I contacted him a number of years ago about his R-12 replacement for my old 1975 Ferrari, rather than converting it. It worked perfectly - better than Freon-12, even. Which is the only reason the EPA refused to allow it to be widely used. His web site (ghgcool, IIRC, I'm sure long gone by now) taught me that you can also mix butane and isopropane as a superior drop-in substitute for R-12, but he didn't pursue that approach because he knew that the EPA would kill it on safety grounds - even though it was only slightly more flammable than R-12 with the required compressor oil mixed into it.

George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.

There is no grand conspiracy. Every major gaseous hydrocarbon also tend to usable as refrigerants but tend to be extremely flammable, while most every chlorofluorocarbon tends to inflammable but extremely toxic under deflagration forming nerve agents like phosgene and acid vapors like HF and HCl. Thus, the primary tradeoffs are cost, flammability safety, deflagration safety, ozone destruction potential, and global warming potential.

The problems of conversion include in/compatibly of lubricants and refrigerants with seals and the density, boiling points, and latent heat of vaporization of replacements. The R-12 to R-134a conversion process was simpler but typically included different lubricants, orifice, and o-ring seal materials. I don't see how R-12 to a hydrocarbon or admixture of R-290/600a isn't a magical tall tale without proper math, equipment, and understanding of HVAC operating principles.

See this PDF for a summary: https://www.colmaccoil.com/media/394090/refrigerant-guide-fi...

I bought the "high end" e-Machines box on a killer sale at BestBuy because I needed a modern computer and didn't have the time it takes to get all the drivers and settings really working as they should.

They branded it as the "eMonster", and although not stellar, it was solid, reasonably quick, and got the job done. It was my daily driver for many years. I don't remember why now, but I called them with some kind of support/upgrade question several years later, and they were shocked when I told them my OS was XP. "The EMonster can't even can't even run XP!", said the incredulous person on the other end of the phone. Only then did I remember that I'd reflashed the BIOS a couple of years before.

My kids heard this on the speakerphone, and christened it the "eMonsterstein". I haven't fired it up in a long time, but it's one of three old PCs that I just moved whole out to the garage (most were cannibalized or just died). I suppose it'll boot up and run just as well as it did when I finally gave it its long overdue retirement. I may have to give it a try - I still have a monitor with a VGA plug somewhere...

If they were really badass, they had a rack of Telebit modems. (Telebit made 68020 based modems that did 56+ Kbps long before a 56K standard, and literally had more compute power than most of the computers they were connected to.)

In my experience, AI is more akin to Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect as a service....

Have you used them for coding? Because my experience with that is the opposite. They're literally superhuman in many significant respects.

Likewise - I tried the demo recently, and it's really impressive. I wanted to try it because the new CAD package I'm using (Sharpr3D) runs on it, and it seemed like a good idea to try that. (Unfortunately, despite being one of the most impressive and serious 3D apps for VisionPro, it's not one that the Apple store (at least here in Austin) was able to demo.)

But the demo also really convinced me that there is no damn way I'm going to want that ridiculously heavy and bulky hardware on my head for more than a few minutes. It's impressive, but pretty expensive, and completely impractical. It makes a great demo, but it's a miserably uncooked product - very well though out in some ways, but missing big targets like weight and comfort by a mile. Maybe in a few more years...

FYI, We just had world-class cellist Steuart Pincombe here in Austin last month performing the last three Bach cello concertos along with three matched brews from the excellent local Lazarus brewery as part of his occcasional "Bach and Beer" performances.

He's a flat amazing cellist, and watching him perform that last concerto you really realize how hard he's working to get it done - it's a workout. Anyway, it was a really good evening. (FWIW, this was part of the Arts On Alexander program this year, which is one of Austin's lesser known gems of amazing live classical music performaces.

Correction: Being a Founder is fine. Just make sure you own the company, and are not at the mercy of venture or Private Equity funds. 60% of America's economy is small privately held companies. With the leverage we now have with AI and other advanced tools (CNC, 3D printing, 3PL, etc.), it's never been easier to start your own company - and be able to survive and let your family thrive, if maybe not take over the world...

Of course it does. Math is not programming - it's almost entirely irrelevant to programming and certainly to software and architecture development. Most modern programming only involves math for trivial things like counting.

This classic article explains the real issue - like Mike Gancarz' classic on the Unix Philosophy, this is something all younger hackers should read, but few have, since these are the fundamental ideas that have created our modern world of computers: https://web.archive.org/web/20000529125023/http://www.wenet....

The fixes for such things are often quite amusing. One of these days, i'll get around to telling the story of how a major computer manufacturer was forced to make the BIOS smarter than the OS...