I've been using less for years, still learned a few things from the article and comments. I used less + PCRE (for pattern highlighting) for many years for detailed code analysis. It was a great way to get "down in the weeds" and really explore the code. less' bookmarks were another key microtool in that work.

As a budding young computer geek and mildly OCD person I always hated the non-square pixels. As far as I recall, square pixels just didn't exist at the time. Maybe at Xerox PARC or somewhere.

They never quite looked right, and making pixel graphics was a bit of a hassle since your perfect design on graph paper didn't look the same on screen, etc, etc, etc. I mean it wasn't life-threatening, just a tiny source of never-ending annoyances.

My Macintosh 512e (one of the early "toaster Macs") had square pixels and it was so great to finally have them.

And not only that, our sensors can return spurious data, or even purposely constructed fake data, created with good or evil intent.

I've had this in mind at times in recent years due to $DAYJOB. We use simulation heavily to provide fake CPUs, hardware devices, what have you, with the goal of keeping our target software happy by convincing it that it's running in its native environment instead of on a developer laptop.

Just keep in mind that it's important not to go _too_ far down the rabbit hole, one can spend way too much time in "what if we're all just brains in jars?"-land.

Wow, tried this in a VM and absolutely love it. Besides the nostalgia factor, there's just a concreteness and visibility to the UI elements that feels like it's been lacking in Linux desktop environments for a long time. Thinking about putting it on my home PC for a while. Might even throw caution to the wind and install it at work :-)

Late to the party but OMG this is possibly the greatest tech news discussion page of all time. Not just hilarious and impressive, but so many fantastic ideas / weirdly believable news items from the future! As an old fart software developer I've been slowly dipping my toe into the AI pool, I may have to just dive in!

Finally, a use case for AI that we can all get behind :-)

Yep. The Curse of Knowledge is a real thing.

Reading (someone else's) code is a whole lot harder than writing it. Which is unfortunate because I do an awful lot of it at work.

But will the smell be in 3D?

I know someone whose sense of taste was ruined by a small stroke. He said basically everything tastes like old gym socks now. That would suck so bad.