cancerhacker

Woz gets some coverage in Steven Levy’s “Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution’from 1984, and he updated it in 2014. I try to reread it every year or so.

It’s fun to consider how C devolves into assembler. In my mind, C and its derivatives dissolve into 68K assembler as I’m writing or debugging. Thinking about code this way lets me get a feel for how all the bits all fit together.

It seems like a lost art to think that way. It’s disturbing to me how many candidates couldn’t write Hello World and compile it from the command line.

Everyone should spend some time with godbolt.org or better, the -save-temps compiler flag, to see how changes affect your generated code. Right now. I’ll wait. (Shakes cane at kids)

(Edited to add: Sorry, too long of a post here. I didn’t bother to renew my domain this year)

A timely piece I can relate to. currently starting my second week in a (US) hospital oncology ward after my 11th cycle of chemo. I was first diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer and after chemo, surgery, resections and stubbornness was NED from 2018 to 2025. The return is inoperable and I was given “six months to a year”.

I asked if I’d be in pain when death came, and he said that I wouldn’t likely be - it would just be feeling more and more tired. That’s basically what’s been happening.

The chemo itself hasn’t given me direct side effects like skin lesions or mouth sores, nor much nausea. The secondary effects on my kidneys (which were already doing poorly before this started) and liver (cirrhosis) plus the metastases in lymph nodes and lung leads to edema. Diuretics helped but flushed out my potassium, so there several months where they trying to balance those electrolytes.

Anyway, a lot of my swelling was reduced (and they took 4L from two rounds of draining my lungs) but for some ungodly reason my scrotal sack decided it wanted to play too, and became the size and consistency of one of those half size basketballs you can win at fairs. it’s so bad that I actually requested a catheter. The swelling makes walking or anything else really painful.

The oncology wing I’m in doesn’t seem soaked in the kind of depressing, institutional green malaise of slightly older hospitals but it isn’t a “nice place” to die (I don’t expect to do that this visit in any case). The older woman (70?) two doors down though - seems to be in constant pain and in and out of lucidity, shouting at everyone. Usually a phrase gets stuck on repeat for a few hours - the most heartbreaking was “mommy get my mommy I’m sorry mommy I’m a bad girl mommy stop it” yelled loudly for hours.

This is a generic hospital though. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC has a patient day lounge and lots of projects for child patients and patients families. Still not even approaching the quality described

Sorry, rambling. Probably my way of compartmentalizing the anxiety.

The other thing I wanted to say is that I really liked Christopher Hitchens “Mortality” and that Terry Pratchett’s very relatable death character shows up in all of his books. My favorite quote is from “Small Gods” as Death comes for the protagonist at the very end:

“Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?” said Brutha. WHO KNOWS? “And what is at the end of the desert?” JUDGMENT. Brutha considered this. “Which end?” Death grinned and stepped aside.

Maybe I’m not afraid of death because as a devout atheist - well yea, we all get to do that at some point.

“It takes a long time for a man like Vorbis to die” - is my favorite, but the book is chock full of brilliantly executed philosophy.

The only reason I disagree is that L&L jumps in with some very well established characters that had been built up earlier. But I do love his (historically accurate by lore?) description of elves. He put a lot of research into re-establishing the myths and lore of his little corner of the world.

(Along those lines I would also recommend Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell” which builds its own parallel history set in the early 1800s Britain, with Fairies taking the same role as elves in discworld.

I love discworld and prosetyilize its virtues when and where I can, but two thoughts about this:

1 - why not both?

2 - via MST3K “If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, And other science facts...(la! la! la!) Then repeat to yourself its just a show, I should really just relax...”

I’m no longer NED from Stage IV colon cancer (first DX 2014), and now it’s returned and inoperable. I was given an option to add Cetuximab which I’d had previously- but the side effects from that were so bad for me that it absolutely isn’t worth it to me to add a few months, but live in misery.

This is absolutely the way. My interviews are conversations with someone that I want to work closely with, and while leet code might be an interesting lunch conversation it’s not going to be part of any of our day to day work (c/c++/swift/obj-c)

Thank you for the thoughtful response- and best of luck to you and your child.

  “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C." - Governor Bobby Jindal, Feb 24 2009 in his party response to Obama first address to congress.  


  “Monitor my Beer” - Mount Redoubt in Alaska, March 22, 2009, erupted.  

I always end up thinking about this when republicans pick stupid examples of government waste. Best of luck to you.

When you’re refactoring a system (which is really what he’s claiming to want to do) you don’t just delete the repository and start with main(). You figure out where the edges are, how they fit together, where are the Chesterton Fences and how can we protect them until they’re understood. A/B unit testing.

This takes a non-zero amount of time and it takes careful consideration by subject experts.

I can’t really speak to your hopefulness of good intentions - as a parent that relies on government agencies to help my special needs child with the tools she needs, I see no hope here.

What does success look like? How long should the chaos and pain last before you’re beyond hope? Will there be remuneration for people that are materially hurt by this scorched earth policy? How will you be hurt, personally?

