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The way you worded this has me imagining the counterfactual world where lots of people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler.

Compilers cost real money back then. Word got out that this was how you got a free compiler. You just wrote a linker, and you got in touch with Bill and offered it to him. (You did have to write your linker in a single huge file of assembly, because you didn't have a compiler or a linker yet. It was fine, more programmers knew assembly back then.)

Microsoft has thousands of linkers. They're the linker company now.

Most of their other products started as test cases for their linkers, that they also happen to sell separately as a side business because why not.

Excel is a notable exception, because due to a series of overengineering decisions, it actually is a linker that gradually gained spreadsheet features.

Yep. And then they discontinued it saying they wanted to add features that wouldn't work on IRC.

Yes. That's why I was using the IRC bridge.

FreeTaxUSA 3 years ago

I used it and liked it when it was Credit Karma, but I am not doing extensive data entry in a phone app. Do they have a web interface now?

Git Things 3 years ago

The 50-character summary thing is bizarre. As far as I can tell, what happened is someone did statistics on summary lines, found that the average was around 50, and then louder people with strong opinions missed the word "average" and declared 50 as a maximum.

My hot take is that you should use exactly as many characters as you need to write a meaningful summary, and people who insist on using tiny terminal windows can deal with the consequences of their actions.

It's absolutely a spectrum, just like the individual conditions that make it up are spectra. (Everything is spectra. Is my friend who has arthritis in his otherwise working legs "physically disabled"? It depends on whether he's walking around a store or trying to run a marathon.)

"Neurotypical" here, when used as a binary adjective, means something like "close enough to the average on all the relevant spectra to not particularly benefit from special consideration". The exact line for where that is is going to be blurry and situationally dependent, because it's a shorthand for an approximation.

... Steam isn't the thing that doesn't support MacOS. I don't know why you're mentioning Steam.

But yes, console and OS exclusives are a plague and people should stop making them.

(I don't work at Github, these are inferences from working on other cloud services)

Does this mean Github staff can basically take over any private account without contacting the owners?

That's an incredibly common feature to have on the admin side. Three of the four companies I've worked at have had some form of "log in as this user" button, with general guidance to not do anything dumb. The fourth had good reasons for not supporting that, but it made debugging anything happening in production incredibly annoying.

Could they quietly manipulate my own repos by changing my ssh key and pushing commits?

They _literally own the servers_. They don't need your ssh key. Likely not _everyone_ has direct filesystem access, but at least a few people do.

By hosting anything on a cloud service, you are trusting the people running that service. If you don't trust them, don't do that.

SQL sanitation is foolproof in the sense of it being possible to do 100% right. We don't do it much because there are other options (like prepared statements) that are easier to get 100% right.

This is an entirely different thing from trying to reduce the probability of an attack working.

My rude-ass car 3 years ago

I like how you disagree with the parent comment suggesting you drive very aggressively, and then nearly every example you give of the car being wrong is a direct result of you driving very aggressively.

it's not a productivity-disrupting change

You've seen benign instances, then. Every time I see a company do this kind of thing it takes one or more engineers nontrivial time to go update everything.

You're also pulling "can't afford anything else" into that as if the two groups are the same, which is what they're complaining about. (I'm not expressing an opinion myself, I've never been to New York.)

having variables with different names can be colored differently

This, too, is entirely personal preference. I've tried it and found it resulted in too many colors for my brain to assign individual meanings to, and then I couldn't even benefit from syntax highlighting anymore because those colors also blended into the rainbow of text.