0xmarcin

I highly doubt it, Windows is known for its stellar backward compatibility. Code signing means a lot of older software, that is still in use, would not be able to install or run. This is not going to happen (at least in the enterprise).

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Looks like a cool project. We get a computer with VGA output, FDD and RS232 ports.

- You can still learn from the best of the best, its called books, try to read at least one per month.

- Conferences, not my thing, but if you are new, you may learn a trick or two there. No just go there, try talking to the people. Approach a few senior looking guys and ask them for advice.

- Confs can be quite expensive, a cheaper alternative is local user groups. You can try to find the closest ones via Meetup.

- ChatGPT (yup, hallucinates but still has a reasonable answer for 90% of the questions).

As for your situation:

- You are responsible for hiring. Try to hire people with more experience than you.

- "to the highest standards of the industry" isn't that perfectionism? Most production code has much much lower quality than what we see in open source.

- I think for the time being (the job market is really bad right now), just concentrate on delivering stuff. Learn if you have some time left, but delivering solutions should be your prio #1 in my opinion.

Blogs and small sites still show up when you look for obscure contents like "RS232 DTR line". So far when I had a very specific question related to hardware or software I could find it via Google.

I find that blogs and small sites do not have a chance when looking for a commercial products or when trying to find a review for a product. There is too much SEO spam and fighting for the top positions.

But if you are doing something that cannot be commercialised easily or is very niche your blog will have easy time on Google (programming is not a niche anymore).

My bet would be to write a small program using your target language. With ChatGPT this is extremely easy as you will get a list of recommended libraries to use. Try to choose an app that requires some serious coding e.g. creating an image board like 4chan is better than coding a tic-tac-toe.

My recommendation is that the learning app should:

- Interact with an SQL database

- Expose an HTTP endpoint (REST or GraphQL)

- Use a logging framework

- Use concurrency

- Use a unit testing framework and a few integration tests

- Build should be automated using GitHub actions

In my opinion that's the fastest way to learn a language or more broadly a platform (as every language now is a kind of platform with its own set of libraries, conventions, idioms and untold rules).

PS. My list is probably not good for a system language like Rust or C++, but should work for languages from Ruby & Python, though Java & C#, up to Go and Erlang.

Ad Scala - it depends if you already knew a JVM based language. If you are coming from Java you will have a head start: use Maven/Gradle instead of SBT, you will already know IJ, you will know your way around managing JVM versions and understand core concepts like jar files and class loading.

For me the most time intensive part of learning a new language is learning the new libraries. I don't mean here the standard library but rather things like library for interacting with SQL database, how mocking works in the new language, how concurrency works, web API framework.

Learning "just" a language can be done over the weekend. Learning to properly use its standard lib and the entire environment of libraries may take years.

Let's hope it won't be Oracle.

ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.

If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.

The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.

This is not my domain so my knowledge is limited, but I wonder if the chip designers have some sort of a standard library of ready to use components. Do you have to design e.g. ALU every time you design a new CPU or is there some standard component to use? I think having a proven components that can be glued on a higher level may be the key to productivity here.

Returning to LLMs. I think the problem here may be that there is simply not enough learning material for LLM. Verilog comparing to C is a niche with little documentation and even less open source code. If open hw were more popular I think LLMs could learn to write better Verilog code. Maybe the key is to persuade hardware companies to share their closed source code to teach LLM for the industry benefit?

I am a bit concerned here. I wonder how much time will pass before someone decide to use it to hack a computer?

Maybe there were in the past, currently there is entire industry there to help you game the system.

- Cracking the coding interview.

- Elements of programming interviews in Java|Python|whatever...

- leetcode & other sides with paid premium subscriptions...

- mock interview bootcamps...

It's no longer about skill, it's only about gaming the system.

Indeed you are right, there is syntax highlighting.

Also my last comment sounds a bit harsh. That wasn't my intention. It is a great project.

When you dig into the code you can see that the author did the bare minimum to have a nice demo. For example only 2 functions are supported: MsgBox and InputBox: https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/blob/383a005...

Still it is impressive to create something complex like this in a matter of 4 days (looking at the commit history). And it is a good start to develop a full fledged IDE.

The more advanced features like syntax highlighting & autocomplete unfortunately are missing. I did not run it (I am on macOS) but I also expect there is no debugger.

Now I also want to share my childhood story: I started my dev journey first by using Turbo Pascal and then by switching to Delphi 7. Delphi was pretty much like VB6, you designed an app by dragging and dropping components on a form. My first app that I have created was a Notepad++ clone, I still keep the code for it but it is so awful that I cringe every time I try to look at it.

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java, Scala, Gradle, Jenkins, k8s, NoSQL

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcin-chwedczuk/

Email: 0xmarcin (at) gmail (dot) com

I am looking for a backend developer position. Ideally in microservices environment.

