Middle click paste is an absolute showstopper for me (and also for my wife, who's not what you'd call a tech-savvy user).

It's already a PITA that some applications don't support middle click (IIRC, Libre Office is one of those, although I could be wrong). If it went away in my web browser, I would absolutely have to move to a different browser, which is a shame, since I've come to enjoy the modern Firefox after migrating to it from Seamonkey a couple of years ago.

I demur - insertion sort is O(Nlog N) or slightly less. The reason been that to insert an item into a sorted list requires doing a binary search for where to insert the item, and there are N items to insert. IIRC, quicksort is also O(NlogN). I often use insertion sort when building a sorted list, as the code is simple.

I taught myself to touch type on an old manual typewriter just after leaving school. The I went to uni, and almost immediately stopped touch typing. Evey computer keyboard I cam across had a different layout for all the special symbols required for programming, so it was back to "hunt'n'peck". These days, with the IBM PC more or less standardising keyboard layout, my hunt'n'peck technique involves most of my fingers, and I'm probably as fast as I ever was when touch typing.

Even more frightening is the concept of Quantum Immortality. Quantum Mechanics essentially predicts the we will each experience an immortal life, getting older and more decrepit as we go, in our own universes, so we see all our loved ones die off.
Pretty depressing really, hopefully dementia takes hold so we end up not caring.

And in the '70s, Male Chauvinist Pig. I once had someone apply to me for a job as a recently accredited MCP, which I believe stood for something like Microsoft Certified Programmer, but he made the mistake of assuming I knew that.

Absolutely! I still can't fathom why electricity is measured in kWh, and gas is measured in MJ. Yes, the conversion is trivial, but I bet most people can't do it. My wife is still confused between kW and KWh, mixing up energy and power all the time, no matter how many times I try to explain. It is so irritating.

Sure - the issue is that prefiltering is done based on the numbers. So if you've filtered out all of the good candidates, because all their publications are real, and one is left with a field full of candidates with CVs stuffed with junk publications, then the choices are a) mark them all unemployable, or b) hire one of the few mediocre candidates who may have some good publications amongst the myriad of junk ones. This problem means that even the good candidates are forced to stuff their CVs with junk publications, just in order to get through the first round of culling. I'm thankful I never had a career in academia - I'm proud of my publication record, all publications have a definite reason for existing, with little in the way of duplication or 'salami slicing', even though it looks less than stellar compared to my colleagues at a similar stage in their careers.

Installing Windows into VMs is indeed painless. Unfortunately, the same is not so true of installing on bare metal. The biggest thing is that using the same ISO you use to install on a VM will not work. You have to start with a working version of windows, download a windows installer creator tool, which then downloads the bits and writes the USB drive for you. Any other variation of this strict sequence of actions will fail.

After installation, there are the additional hoops to go through if you want to install it with a local account, rather than MS Cloud login. I'll let you Google the steps, it pretty wild.

I remember being asked by my director (ie boss's boss) what the impact of Y2K was going to be on the academic sector of the university (my responsibility). My response was some backups might fail, and possibly a few emails lost. Re the BIOS issue, some computers will need to be rebooted and their clocks reset to the current day and time.

What happened? Backups failed on one machine, because we omitted a software update that had a critical Y2K fix that for some reason wasn't highlighted in the release notes, and my personal email stopped working, requiring me to switch from using elm to mutt. As far as I know, nobody else had email issues.

Of course administrative and financial computing was a much bigger problem. But due to the stellar efforts of my colleagues in those areas to fix the codebase, financial disaster was averted. I never believed there would be any issues with embedded systems (ie I was quite comfortable seeing in the new year on the top floor of a tall building in Hong Kong, and knowing the only way out was via a lift controlled by an embedded computer).

Sounds like coding to me!

Recently my 3 year old 11th gen NUC died, dead as a doorstopper, and so I replaced it with a 13th gen NUC. According to my benchmarks, the new machine is about 10% faster on my workloads than the old machine - disappointing evidence of the death of Moore's law.

So far, I've not seen any instability - perhaps I'm already benefiting from mitigations integrated into the Linux kernel.

I depend on all of those things. I'm a bit surprised, though, I thought Rust had templates at least.

I can see the point of this, to deeplink into somebody else's web page, but it is obviously a fragile link. So you'd want to quote the text anyway, and then provide a link to back it up. People do understand when the source text changes, and can search within a page to see where the original text might have come from.

If it's you own text you're deeplinking to, then just adding an html anchor tag to the source suffices to enable deeplinking to the point of the document.

Apparently some nerve cells are nearly as old as the person. This has been verified by looking for the radioactive spike due to atmospheric atomic bomb tests - only cells alive at the time of those tests contain the spike. A recent paper reporting this is here https://www.science.org/doi/10..., although I remember reading about the radioactive spike dating some 10-15 years ago.

Not sure how you'd verify a person's age ante-mortem, though.

Which build system? For most of us using a cross-platform build system, such as make, you have to explicitly code the steps to sign the code, then run the notarizer. Documentation is sparse on how you do this - I had to spend a truly painful number of hours figuring out how to do it from Stack Overflow posts and the like. And then every few years, you have to do it again, when Apple changes the system (like they did last year). Also, these items have to run under a desktop, so you can't just build your software on a headless virtual machine or ssh session. And for this they have the temerity of requiring Apple Developer membership - for a fee, of course.

The only mitigation is that the situation for Windows development is far more insane