Bill Heyman

The sun rises. A new journey begins. Carpe diem.

@willmcgugan Don't forget ^a (start of line) and ^e (end of line). These are all from Emacs.

Why do editors support ^f / ^b to move forward / back, and ^p and ^n for previous and next line — when every keyboard since the dawn of time has perfectly good cursor keys?

@naval Some 10x engineers become so through 10x tinkering.

There are 10x engineers because there are 10x thinkers.

The price of 12- and 24-packs of canned pop (soda) went up during the lockdowns (in 2020-2021) and never returned to its previous price. No doubt, some of this was the shortages (and high demand) at the time, and some of this was the inflation, too. I suspect that Coke and Pepsi leveraged the fact that their market has become inelastic because of brand loyalty (taste addiction?). A cola is not a cola is not a cola. My personal taste won't let me substitute a Diet Pepsi for a Diet Coke (or Coke Zero).

I’m not a big pack of soda buyer but how are people not talking about how a 12 pack of soda is $10? Wasn’t like $3 a sale price like 5 years ago?

@friedmanohio I never had a name for the bump on the left side of my index finger on my right hand. But, now I do: writer's finger.

When I was at school I spent a lot, lot, lot of time furiously writing essays by hand for class and in exams. Consequently, I built up a lot of strength in my writing hand. It never got tired. A peculiarity is that the top of my middle right finger was slightly bent out and there was a lump on the left side of the right joint. "Writer's finger," we called it at school. We all had one. Mine's almost corrected, and I kindof miss the slight deformity, which, along with inky fingers, marked me as a writer. Makes me feel bad for kids nowadays who don't have wonky, filthy fingers but repetitive strain injuries, migraines, and weakening eyesight because they're on a computer all day.

Multi-sensory serendipitous discovery... Physical dictionaries provide this for words as old dusty bookstores and library stacks provide for books. You focus and learn because you're forced to approach the act slowly and almost reverently. So much implicit education and attention is lost in today's modern, instant gratification, digital world.

@friedmanohio Yes!!! Physical is so much of a better experience in so many ways

There are so many more benefits to looking for a word in an actual dictionary than on your phone. There's the tactile pleasure of flipping through the pages, for one, and the chance of discovering new words along the way. When I did my degrees, all of my research came out of actual physical books. Some I'd read cover to cover because they were core texts. Others, I'd flick through looking for something in particular. But in flicking through a book and scanning the pages you read more than you need or want, and sometimes happen upon a fresh angle or new piece of information you didn't know you needed. In those cases, I could add something a little more to my essays. It was like finding treasure. Consider how poor by comparison it is now to look up something in an e-book or going online and looking for something using Ctrl F. Sure, you get to find exactly what you want very quickly, but you only end up finding what you want — no more delightful surprises in learning. You find, but you don't discover.

@MyTeslaMoonship My experience is that the FSD navigation is completely disconnected from the navigation on screen. I've had the screen showing a specific route (default, no changes from me), but FSD chose a completely different route by taking a different turn (e.g. right instead of left).

FSD navigation just irked me and this is not a new issue. I choose a different route than it wanted originally and turned on FSD (while in motion). Next thing I know, we pass by my turn because the route changed back to the original way! I had to disengage and go through the next parking lot to get back to the way I chose. 😡 I have seen the issue of navigation changing on its own back to what it wanted (usually behind us) since sometime in V12. The change isn’t caused by construction or obstacles. It is like the system didn’t save my selection or something. For the most part, if I choose a route, I think it should listen to me.

It’s strange watching old George Carlin clips now… because half the crowd laughed, and now people watch it in silence like he was reading the future out loud.

@mitsuhiko @badlogicgames MZ FTW

Did you know that @badlogicgames invented the .exe format?

@gregisenberg “It’s not you — it’s us.”

Every CEO layoff letter in 2026 follows the same template. "Hardest decision I've ever made. AI changed everything. New roles designed for AI-native work. We owe it to our customers. We're choosing to compete." I feel like I'm reading the same letter with different logos

I have not experienced a Windows laptop that has the fit-and-finish of a MacBook or MacBook Pro. On the Apple hardware, the trackpad just works and feels right. And (ignoring the butterfly switch keyboard), the keyboard have a great feel, key sizing, placement, and travel. I get over five years on a MBP as a primary machine for software development purposes, with 7-10 years as a useful machine. I have to replace my Windows laptops around year 3. Note: I always buy the high-end specs on my MBP, which certainly helps. My current machine is from 2021 and the only thing that might push me to upgrade would be to run larger LLMs locally, an itch that I scratched with the purchase of a Mac Studio last year, no it's not a critical upgrade right now.

I don’t think Apple’s genius is “pricing higher because of brand.” They made better products. Those products were more expensive, yes, but we didn’t buy them *because* they were more expensive. We bought them because the alternatives were often cheap junk that never worked.

@Austen Exactly.

@BillHeyman Yeah the ASVAB is honestly the most like an IQ test from any of the “vocational” tests I’ve seen, but what are you gonna do sue the military?

Why don’t employers use IQ? Because of Griggs vs. Duke Power Company. It’s illegal. They want to. And yes, it would be very predictive. They learned to launder it through the SAT and who got into which college for a while, but those signals have been largely nuked, too.

@Gregnormanjr My dad was a golf teaching and management pro. This is how he taught me.

Kids should learn golf on the forward tees and only move back a tee once they break par. Like leveling up in a video game.

@Austen The military uses ASVAB. (But, of course, vocational... nudge, nudge, wink, wink.) Before I was hired as a software engineer at IBM in 1989, they had me take their own aptitude/competence test. I definitely recall some IQ-type pattern-recognition questions.

You can still use vocational-type tests legally (with a little more risk). Leetcode and its ilk were one of those. Same with the Google brainteaser questions. How quickly someone can problem solve is definitely relevant to their job performance.

@jspeiser I tried this earlier this year, but had to return the product because its performance was horrible. The circuit where I connected to the network was too isolated from where I needed the extended network drop. A WiFi extender fixed my issues for the moment until I can run fiber.

Im today years old when I found out you can run internet through your home's electrical outlets to kill Wi-Fi dead zones. how have i never heard of this before? Powerline adapters. Plug one into your router, plug another anywhere in your house. Done. How is this not common knowledge??

I wear this shirt ironically.

Sam Altman recently posted about his own experience. It wasn't good. I personally know people on GLP-1s who have given up other impulsive (bad) behaviors: excessive drinking, gambling, risk-taking. But, are we averting our eyes from that there are good (for our society) behaviors that are being reverting to the mean, too? By eliminating a desire for the good risky behaviors, are we drugging ourselves to extinction?

“Ozempic may be reshaping the brain, scientists say GLP-1 drugs may be rewiring circuits involved not only in appetite but in emotion, desire and beyond” The later stage of life impact will be massive to society, when will we learn?

@p_millerd I look forward to seeing that.

@BillHeyman That’s a good call. I’m gonna cut the numbers by number of people.

Total wealth by median cohort age. Millennials are actually doing better than everyone.