Scheme is a small LISP written in C. It is smaller and simpler than Clojure. Common LISP is much more advanced if you find Scheme limited.

Erlang and Smalltalk are both interesting languages based on message passing paradigm.

Verilog - a hardware description language. Tetris in hardware? No problem! There are free simulators out there but using real FPGA boards can be expensive.

CUDA/Shaders - massively parallel take at the programming.

You may always put an "innocent" looking file into the output binary that states who is the actual authors. Say you may create AUTHORS file in your repo, but store a SHA512 of that file in some obscure file in resources e.g. META-INF/ArtifactSignId, don't automate this step in any way, do it manually. A lot of people that are mindlessly copy'ing your work will not bother doing anything more than remove some stuff & search'n'replace author name. Then you will have a proof in case this other fork gained popularity (not very probable) that it was stolen.

I would not stress over it until that other person sets up a project webside and starts a marketing campaign. Most probably it is only about making a good looking GitHub profile.

Great that JavaFX is not dead yet. I still use it for hobby projects e.g. apps that communicate with Arduino or MIFARE card readers via serial ports.

Ad 2024 the framework is seriously behind any other commercial GUI be it WPF or Qt. I found the SceneBuilder to be highly unstable, crashing often several times during development.

The idea to use CSS for styling is not bad, but there is absolutely no autocomplete in IntelliJ Community for it. Makes writing it hard. There is a JavaFX plugin for Eclipse but it looks abandoned.

All in all it works when you need to put a simple GUI for your hobby project but I would not recommend it for any serious app.

The fun was there until I got to the steganography challenge. I still avoid steganography during CTFs...

I think they selling point is that you do not have to solder. Soldering is not for everyone: you need expensive equipment, soldering in an appartment without proper ventilation is quite harmful to your health, young kids should not solder.

I used breadboard to play with electronics during winter in my small appartment at that time. No troubles with fumes, no need to buy expensive soldering station, no need to safely get rid of tin with lead. This was a good way to start, now I own a soldering station but now I also know that I need it about 2 or 3 a month.

I only want to add that you need resistors with slightly ticker leads. Most of the cheap resistors have either too soft leads or too thin and they do not provide a good contact with the breadboard.

I use quite expensive (comparing to noname resistors) Velleman Sets similar to: https://www.amazon.com/Velleman-RES-E12-Pack-E12-Resistors/d...

The same applies to wires that you use for the connections. Do not buy the very thin ones. An example of what I use: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3175

Jumpers are good but if you have to do a lot of wiring (e.g. 8 address lines + 8 data lines) then using custom cut wires is the best.

Gates is still a stakeholder in Microsoft. I think this piece is not independent of what Microsoft is doing right now.

This assumes that you will have only a single model. I expected at least one model per race (elves, dwarfs...) x adversity (friend, enemy, neutral) x some psychological models (e.g. Jung personality archetypes). So with ~100 GTP models learned on different sets you may have a quite diverse army of characters.

ChatGPT also offers a possibility to e.g. have a real bargaining at the shops: "How much is that sword... ".

Not sure about physics but I am really looking forward to see games with NPC characters powered by ChatGPT. That would make some game world really deep and involving.

Isn't this expected. Bitcoin seems like a completed project, you can fine tune it to get better perf, fix security issues. Any significant architectural change is basically impossible now without breaking backward compatibility. Not only that, you have to persuade miners to use the new code. I remember the hate around increasing bitcoin block size to 8MB (to allow for faster transaction processing, on par with debit cards), which lead to creating Bitcoin Cash fork.

Bitcoin is like git basically, it works, most of the crypto fans are happy with it. Non tech people are using nice UIs without any understanding what happens to their money.

OTOH I have friends that work "around crypto", they either work on new coins that provide privacy/speed/eco-friendliness or create exchanges or create other financial stuff like crypto robo-advisors that buy/sell according to user spec algo. The scene looks similar to what hedge funds are doing on major stock exchanges.

The invention of Radio, TV, Internet and Smartphone all have a property that they eventually reached even the most tech averse individuals. Crypto market is very limited as it requires technical (read nerdy) knowledge to do it right, or you will risk your money due to scam exchanges. But digital money is still a very good idea, Central Bank Digital Currency is a thing and I bet we will have you use in the future.

AI has the property that it can reach all the people around the world. From AI that teaches you a foreign languages to automated advisors that can e.g. recommend a diet based on your needs or even AI dating where instead of sweeping AI will do the match (I would pay for the last option).

The problem with AI is that there was already "AI winter": high expectation in the beginning, but nothing workable delivered in the end in the late 70s if I remember correctly. I hope it will not end up like this, this time.

I also don't see much potential in metaverse. For one we are crazed about healthy lifestyle and siting with glasses to walk though some virtual landscape makes no sense to me. It will only make you weak and tired. For the second the tech is not there yet, we may fool our sense of vision and hearing, but we cannot fool our sense of orientation, neither our muscles.

