I went to a local estate sale of a professor, whose entire downstairs (4+ rooms) was filled with bookshelves full of books. They were well organized by topic, and covered a range of topics (math, science, health, fiction, biographies, etc). It was more functional than artistic, comparing it to the pics in this post, but the number of books was probably the same order of magnitude as our local public library’s collection, or a small bookstore.
I went at the end of the 2 or 3 day sale, and it still looked full. They were charging fair prices for the used books, but were going to pay to haul the remainder to the dump. I’m still unhappy about the waste, even though I mostly understand it.
Disheartening to say the least. A cache like that would sure to a have single volume that would more than pay for the price to pay to have them moved and stored for a year… the idea that there are countless volumes of that caliber most likely in a collection like that means whomever is responsible is literally throwing money away… based on what you’ve described I could easily see a collection like that fetching at least a hundred thousand dollars, maybe substantially more.
My first team figured that out after a year or so. If it’s really TODO, it should either be addressed before the WIP feature is considered “completed”, or it needs to show up in our work tracking system. Otherwise it just fell through the cracks and would never be prioritized.
> For example: did you know there's no way to run a system upgrade (like to 26.2) via SSH
I did not know this. I thought the `softwareupdate` command was built for this use case, and thought it worked over ssh. It sure looks like it should work, but I don’t have a mac I can try it on right now.
Or, they hit the brick wall that is US anti-money laundering laws. It’s illegal to “tip off” (warn) the person if they’ve tripped the AML checks.
At that point, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have on the inside, unless you’ve got one that’s ignorant of the law or willing to risk the penalties.
If this is being regenerated every commit, I’d be interested to see the version history and/or being able to see the CodeWiki diff inside a pull request.
Maybe it’s too noisy, if the LLM isn’t stable about the way it’s wording things, or maybe it’s only useful for commits that make significant changes to architecture. However, I do think it’d be interesting to see how the documentation changes over time, as well as seeing how any specific PR changes it.
Also, I looked at golang, and I was definitely expecting a multi-page architecture with lots of cross references, not just one long scrolling field of content.
I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.
The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter
I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.
I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.
Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.
If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.
The very first thing I learned to cook as a young kid in the late 1950s was a macaroni and cheese recipe from the BH&G cookbook. It was very different frum the creamy mac and cheese recipes that are common today. It didn't have a runny sauce; it had more of a firm custardy texture. You could scoop up chunks of it with a big serving spoon.
I did some brainstorming with ChatGPT, and we found the recipe below.
Could you check your cookbook to see if it has a recipe like this, and possibly take a photo and send it to me? Email is in my profile. Thanks!
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Old-Fashioned Baked Macaroni and Cheese (circa 1950s BH&G style)
Ingredients:
1½ cups elbow macaroni (uncooked)
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk (sometimes evaporated milk was used)
1 tsp salt
Dash of pepper
Optional: breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs for topping
Optional: butter for dotting the top
Instructions:
Cook the macaroni in salted water until just tender. Drain.
In a large bowl, combine the hot macaroni with most of the grated cheese.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk, salt, and pepper.
Pour the egg-milk mixture over the macaroni and cheese, stir gently to combine.
Pour into a buttered casserole dish. Top with the remaining cheese, and optionally a layer of buttered breadcrumbs or crushed crackers.
Bake at 350°F for about 45 minutes, or until set and lightly browned on top.
Very interesting, thanks! That one is very different from what my little sister and I made as kids. Ours was more like the one from ChatGPT that I posted above.
We were big fans of cream of mushroom soup, though. Our favorite was to mix a can of that and a can of tomato soup (with the usual 50/50 dilution with water). We called it "cream of tomato".
My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef.
I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.
Generally spaces around em-dashes is a question of style, not pre- or pro-scribed by any specific typographical rule. One nice middle ground is a hair space ( ), although it’s a pain to insert.
> spaces around em-dashes is a question of style, not pre- or pro-scribed by any specific typographical rule
Writing and publishing style guides like Hart's Rules (Oxford Style Guide) & Chicago manual of style have the 'em' dash use as a parenthetical closed or "no spaces" dash.
In British use – Hart's Rules – writers will choose the 'en' dash with spaces as a parenthetical dash, where US writers/publishers choose the closed 'em' dash for the same thing.
Imo, there is a conflation of 'en' dash and 'em' dash going around due to the ease of smart-dashes auto-correction turning (--) into 'em' dash with the 'en' dash and non-auto-correct 'em' dash needing a key-combo.
Common everyday typing online, I think people will simply use what is convenient and "good enough" -- a single hyphen dash as an 'en' dash or 2-hyphen dashes that may or may not auto correct into an 'em' dash. I prefer mixing spaces with a 2-hyphen dash 'em' dash, but I'm not a published writer so I enjoy doing wild things like that
I configured my Markdown renderer to replace ` -- ` with " — ". Hopefully those narrow spaces make it through HN's rendering — it's much easier when your tooling can do the job for you.
I went at the end of the 2 or 3 day sale, and it still looked full. They were charging fair prices for the used books, but were going to pay to haul the remainder to the dump. I’m still unhappy about the waste, even though I mostly understand it.