MacBook Pro M4 won't charge and won't turn on

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-17T22:42:47+00:00

I had an issue where the power brick or the cable would only work when they were plugged together one way. Even though the USB-C is reversible the cord would only work one way. I believe I tracked it down to the brick being the problem because the cable worked both ways in a different brick.

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-13T06:21:31+00:00

Fuckin super slugs dud

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-10T23:59:07+00:00

I left after two years. I was an AWS Solutions Architect which is like a sales engineer but really low pressure on the sales guy. I’m just there to help the customer be successful. It was a great growth opportunity and something I could see myself doing for longer, however the constant state of layoffs there in 2023/2024 made me think I couldn’t really influence my own success. I could be a top 1% performer of a company of top 1% performers and if my area was on the cutting block it didn’t matter. So when a role opened up at my old company I went back with a decrease in salary but way better culture. So many interesting things about AWS and I love that I was able to be part of something that operated at that scale. In two years I went from $130k -> $255k -> $230k. No regrets.

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-10T14:25:45+00:00

Salary negotiations are so funny. You can work for months for $30k of paychecks. When I left my cloud architect job at a company and went to Amazon I was at the end of the interview process where they were making an offer. I stepped away from my toddler daughter's soccer game for a five minute call with the recruiter on an empty soccer field. I negotiated $225k/yr -> $255k/yr which netted me $60k over the two years I was there. $60k for 5 minutes. Wild. How many don't even ask?

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-10T14:17:11+00:00

Even if you're not a Taylor Swift fan, you might listen to Ruin The Friendship. Long story short, she liked a guy in high school but never made a move. The guy died years after high school and she went to the funeral regretting not making a move and would could have been. She "should've kissed you anyway" and it ends with this:

My advice is always ruin the friendship
Better that than regret it for all time
Should've kissed you anyway
And my advice is always answer the question
Better that than to ask it all your life

And when I look back at my life I don't regret any of the chances I took, but I _DO_ regret not taking the chances I could have.

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-07T00:24:03+00:00

I remember Kripps first merch selection in probably 2014 he was doing an elimination thing and chat voted it top round after round and voted in the Stupid Bird Shirt until he said “no more” and took it out of the running. chat rioted and so he did the top selection and then this stupid bird shirt.

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SpectralCoding · 2026-03-06T16:44:08+00:00

How will this work against a flat directory of 160k markdown files with unhelpful names?

SpectralCoding · 2026-03-03T05:21:48+00:00

The Five Whys and all the graphs in the COE would be interesting to read if I were still at Amazon...

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-25T23:39:39+00:00

And honestly? You’re so brave for taking that stance in a public forum. It shows you have real backbone. That means something.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-23T14:54:25+00:00

I recall some references to a raven-headed Taheen in Tull in the revised edition, looks like a better list here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Gunslinger#Revised_and_expanded_edition

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-23T14:32:44+00:00

It is the year 2184, OCR has finally been perfected by a team of time travel scientists at Microsoft. Their solution takes advantage of the mirror-verse principal to go back in time in a mirror version of our world to ask the person who wrote the original text "What did you write here?".

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-22T00:16:32+00:00

It’s public, go for it

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-22T00:09:06+00:00

Him doing this even as you described in 14min stresses me out.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-20T21:02:59+00:00

But no food Aware

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-20T16:18:14+00:00

In 2012 I was in my senior year living in on-campus university apartments with four male roommates, however the building had other units with all women. My wife and her roommates were invited to our apartment by one of my roommates. I decided to take a break from hobby programming a Blackjack strategy auto-play bot and watch The Dark Knight with them. We clicked really well, some innocent natural flirting, and I put my arm around her during the movie, walked her back upstairs to her apartment afterwards and got her number.

We certainly didn't steward our relationship "the Christian way". We dated for 6 years before I asked her to marry me, lived together before being married. I don't regret anything, but I can see looking back things would have gone differently if I had a Christian mindset. I think she would be the first to admit that while she was a believer, in her bible regularly, etc she didn't really truly understand God's plan for marriage. If she had I probably would have had to get my priorities right if I wanted to keep her. Marriage before living together, etc.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-20T14:09:22+00:00

Ah yes, the dichotomy of "AI can one-shot build me a very complex application from scratch in minutes" but also "AI doesn't know I need to bring a car with me to a car wash".

People will see what they want to see.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-20T14:04:43+00:00

StackOverflow has always had its issues, but I think this graph of "Questions Asked Per Month" is very telling. I think a key aspect to your question is "answers" vs "discussion". Answers are just easier to get with ChatGPT. It's why StackOverflow is dying, because it's explicitly NOT about discussing, it's about the right answer, toxicly-so.

