I was going to trade in an old truck and buy my daughter a Tiguan this weekend. I guess I’ll rethink that.

Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.

Conversely: the self-help nonfiction book existed because it was the only practical way to monetize "good advice" or "good ideas" at scale. Now you can do a podcast or a youtube series and try to make money from advertising/affiliates/etc, but for a very long time, "buy my book" was the only game in town

The article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.

The author even mentions this. Why watch a 20-minute video when you can just scrub to the 40 seconds you need?

A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.

I use Karabiner-Elements on macOS, and finding keyd was a godsend on Linux. I cannot deal with standard keyboard mappings and the lack of hold/tap keys.

I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.

I've found that if I apply for any company that uses Workday, it's an immediate rejection, so I don't bother with them anymore.

I would not be surprised if their system breaks somewhere between us clicking submit and some storage system. Their HR stuff is terrible.

Neither do I.

LLMs seem to have an easy time with Elixir and Phoenix in my testing.

I find Elixir's memory and threading models much more compelling than Go's for web services. There are many great libraries for Elixir as well, but if you need something else, Elixir makes rolling your own libraries very easy. I'd recommend giving Elixir a try, if you haven't already.

Or gleam if you don’t fancy elixir.

I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.

What would they run on these days? I mean other than my old Gateway 2000 dual Pentium Pro with 32MB of RAM and dual booting BeOS and NT4?

Philips is the company that came up with the term "Compact Disc" for CDs, so we can blame them for goofing up the regional spellings and making the world more confusing.

I think Alan Shugart (or at least his team at IBM) started calling portable data disks "floppy disks," and then "hard disk" emerged to differentiate rigid disks from bendy ones. Maybe we can also blame him and his team.

The important thing is that someone gets blamed. :D