it just becomes harder to do a good job with a small amount.


Alan Kay invented a dead end (smalltalk). Meanwhile Linux became the future.

Apple had a terrible Unix until they bought NextStep.


Giving back to society means a very different thing to billionaires than it does to ordinary folk. They’d rather spend it on politicians to tear down the society they think is wrong rather than shore up the parts that are failing. I have always blamed the idea that seems to stem from liberal economics (not liberal in the American sense) that equates money with virtue, something that conservatives have taken on as a mantra.

So be careful what you wish for. Ordinary morality or virtue loses all meaning when the world becomes abstract due to your wealth.


My counterpoint to this is that something that threatened to be a standard space opera had the delightful juxtaposition of Ruby Rhod and the opera singer. The initial appearance of Ruby Rhod really jolted my attention the first time I saw this movie. It’s weird but it works for me

Most "space opera" folks recognize, are just a close scene-by-scene copy of a classic foreign film title.

"The Hidden Fortress" (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

https://archive.org/details/the-hidden-fortress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress

Luc Besson and Patrice Ledoux structured The Fifth Element plot very differently due to their culture. Perhaps one may also find something unique in the classics for your own enjoyment, or continue to choose to be upset with mundane facts. Goodbye =3


If you’re an ant, sure!

There's a Far Side cartoon in that

"Oh boy, look at that all that melting ice cream.. I hope he sits on our anthill!"


I don’t know whether it’s related to training yourself how to lucid dream, but once you can you may regret it as dreams stop working in the old way once you do. So be aware of that possibility before you go down that path.

I'm sensing an interesting story. Care to elaborate?

https://tim.blog/2009/09/21/how-to-lucid-dream/

I roughly followed these sorts of techniques after a period of having terrifying dreams related to stress.

It worked. I can recognise dreams and control the outcomes to a very large degree. The downside is that while that’s great for terrifying dreams it’s not so good for interesting ones. To lucid dream is to stop being able to let go completely. I’m ambivalent about it now.


That's really surprising to me, thankyou for replying

_"Pinkerton, you explain the logic and I'll provide the background."_

Sorry, what?

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