I keep thinking about musks group having all this financial data (that his business competitors do not!) and feeding it into a model to find signal he can use to further his empire / investments. I also see his stated intention to make the “one app to rule them all” (for govt ID, banking, etc) as another route to the same data. His payments to / cleaving to trump really accelerated his underlying goal.

Presumably these users have audio in other contexts? Are they running the web app version of teams? Do other web apps play audio? From 10000 feet up, I wouldn’t start by blaming Linux here (even as a non-Linux-desktop user,)

The few times I (50s male) tried horizons universe I felt a visceral creepiness - that any adult I “met” was likely there because it wasn’t technically within 100meters of a school.

VR Chat was less locked down and felt more self patrolled and honest. (On the other hand I wandered a common “watch a movie” vrchat video room instance where Nazi propaganda played and the people in the room were bro-asting about being racist anti-semites.)

imagine an ai tv that was given the prompt to continuously encourage viewers to sign up for LG/HP instant pixel delivery service and that it should be noted that many viewers feel great satisfaction with the service, and are frequently considered the most attractive people within your area.

That’s lovely. It’d probably have been too rare for the DAK catalogs of the early 80s, but a lot of similar (cheaper) gear came through them. (The Olivetti branded TRS-80 Model 100 was a prize!)

I made that a slowly panning and enlarging Mac OS screensaver from that site - 10 lines of source I’ve long since lost to load a web view. [edit to make sense]

Early 90s, Todd Rundgren realized a Mac App called Flowfazer - it didn’t simulate your experience but was helpful as a distraction to move you along. Some people used it to provide guidance for their own creations.[2]

[1] https://grokware.com/ [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4X4FmIhIw

It was a time of screensavers and palette animation.

Not sure if it’s still being sold, but “evil mad scientist” had a kit [1] to build a giant 555 from discrete components.

[1]https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2014/555v2/>

I was there, 1986-2006 and by and far what he said internally at company meetings was completely apolitical. He didn’t moralize, he pushed groups to create better products for customers and that’s what we as engineers were exposed to.

The one time I remember something different was around 2003 when he was asked at an all hands meeting, a question that came down to “how do we work with all this chaos, war, blaming ethnic and religious minorities”, etc. The person that asked it was almost in tears. Jobs response was to look seriously non-plussed and he answered “if you can’t do anything else, vote for the democrats” and then moved on to the next question. He may have had deeper opinions- but they were not part of his public discourse when he was ceo.

Interesting if possibly somewhat off topic (to this submission) - a discussion [1] about DES key length and some of the thoughts given to it in a taped meeting from 1976 -

[1] http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html

I really started listening to music as a teen because of the wall, but _obscured_ really hit me at an emotional level, years later, and has become one of my favorite albums. In particular “Childhood’s End” always gives me goosebumps / tears / a feeling of connectedness. (I would want that played as the last track for my funeral, if I were to have one, although I should probably require attendees have decent headphones!)

I used to “own” a port in /etc/services and got a few Emails and somehow a very irate phone call from someone that was being port scanned. (Back when we had desk phones and they could call the company main number and asked to be transferred.)

A friend of mine mid 90s was doing a clean room rewrite of doom (for fun, just to learn) and didn’t have any bounds checking on his maze - so it was possible to wander off into program memory and shoot variables. (Classic Mac OS, no memory protection)

Your contempt fails to bolster your argument. I would propose that both crimes should be investigated - the fact that J6 litigation consumed so many resources is unfortunate. But it was also well underway when this particular scheme collapsed.

I do fear that the new administration stated aims of reducing regulations and oversight remaining in this space will make it even harder for the DOJ to pursue financial crimes (or even to be inclined to.)

If you say “cost overrun” 3 times in a row, Elon Musk will appear to install the soap dispenser from Home Depo himself, insult some people and then only charge half what Boeing did. The first time it is used in flight it will explode because as it wasn’t rated for pressure, blinding the pilot and leading to the loss of the aircraft. Musk insults trans people before losing interest in the whole thing, and trump assigns RFK Jr to dismantle “big hygiene”.

Hah, reminds me of 1990 Sun where I was handed several boxes of parts and told to make a sun4 VME workstation and bootstrap it from tape. I think it was part hazing, part can this person ask for help when they get stuck and partly where is our documentation lacking. (Sun had excellent docs at the end)

My current chemo regime is FOLFIRI, one of the components of Which is Fluorouracil, and frequently written as “5-FU” and it’s a bugger.

Coast Electronics in San Louis Obispo still flys the Radio Shack marque. I didn’t have a chance to stop in, but the yelp pages show drawers of components that might date back to when it was a RadioShack proper.

Santa cruz Electronics (Bay Area adjacent) sells them as well as passive components and NTE chip replacements. I even went there a year ago to buy a passive SCSI terminator- the guy went in back and came back with a dust covered box marked SCSI $5/per and let me dig for what I needed.