If you divide outages / new feature then they are one of the best. Last few years they innovated like crazy. Opening VSCode straight from the repo is still my best feature. CoPilot hype is shadowed by chatGTP, but still it is one of their most impressing inventions. GitHub Actions, entire project management (although I still cannot choose colors for "sticky notes" in the project board). They where very innovative comparing to their competition e.g. GitLab.

Over this we have less visible feature like sec scanning that warns you when one of your secrets was actually made public. Or just old good dependency vulns scanning (too noisy for me).

That's why I find this very surprising, company that can innovate this much surely can make use of those people. Maybe this come from Microsoft headquarters, if MS layed off some people then all subsidiaries have to do the same? If so LinkedIn will be next...

Having a single source of income is becoming more and more problematic in current times. If you are married you have at least two sources of income, that may be the biggest _economic_ advantage of the marriage. Those layoffs make me realise why so many people are interested in FIRE movement and passive income. Either you have savings (but fiat currency discourages that) or some source of extra cash flow (be it minimum that allows you to survive) or you are at the mercy of current economy climate (be it FED printing or FED tightening or stock market frenzy). Maybe the universal basic income will be come the solution to this problem in the future?

With more automation and unstable world economy we will probably see more layoffs. Entire industries may go extinct.

Yes I am on more pessimistic side, but the last decade was great for software engineers and as the Bible says after 7 good years there may be 7 bad years coming.

For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). I was also fascinated by Japan, even tried to learn the language but got discouraged early on by having to learn 3 different "writing systems". The grammar was also not quite easy to grok (definitely not easy as the presented code-like example).

Now I am more fascinated by contemporary China than contemporary Japan. I see that Japanese culture is based on much more ancient and broad Chinese culture. I also see a pick up in interests to learn Mandarin among my friends/coworkers.

I watched a few Chinese movies and I have to say they bring a breath of fresh air. I think whenever we want it or not we will see more Chinese media in the future, simply because they are different from what a typical person is used too. That makes them more interesting at least in the beginning.

Something similar happened to me, the magic of programming is gone - now it is just another job that pays well. Personally I moved my interests to stock markets/investing/economy and also philosophy (but only basics).

I still feel about once or twice a year a need to quickly code a side project but it usually lasts month up to 3 months. In that time I code something that eventually is abandoned, but gives me some satisfaction.

When I was younger I tried things like taking part in CTFs and reading math books in my free time. Now something changed and those things seems pointless to me. Maybe it's the nature knocking on my mental doors telling me it is time to become a father?

Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long. Now the stakeholders want better results than one failed launch per year. It is unfathomable how GCP can be so far behind AWS and Azure. I think Google will soon have a new CEO, during last few years they provided very little innovation that can pay for itself.

Germany already took enormous amounts of immigrants from Syrian war. Now they "benefit" from Russian-Ukraine conflict. I think there will be zero/null shortage of the workforce there. The country is still desirable target for immigrants. Instead Germany problem may be lack of natural resources, they relied heavily on cheap commodities from Russia. Probably they will try to go back to business as usual as fast as possible to restore their competitiveness.

China: just as government introduced one child policy it may introduce 2 or 3 children policy, saying e.g. that with 2 children you will get an apartment for free or that childless ppl have to pay 50% tax rate... So far China is not a consumption society, so decrease in population will not translate to a huge decrease in consumer spending. Instead they still rely on exports as engine of the economic growth. Introducing sanction against China by EU & US may be a greater hit than demographics.

Probably we will have to find ways to produce e.g. batteries without rare earth metals. New deposits where recently also found in Sweden.

No government will risk famine in their own country to support "rich countries sanctions". Certainly neither India nor China will. Poor countries will buy regardless if the wheat comes from Russia or Ukraine, not buying means starving a lot of people and social unrest.

Time to build neon producing facility in the west...

I think the current situation will be remembered as a small local conflict, just as Vietnam war, first gulf war and hundreds of other conflicts. Despite propaganda both sides (NATO, Russia) do not want to go to the full scale conflict (see NATO and Russia behavior after a missile have fallen on Polish border). Some EU politics still want to talk with Putin (Macron), some countries (Hungary) want Russia to actually win. My country (Poland) went "full panic mode", mostly because populistic government tries to use this conflict to boost their chances of winning an election coming in September.

As for Taiwan there was already a serious conflict about that island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis Looks like we have a replay of that today. Just as south korea wants to avoid war at all costs (because the war will be on their territory), Taiwan want to also avoid war at all costs. China wants to unite with Taiwan on peaceful terms, otherwise we would see missiles flying over the island a long time ago.

Overall I believe Chinese government is kind of "brute gentlemens" or maybe even merchants, while Russian gov are just brutes. Nevertheless as long as Russia and China do not pull from stuff like fight with global warming, WHO (US shame on you) there will be no WWIII. Do let media panic and propaganda get to your heart.