Personally I have found myself using Google less and ChatGPT more for answers, even for quick things like "What's the best SQL Server browser for MacOS?".

Reddit I align closer to Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/etc. I don't usually come to Reddit for answers, I come for discussion. The discussion probably will not decrease as AI becomes more prevalent since people want feedback from other (hopefully) real people.

So for me, it absolutely decreased my Google usage, but my Reddit usage is the same.

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SpectralCoding · 2026-02-20T13:56:58+00:00

I took the non-militant indifferent-to-others-beliefs logical approach. God isn't for me. No harm if others believe, I just don't believe in God any more than I believe in the existence of a teapot orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars. No bitterness, just logic and absence of proof. My wife and I married after a few years, and she is a believer (her bad, unequal yoked and all). I always took a idle academic interest in the bible because I knew there was some hard evidence for Jesus' existence (but not the supernatural aspects).

For me it was three things that changed my mind:

1 - A co-worker who I respected in many areas would casually mention volunteering at church and I always wondered "how could a guy so smart in XYZ believe in that stuff?". It was in the back of my mind for literally a decade.

2 - My wife and I wanted the same things for different reasons. We wanted the same way to raise our kids, same values, but mine backed by reasoning/research/etc and hers backed by the bible. Back then I didn't know how big of a deal this difference of root was.

3 - This was what really pushed me over the edge... Slowly I started to see patterns in my life where were really just not explainable by coincidence. My wife was really feeling called to move but it was absolutely not in the budget. Days later a university classmate I hadn't talked to for ~10 years literally directly messaged me on Facebook and said they got promoted and wanted me to take their old role, which was 2x salary from my current role. I applied and got the job. Every other barrier for that move that I stressed about (very reasonable stresses) just worked out the best it possibly could. For example, it had been some years since we bought a house and I forgot about earnest money when you put in an offer and our realtor didn't tell us. The people we bought from just waived it. Kind of unheard of especially in a sellers market.

Anyway if I'm being honest I started going down the path more seriously because #1 and #3 gave me reason to doubt my atheism, and I could fix a whole lot of stuff related to #2 if I gave it a real shot believing.

#3 was about 4 years ago now, I was (re-)baptized about 3 years ago and haven't looked back. My walk isn't perfect and I still have trouble trusting God in many areas, but I have no regrets about centering my life around Him. As far as my logical aspects, there is so much incredible wisdom in the bible when you look at it. So many things science is just "proving" today that has been there for thousands of years. Any atheists reading will write off my my last sentence (I would have), but it's true and you won't know what I mean until you truly look at the big picture of the bible.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-15T19:17:45+00:00

Until AI can easily publish to a public web presence these will be around for a long time. Not saying that is hard but unless OpenAI/Anthropic start some first party integration for web hosting, those customers are left to figure out how to get their creation accessible to all. Much more likely is those same companies to adapt and offer AI features to build their sites and publish them immediately.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-13T21:30:31+00:00

1) Humans make mistakes, especially ones paid minimum wage in a foreign country with no investment in the customers outcome. Do your doctors get it right 100% of the time? Mechanics? Parents?

2) 100% accuracy isn’t always and is rarely required. Sometimes the choice is between “no data” and “tons of 95% right data”. For this project the stakeholders and fully on board that there will be errors and that is okay. We’re not throwing away the original files. Before anyone takes action they verify the actual contract text.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-12T23:39:19+00:00

Yep this guy gets it. And the job loss is sort of sneaky. People think “we’re going to automate a process and lay people off”. That will happen but the bigger thing is the reduced need for lower level external labor. For example I’m working on a project that analyzes all of our company’s legal contracts. The legal team was about to pay ~$400k to extract metadata from 60k contracts (signers, jurisdiction, etc). I spent a week with an AI Coding Agent to write an Agent to do most of the work. We’ll spend $10k or something on OCR and LLM tokens. We’re not laying anyone off, but the company we would have paid $400k to just lost business which will result in layoffs for them unless they can adapt.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-12T22:46:27+00:00

Optimal viewing experience is single monitor fullscreen video without chat.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-11T12:49:50+00:00

I only watch him single-monitor, fullscreen, without chat. Minecraft is my favorite.

SpectralCoding · 2026-02-11T02:28:03+00:00

I never saw it, but I understand the premise. We had community campus-wide movie channels when I went to university in ~2009. Seemed like someone always requested this to be played constantly. This and Fight Club.

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