This was a lot of fun to see, especially part 3 where it boots up. Us older guys (me, anyway) still find joy in seeing these old machines we learned our skills on being restored like this.
I'm over 50 now and feel like this as well. Haven't used Claude yet but used Codex a bunch, and it's been SO MUCH fun going over all the old perl & shell scripting stuff that I used to do years ago before I got into healthcare time and morphed to a hobby sysadmin.
Staying up and re-learning what I used to love long ago has given me a new found passion as well. Even if I do vibe code some scripts, at least I have the background now to go through them and make sure they make sense. They're things I'm using in my own homelab and not something that I'm trying to spin up a Github repo for. I'm not shipping anything. I'm refreshing my old skills and trying to bring some of them up to date.
An unfortunate reality is that my healthcare career is going to be limited due to multiple injuries along the way, and I need to try to be as current as I can in case something happens. My safety net is limited.
Having never touched Perl in my life, Claude has enabled me to create a plugin for this ancient Perl software a lot of people are still using to this day. This felt different from just creating some new code with some LLM. This felt like ancient gods we're whispering their knowledge into me.
We have probably 30 of these within 10 miles and it's great. Perfect excuse to go for a walk, get a book, read it, and then return it to one of the others.
This is exactly it, it’s death by a thousand stupid cuts by throwing everything at the wall and hoping that something sticks. They know that many of these laws won’t pass constitutional scrutiny, but by the time they make their way to the Supreme Court, the damage will be done and 10 new stupid laws will take their place. The anti gun lobby has been doing the exact same thing for years.
Same, and I was starting to feel kind of strange doing anything in html/php in 2026 but then I looked at everything else and realized I'd have to start from scratch again. Plain ol' HTML has worked great.
I am the same, self-hosting for many years and while I have the occasional question about it, it's easily corrected. I now have a short .com domain I use because my .fyi one was even more confusing to people, and simply didn't work with some systems I needed to use.
A bigger problem in my opinion is just how heavily people have associated "Google" with "the internet" and "Gmail" with all email in existence. They don't even think about outlook.com or even hotmail anymore. All email is Gmail to many people.
I'm amazed it's still around. Metafilter too, although it seems to have a LOT fewer comments nowadays.
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