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If you were utterly confused, like I was, how the iPad Air M4 compares to the iPad Pro M5 and the iPad Pro M4, this 3-column comparison table from Apple's website might help:

https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-air-11-m4...

The quick summary:

- iPad Air has 2 stereo speakers, rather than 4 speakers as Pro models

- Touch ID in top button rather than FaceID as Pro models

- iPad Air is slightly heavier (???) than either Pro model

- screen of iPad Air is a bit less bright

- no nano-texture display option on iPad Air

- no true Thunderbolt connectivity through USB-C port on iPad Air

- all devices can use same Apple Pencil Pro...

- ... but the iPad Air takes a special Magic Keyboard (supposedly due to form factor)

- camera array is slightly different on iPad Air (no ProRes video)


You left out IMO the biggest difference (and the only one I'd pay for): the Pro is the only iPad model with ProMotion (aka. 120Hz refresh rate).

Someone named Ashley Blewer did such a deep dive on this show that she produced a full online course and syllabus centered around it.

https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/

It allows people to form a "watch club" around the show, similar to a book club, and have plenty of extra reading materials to understand the different tech eras covered in the show.

I think this show -- combined with the documentary "General Magic" and the book "Fire in the Valley" -- is a great way to be immersed in the techno-optimism of the early tech industry around the time of the desktop PC revolution and early internet.

For me, that sort of techno-optimism has stuck with me even if modern tech has more dystopian elements with which one has to grapple. It is still an amazing industry, all things considered.

p.s. total aside that Apple TV sells a digital "box set" of this show for a pretty low price these days. I am usually not a fan of "buying" a show from a streaming service but might be worth it in this case since it's around $16 USD for every episode across its 4 seasons, Apple has a good track record honoring digital purchases, and watching the show is a commitment.


I've used vim as a prose editor in addition to a code editor for a long time.

For me, Goyo was the plugin that always matched what I wanted vim to become when I was in "prose writing mode."

https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

I combine with limelight.vim:

https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim

This partially simulates the experience/UX of the product iA Writer on macOS or iPad, which is my favorite prose editor, but is proprietary software and doesn't work on Linux.

As others mentioned, when in prose writing mode you can also flip on a handful of vim options, I save these as hotkeys in my vimrc. For example, spell checking and line wrapping.

In case you're curious:

https://github.com/amontalenti/home/blob/master/.vimrc


I played with some of these tools 12 years ago and created "dim", but it was really just Vim with limelight and goyo in a Docker container.

https://github.com/amouat/dim

There is something nice about having the editor as a separate command especially for writing.


I just checked these out and Limelight feels wonderful when editing and reading prose in Vim! I will definitely be using this in the future - especially when writing things for my blog.


Glad I could be helpful! They are great plugins.


“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

-Donald Knuth


At that time made sense. It’s clear what he is trying to say: “I won’t engage every excited programmer who wants to know this or that via email, like others tend to do even for little things”.

In 2026 email is the most time-respecting communication medium other than a classic, physical letter.


Knuth is such a wonderful guy, his books are amazing


In that case, emails like IM's can be batched together during a 30 minute block twice a day.


That’s what he does except it’s every 6 mo

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html


What a clever sentence!


https://amontalenti.com - website/blog homepage

https://amontalenti.com/feed - rss+atom feed

https://amontalenti.com/archive - full archive of posts/essays

https://amontalenti.com/about - info about me

See GitHub PR here: https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd.github.io/pull/32


I'm working on startup #2 and we recently came out of stealth.

PX is a daily developer tool that helps backend engineers go from working code on a laptop to deployed code in a freshly-built cloud cluster -- all within seconds.

In December, I wrote up a launch blog post:

https://amontalenti.com/2025/12/11/px-launch-overview

We also launched the PX website, https://px.app/, and we wrote up a basic developer quick start guide @ https://px.app/docs/quick-start.html

Prior to PX, I was the founding CTO of Parse.ly, a real-time web analytics startup that grew to be installed on 12,000+ high-traffic sites and had terabytes of daily analytics data flowing through it. PX stems from my experience as a startup CTO who eventually ran large distributed systems on AWS and GCP.

PX is cloud independent, programming language agnostic, and open source friendly. PX is, in short, the backend development tool that I always wished my team could have. We're having a blast building it and we're excited to give back some power to backend developers so they can wield cloud hardware resources with open source tech, rather than locking in to proprietary cloud APIs.

The current version of the CLI is focused on one-off (or batch) workloads on GCP, but on the immediate roadmap: cron-style scheduled jobs; a v1 of our monitoring/debugging/admin dashboard (already looking good in internal builds!); and, formal support for the other 3 clouds (that is: AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure). We also have a lot more documentation to write and a lot more examples to post, but you have to start somewhere! The launch blog post covers some of the history and inspiration.


Agreed. I wrote a post about the history and power of plain text in computing here:

Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters

https://amontalenti.com/2016/06/11/simple-and-universal-a-hi...

You might enjoy it!


As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.

The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.

Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.

Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away from my developmental dependence on my parents.

My childhood before then is a blur. That might be a depressing thought for parents -- that this kind of blurred and fragmentary memory of childhood is possible, given that parents often describe this period as one where they are "making family memories" -- but I don't think I'm the only one. Importantly: this doesn’t make early parenting meaningless. Good parenting is ethically and developmentally important even when it doesn’t leave the child with later-retrievable episodic memories. But I don't think the point of parenting is to create said memories. It's to create a healthy child who can develop and individuate on their own in adulthood.

The article talks a lot about childlike wonder, and seeking that in adulthood. I'm all for that. But what's strange is that OP seems to believe the only place to find that childlike wonder is in parenting of your own children. I am sure parenting can be one such way to regain childlike wonder, but surely not the only one. People can reclaim their childlike wonder in sport, art, hobby, play, and travel, among other things. What's more, I know many parents who haven't the slightest bit of childlike wonder when they interact with their children. Or any other children in their family. So I'm not sure it comes as naturally to everyone as OP seems to think it does.

Two adult thinkers on how adult humans spend their time that have interesting thoughts on childlike play are John Cleese and Alan Watts. Cleese discusses it in the context of creativity in his wonderful lecture, summarized here:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-cre...

And Watts had this to say about it: "... if you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's just playing because it's good for him! Well, he's not playing at all! You have to be able to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don't try and get a sermon out of it."


That's cool. I've wanted to track my movie watch history for awhile but just couldn't find the right software to do it. I really dislike Letterboxd. I also agree with your point that having a software engineering (programming) background makes projects like these a bit easier to prompt for in a direct way.


Wow, this is cool. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Delicious Library. That is such a nice look-and-feel for this sort of app.


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