There is one game called 'hack n slash' on steam. You manipulate the 'global vars' to win the game. There is even one point where the game has you open up its data files and change things. Interesting mechanic.

On some systems/drives if it detects an error that is big enough it will reset the carriage. You can here it reading and rescrubbing over and over. That can cause the carriage motor to overwork and burn out. Not sure of this system does that or not. But that would be my guess.

> Now I work mostly with PhDs who were at the top of every academic environment they've ever been in. And yet I can see their thinking skills rapidly declining as well

I noticed this before LLMs became a thing. It was by accident. We had a team of programmers. All decent at what they do. The management said 'hey you want to learn another language we are going to be using it for these upcoming projects'. So we set up a self learned at your own pace class curriculum. Maybe 10-20 hours of school work if you sat and really dug in. Maybe 3 to 4 hours if you breeze thru it and do not care much. We set up weekly check-ins doing about 1 hour a week. Easy. Watch a 20-30 min of vid 20-30 mins of do homework come to check-in and talk about what you learned and help others if needed.

Now this is where I was disappointed. The first 'class' was 40 people. By the last there were 3. Those 3 I noticed always are the ones who dug in. The rest wanted a proctored classroom and someone to tell them what to do.

Actual genuine curiosity is rare I think. We have a lot of people who are decent at what they do. But do not really care about it. IF you do not care you are going to just push the button and get the answer.

I could see myself dropping out even if I was interested in learning. I'd suspect that the time spent would end up with me needing to stay late to make up for it or being penalized in some other way.

those story points do not earn themselves!

Start simple add the rest later when you needed it. How will you know you need it later? At 3AM. If it makes you feel better add a comment what will be needed when it breaks.

I see over and over wildly overdone code. When all I really wanted was some simple if conditions and a couple of loops. But that doesnt scale to XYZ per ns. Does it need to?

Boring wins almost every time.

Yeah that probably should just be an option. Basically the default is to least mangle the zip file. Where the most extreme is turned on by flags. One of those could be 'remove empty folders'.

Heh, not sure why but it makes me wonder if you could 'Ship of Theseus' something like that into a modern day desktop. By going thru the different eras of DIY compute.

At some point you have to go from S-100 to original “8-bit” ISA. There might have been a combo backplane in period.

Yeah I was thinking that. Also at some point you will be switching motherboards every other cpu update just due to the socket changes between generations.

S-100 went as far as 68020 and Unix clones, but you'd be at a dead end there

I want to see the outtake lines they didnt use. Roddy Piper had tons of one liners he would use for wrestling.

I wanted an accountant I got a poet.

That can happen many times during a buyout. Some company buys a thing. The problem then is ownership of the thing. Who in the new company is going to own the 'make sure it stays good' problem. Sometimes with a buy out the people who were doing that may even stay at the company. But it is a matter of motivation. MS has a real serious problem. You can see the gaps where they have glued together at least 10 companies together and called it microsoft. They have a huge reputational risk issue. Where something breaking in the xbox div can have a negative impact on the tools division. Also the other way around. They lack focus on many items. They have needed a 'service pack 2' stop the presses moment and fix this mount everest of tech debt.