Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).

Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

Or, you know, we could just quit it with this generational shaming nonsense. It’s not like human beings are complex creatures or anything.

Doctor in Front: Everyone stay behind me. I’m a doctor of art history. It’s finally my time to shine.

How many other animals did they put through a sieve to reach this conclusion? How many?!

I have yet to play Skyrim with any mods even though I’d really like to. Only thing I have are the DLCs.

Getting it to run under Wine has been challenging enough (though it’s a lot easier these days) so I didn’t want to even attempt to mix mods into it.

I always start out with a random race, head in the opposite direction of Riverwood, eat everything I can pick up, and just start making and selling potions lol. Then I use the money to buy iron ore and start crafting daggers and selling those. Along the way, I may take a few side quests for extra cash. Then eventually buy or build a house.

By the time I finally go to Riverwood to start the main game, I’m…a fully Daedric-clad stealth archer. Every time. lol. (I don’t quite have the patience to level smithing to 100 for dragonbone, so I upgrade that along the way of the main quest).

^^ Every time I play Skyrim

Reminds me of a still from Portal 2.

A database can be used to plug into any number of applications that run on top of it as well as be easily shared by multiple people and centrally backed up. Auditing, logging, and row and table level access controls, and other measures can be easily added.

Excel files (or even MS Access files) as “databases” are often just people emailing around a file or accessing it from a shared drive. You end up with a split-brain situation at best and at worst you’re dealing with constant file corruption from multiple people thinking they can access it from a shared drive at the same time.

Then you get vendor lock in and are forced to keep MS Office professional licenses because Shawn created some stupid Access “app” 10 years ago which is “THE DATABASE” and no one understands how it works.

Not that I’d own a smart fridge, but if I did and they started shoving ads on it, it’d look like this later that day:

Underappreciated top

That was my nickname in college.

POV of:

Yeah, that one took me a minute. I think “drip” or “slow drip”? I know “drip” used to be a term but was never one I associated with “screwball” or “crackpot”. Usually I’d heard “drip” to mean something closer to “dull” or “boring”.

Pretty decent unless there’s a lot of animation / video in them. Calling, texting, looking up something on the internet, bank app, auth app, etc all work great. Some of the stock Android components don’t work super great with it, though, like the quick action buttons (though, arguably, they don’t work great on any Android phone either lol).

Feels sluggish at times but that’s just the e-ink being what it is. I mostly treat it like a dumb phone that’s also an e-reader.

I’ve always joked that coding as a hobby is just digital knitting lol.

I’ve gradually weaned off of smartphones over the last 18 months. Currently daily-driving the Minimal Phone and loving its distraction-free (or at least distraction-lite) ways.

I may not be analog like the article is highlighting, but I have basically eliminated the doom scrolling and have reignited my passion for reading (the one “distraction” the Minimal Phone does well is being an e-reader since it’s got an e-ink screen).

Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025

I’m just going to ignore the irony of that and appreciate it at face value 😆

(Cries in Rich Hall)