Technical: - Just anything more programming-specific stuff at work. When I get to do something, it's a stress-relief, because the typical day involves dealing with meetings, people, etc. and I can't have that much anymore, now with my health. Even when I can just focus, I want to shake the worry of other people's issues. The programming I do mostly is handling precise reporting requests, but since that is going to be offshored, I can move to something else at least. I am hoping that I can take on anything outside of Java or .NET. I work at a consultancy and those projects do pop up.

- Recreational programming: graphics programming, something to support my odd project (a "recreation" of the bad software from "a company" "I worked for"). I already wrote a hacky command language that is intentionally tedious to use :) Next is the user interface!

- I have a plan also to go through Wirth's Oberon Compiler Construction and his Algorithm text using Oberon. If there is a project in it, I want to maybe bootstrap a simple Oberon compiler in Pascal then rewrite in Oberon (without caps!)

Non-technical: - I want in the future to expand my range of project options from my employer, so I want to rev-up my mind again in this country's language and go through the thickets of folk's heavy dialects.

- Eat better. If I can help to avoid my gut issues at this point, I need to.

- Do more presentations, particularly in the more topics I have embraced (Pascal, compilers, etc.) as something pedagogical for others in my company of consultants.

Free Pascal with better tooling?

I have read HN for years ... on my profile it says my account was made 11 years ago but I followed it much longer than that. It has been a continual resource of things that I would have never thought of looking into or spark interest in things that I haven't looked at in a long time. As an example, a post on a Lazarus/FP release triggered my multi-month long interest in Pascal again for me.

I do like there is a level of civility and this site is not juiced up with advertising and algorithmic personalization. Sometimes though, I feel like this site has some conversations similar to that I had in real life. I would say something and someone, would say 'but!' with a long explanation on why someone I'm wrong, rinse and repeat. It gets annoying to read, but I can at least not bother, because most issues are simple not hills to die on. I will leave it to others here to elucidate this point in other ways, which I dutifully upvoted.

"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."

That sounds like a plan!

I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.

Used KDE for years now. It is stable and just works.

It's not important enough, but I wish there was a function like in macOS that switches between applications fully on Alt-Tab, where all windows would show (I have it half-way there, "show one icon per application" in System Settings). macOS's function I think reflects old Classic macOS functionality.

I started to think that these type of articles posted on Hacker News are a bit excessive. This and the AI stuff. This is one American company (high-profile, for sure) that might or might not be having retention issues. It's up to them to decide that, individual employees of the said company to decide if this arrangement is still right for them and shareholders if this will be a worthy investment in the next years. I think a lot of people are none of these. In the meantime, these "top tech talent" probably make way more than I can ever possibly can, and have the mental acuity to keep up with the demands that their employer requires from them while continuing to have a higher ceiling on the type of employment benefits than I could ever have.

I know I will have an argument over this which I won't both participating in, so please just downvote me.

You want to know about my own employer's policy, and employer you might have never heard of? It's not like Amazon. Amazon is not a bellweather for the wider industry as I see it.

How does that boot taste?

A quite delicate taste of leather on my soft palette.

This is exactly what I have been thinking lately, starting with looking at Oberon. It seems to me that writing a simple GUI should be the same as writing a simple text-oriented script. GUIs have their own challenges, of course. However, doing the GUI equivalent of print() statements to show calculation output is a think a modern operating system should do, not have a distance between user and the graphic system. At the moment, it's a pretty ideal, but there are cases I wish their was less friction with it.

edit: I never tried, but isn't this where Smalltalk comes in?

I've never worked with Smalltalk either but I think you are right. The conversation here reminds me of the the Unix-Haters Handbook = )

I have become slightly more interested in the software, that is, the GUI, the operations, etc. I miss some of the simplicity of classic mac, and the silly ideas I had trying to program it (which I sort of understand better now.) The hardware is physically demanding and costly (space in my apartment is precious).

The emulators available are top-notch, and you can get a quite functional “developmental setup” running and even use file sharing to be able to target old Mac OS with modern IDEs.

I only toyed with Lazarus/Free Pascal. There was some things I couldn't get used to. Maybe time to toy around again :) I feel like mentioning a few things that helped in the past: fpcdeluxe for installing a build of fpc and lazarus and a plugin called anchordockingdsgn to get all the floating windows in one window. It would be nice if 4.0 defaulted to that. The Castle Engine Pascal tutorial was actually pretty good also (which is mentioned in another thread here.) (edit: for the plugin, I see an option in fpcdeluxe to dock all windows - so it's possible to build that plugin in initially.)

fpcupdeluxe is great if you want to get a particular revision or build cross-compiling. If you need a stable version, just download the setup from. The docked IDE is the default option for this version.

They might as well load the rest of Windows at startup if that is the magic bullet of how many performance issues their OS and software has. It still shocks me that my cheap 8-year old laptop with Fedora on it feels all around snappier and a relief to work with than the computer handed to me at work. That computer would fly with a decent operating system.