I worked for a company that also had hardware engineers writing RTL. Our software architect spent years helping that team reuse/automate/modularize their code. At a mininum, it's still just text files with syntax, despite rather different semantics.

I worked for awhile as a janitor in a college dorm. Not an easy job but it definitely revealed a side of humanity I might not have otherwise seen. Especially the clean out after students left for the year.

We had a large green plant growing in an unused fridge. Fungus yes, but this was a new experience. As students we learned a lot.

> it definitely revealed a side of humanity I might not have otherwise seen

It definitely revealed a lot of falsehoods and stereotypes.

Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit...

+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

> the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.

> defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit

People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.

It also helps to spread your lifetime Soc Sec benefits over more tax years, thereby lowering the total tax you pay (because pushing higher payouts into fewer tax years by delayed filing will typically increase your marginal tax bracket).

Yeah it's definitely not one-size-fits-all advice. Depending on what your IRA/401k situation looks like, taking SS right at 62 may be the financially superior choice as it reduces your early draw down on the investments.

I'm not following this advice for now but a recent post about not delaying

https://nesteggcare.com/why-would-you-delay-the-start-of-soc...

But is Medicare as good as the insurance you had before?

I can't speak for aworks, but most of the people I've spoken to on it, like my mother, say it's better than the private insurance they had before.

For general medical coverage, it was better for my Mom and now it seems better for me. Some things are not covered with traditional Medicare e.g. dental and vision.

Dental and vision aren't covered by private medical insurance either, and private dental insurance typically has max annual payouts low enough (like $1k/1.5k) to make it basically a scam unless you know you'll actually get use out of it.

I had a separate dental insurance policy but as you suggest, it didn't make much sense and I dropped it.

So yes, dental/vision was a wash versus private medical insurance. There are some other therapies I no longer have any coverage for under Medicare.

I’m going to need to buy on the individual market. Talking to a broker he said Medicare is a great deal, and you should take it if you can.

A lot depends one what you do for Part C (if you do).

"Agile Vibe Coding in action: short cycles, fast feedback, continuous correction.This isn’t a formal spec. It’s a conversation that keeps going during the work, not before it."

I tend to go for workflows like that, in my experience generating a lot of code without appropriate feedback is a recipe for trouble.

Hmm. The design of left turns on "stroads" seems to vary in the US. Mostly left-turn/U-turn lights in California, loop arounds in suburban Detroit, unprotected left turn lights in Kentucky, differs if the route is a national, state or local road etc.

On the other hand, right turn on road now seems to be universal unless a sign prohibits it. And all states apparently enforce slowing down or moving to the adjacent lane for stopped emergency vehilces.

It was a long time ago but I attended a session by IBM at an OO conference. The speaker's claim was that the half-life of programming language knowledge was 6 months i.e. if not reinforced, that how fast it goes.

I learned the Q array language five years ago and then didn't touch it for six months. I was surprised how little I remembered when I tried to resume.

I was 10 in 1969. Landing on the moon was a communal and shared event for a large percentage of the population, via one of the three television networks. As was the war in Vietnam.

Many decades later, our institutions are in need of rebuild, for the common good. Maybe this event is a "small step" in that direction.

The Apollo program only barely reached 50% approval during the Apollo 11 landing. They canceled landings because people stopped caring within a couple moon landings.

The popularity of Apollo is fictional. Artemis has dramatically better popularity than Apollo.

I"m not saying it had high approval. I'm saying it had high community awareness, unlike the current mission. I was in a bookstore where they were playing the radio over their speakers as Apollo 13 reported problems. That seems different to our current fragmented, de-institutionalized world, FWIW. Maybe there are tiktok memes that I'm not aware of.

I was an engineering manager for a commercial C/C++ toolchain used in embedded systems development. We, and our customers, examined the generated code continously. In our case, to figure out better optimizations (and fix bugs). For some of our customers, because their device had severe memory constraints or trying to do difficult performance optimizations.

Moving up to an MMU and running Linux was a different (more abstract) world. Although since it was embedded, low-level functions might still be in both assembly and C if not the apps on top.

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

6 quarters, not 6 semesters!

Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.

I was a manager of engineers and manager of managers. I've never heard the word fun used in conjunction with reviews.

It's a system and process put together by others, with forms and criteria that were flawed. It required real effort to do it even half successfully. It's not clear it ever had much impact on future behavior. and it had to be done on a timeline that interfered with doing the regular job.

If someone had a real performance issue, there were better approaches to the problem.

Yet every company I worked from from tiny startup to large Silicon Valley company insisted on it every year.