> I don’t really get the nostalgia angle as it seems as many of those who are into this kind of thing are too young to have ever been in such a space, let alone worked in one.

I developed a fondness for 1970s interior decor/styling even though I was born in 1988 because most of the places in my town, such as the library, were last renovated during that time.

Also, many people in my life, such as uncles & aunts, were still living in the homes they purchased in the 1970s and some design choices just can't be easily/cheaply changed.

I grew up within and around a ghost of 1970s architecture and design. As an adult I wound up moving into a suburb built in 1968 for this reason.

It's less nostalgia and more like a vague sense of familiarity that you can only scratch the surface of in your mind.

Boundaries are a privilege available only to those able to deal with the consequences of enforcing them.

Not having boundaries is the privilege of those with resources to replace what is lost through actions of their transgressors

> But I still do not understand how one can consider writing to memory the OS owns to be ok.

Go to Vogons and look at all of the memory tricks people will use to get various games running on MS-DOS. This kind of juggling exactly which drivers to load, etc. is why Microsoft added the boot menu in MS-DOS 6.0 to CONFIG.SYS.

I'm not necessarily saying that this was the case here, but it smells like that to me.

> After a few years of pain, people would've gotten with the program, so to speak.

Not necessarily. This was still very much the time in which choosing to stick with an old version which worked (e.g. Windows 3.1) wasn't uncommon.

Just look at how many people jumped from XP to 7 due to the network effect of "Vista sucks" and then multiply that by the fact that, at the time of 3.1->95, people had far fewer computer security concerns, if any.

But what about The Jevons Paradox?

And it’s your upbringing that has the biggest impact on who your peers will become.

My parents were great, but if we were forced by circumstance to live in the worst parts of the US (e.g., Appalachia), then no amount of having a "good upbringing" would shield me from having a peer group which would routinely put it to the test.

I was obsessed with both history and computers when I was young. I've stayed a little close to history by building my career around problems domains in which C is the language of choice.

It's not quite Software Archaeology, but I've run across enough "old code" [1] in my career to keep me happy.

[1] One example is: In 2008 I had to modify code written in 1991 for a long-term Psychology study on rats. It had executed hundreds of times per day for ~17 years at that point. Fun times.

> Software people tend to overestimate their knowledge of other disciplines, writing it off as "easy" or work beneath them

You should see what happens when someone involved in the sciences, e.g. Chemistry, gets their hands on Claude Code.

What happens?

A professional scientist I know (tenured, professor) recruited me to set up a backtesting framework for a predictive finance model. When the results were not as they expected (this person does not work in finance and never has), they asked to see the code, then told me that claude had found a problem with the way some of the calculations were done (there was actually no problem), supplied the claude comments, and told me to change the code to match what they thought was correct. I did it anyway. Had they had more expertise in the domain (finance), they likely would have been able to leverage claude as a tool rather than inadvertently pursuing a very stupid mistake. Domain experts tend to doubt their ability to excel in other domains which is amplified by LLMs.

I work with a bunch of PHD's and have been since before ai coding.

Their code is aways terrible, and they constantly think it's good.

The exercise is always the same: explain the math to me, like I'm 5, then we profile it and see what is faster.

Oddly Claude Code, integrated into their IDE's has made this situation happen much less.

I never want to work in a place again where the fun way to start the Monday meeting is a "math problem".

PS: Don't even get me started on their SQL.

My first job out of university was at IBM wrangling a prototype some research PHDs had written into a shipping product, and.. yeah, this tracks.

This sounds rather similar to the form of scientific fraud where you first create a conclusion, then invent/manipulate the data until it supports your conclusion.

They suddenly act as if Claude has awarded them with a second PhD in CS. Now they know everything and everything you tell them gets filtered through Claude.

It's like "software dude thinks he can do hardware", but on steroids. They don't know what they don't know and they think they have a panacea in their hands.

Don't you know? Software is beneath them and the fiddly bits are just standing in the way of them getting their BigImportantWork™ done.

You would have? I don’t necessarily think I like the idea of using AI for anything that I’m going to send to anyone else, be it prose or code. But I’d rather get an AI generated pull request than have anyone in my medical team using it for, well, anything.

20 watts ignores the startup cost: Tens of millions of calories. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. Substantial resources from at least one other human for several years.