MiniDisc would have been an ideal successor to the floppy disk if only Sony had unclenched their fist just a little bit. USB sticks are higher capacity but there's utility in having media you don't have to keep track of; especially in the early 2000s it would have been very handy to give somebody a MiniDisc of data and just say "don't worry too much about getting that back to me, I have a whole box at home".

We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.

Yeah - like many things Sony they went to proprietary and locked down

True. They screwed themselves thoroughly multiple times.

It could have beaten the Zip Disk and helped MD be adopted as a music format ("oh I have a few of these already, might as well get [a Walkman / PC drive]")

I don’t see why “truthful, nuanced, well reasoned” is the long-shot vs cagey and evasive.

Have you seen the job market lately?

You call the response "cagey and evasive", but that is for an objectively a bad interview question, one wrung below "How many years experience do you have prompting Anthropic Opus? We are an Opus shop." People are not locked into their current way of using AI and it is trivial to match how one works with AI to match employers requirements. It's a question that deserves an idealized non-answer

In what way is “How are you using AI?” an objectively bad question?

Remember the context - this is while solving a whiteboard problem. Its bad in the same way asking candidate what their birthstone is - because any answer offer little or no signal about the odds of a candidates success at the company.

I'm curious to know why you think asking about AI usage is a good interview question.

You're fond of asking candidates an unrealistic hypothetical and you think that's revealing?

Yep. I sure do.

Obviously because the latter lands more jobs.

There’s a Tumblr for that: https://www.tumblr.com/moviecode

Also Eddie Izzard shows how it really looks like: https://youtu.be/TKQzqwn-jIM?si=Ad_ZMhFr4As6H0lr

Seems like this is even more reason to set a good example and follow the style guide.

Twisted has had its own style guide for decades: https://docs.twisted.org/en/stable/development/coding-standa...

(Earliest mention I could find for camelCase methods was 25 years ago: https://github.com/twisted/twisted/blob/d7c19cd40d07c8c37f85... )

> get_someAttribute

Hell no

Maybe, but the position to not listen to him at all because he doesn't do that is still a much worse look in my book.

Soccer is not destroying the planet and making basic computer hardware unaffordable.

You're looking at the finger and missing the Moon.

I categorically do not love the timer. Timers should be a fixed-width typeface so the numbers don't jiggle.

Good point, I’ll fix this in a bit, any typeface recommendations?

This isn't the first time it's happened, either. It's a pretty frequently recurring issue, in fact:

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16725

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16732

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16734

All opened the 15th of January though, same as the instance linked in the submission. Seems maybe more accurate to say "widespread issue" rather than "frequent issue", as it seems to only have happened at one occasion, but it had time to spam many issues on that day.

A couple of other comics with their own distinct personalities but an unmistakable C&H vibe:

Cul de Sac (https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac)

Wallace the Brave (https://www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-brave)

The comic "Frazz" is also often compared to Calvin and Hobbes (as if Frazz the janitor is an adult Calvin), there's a long section on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazz

My pet theory about why the Minis sold poorly is that the 12 Mini was released just a few months after the SE 2; I suspect a lot of the would-be Mini purchasers had just bought an SE 2 instead (not knowing the Mini was just around the corner), and are also not a demographic interested in upgrading their phone every year.

Didn't the SE models sell notoriously bad as well?

There are always a bunch of us who wants a smaller phone, but the sales number indicates that we are the minority.

To some extend I also think it explains the increasingly thin phones. With the increases in screen size, they need to make the phones thinner, otherwise it would feel like a brick in your pocket.

No. Even the 2022—which was intentionally nerfed—sold 15-20 million and ranked in the top ten best-selling phones.

Wasn't eight of the ten best selling phones iPhones? It was even beaten by the iPhone 14 line up, which was only for sale in four out of the twelve months, while the SE was available for all twelve.

You're right that it was good sales figures for a smartphone, but not great for an iPhone.

The SE3 has bad selling because it is exactly the same SE2 with upgrade SOC. People buying SE phone mostly don't care about SOC performance.

I always point out that the minis were a billion dollar product. Most companies would DIE for a billion dollar product.

Apple is like CBS in that regard - shows with viewers that other networks would kill for get canceled at CBS because they expect more. Apple doesn’t get as much ROI on phones that sell in the low ten millions or low single digit percentage of the market. But I do think they could put those phones on a slow refresh cycle and teach e.g. Mini or Plus users to wait for the next release and stack that market together over a few years to be worthwhile to them.

My theory is rather about battery life:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44588733

My pet theory is that having to charge the phone twice a day was a deal breaker. We wanted small, not "impossibly thin" and always dead.

Something quite similar to this is a theme in Greg Egan's Diaspora[1]. Specifically the various "flesher" societies and "bridgers" who facilitate communication between vastly divergent groups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)