commandlinefan

I remember spending hours typing in hex dumps from the back of Compute!s Gazette back then. To this day, I still remember that LDA at A9 and STA was 8D.

I started on a TI-99/4A. I've met TI greybeards who've never heard of it and didn't know TI even made a personal computer...

I hit the limits of C64 basic pretty quick and I read somewhere that there was a different language called "assembler" that was faster, so I convinced my mom to buy me a book about it. As I started reading the book I realized that I needed some software to go with it (the actual assembler...) and the book was about the "Merlin64 assembler" so I begged my parents to buy me that software for Christmas.

Well, as it turns out, that particular assembler was actually pretty obscure software. My poor Dad had to visit a dozen computer stores in Ann Arbor before he _finally_ found a copy.

It still remains to be seen, but the C64 may have ruined my son's life as well. I have a similar story to yours and OP's: born in the mid 70's, got a C64 in the mid 80's, convinced myself that I was a genius because I could get it to do anything I wanted (I even learned 6510 assembler back then) and parlayed those skills into joining the internet boom of the mid-90's.

My own son was born in 2003 and he sort of picked up on my passion for computing, but he grew up in the iphone generation, not the C64 generation. When he went to college, he chose to major in CS like his dad did and just graduated last year into the worst employment market since the great depression. He did get a job so that's good, but we'll see how things go...

I do think I'd have an emotional reaction if I typed load "*",8,1 again, though...

When I first started working as a programmer in the early 90's, I was surrounded by older guys whose advice was always along the lines of "hoard information and knowledge, make yourself indispensable/unfireable". It seemed like silly advice to me at the time - surely as long as I was doing good work, I'd be recognized/rewarded, right?

Yeah, after a couple of decades in this meat grinder I realized they were right: the best survival skill is to just know a lot of stuff that nobody else knows.

I hear from my son that, yes.

I've worked with some professional coders who were philosophy majors - there's some overlap between formal computer science and philosophy for sure. I was sort of surprised when one guy started talking about using diagonalization to prove Godels theorem of incompleteness - I thought, "ok, I guess they do teach y'all a thing or two".

On the whole, though, it's _way_ easier to bluff your way through a philosophy degree than a CS degree.

There are M/MIX assemblers and interpreters you can download and run - in some ways they're better than "real" programming languages because they're explicitly for instruction so usability concerns like package managers and build automation support don't get in "the way" of operating them.

I never took the SAT, but I did take the GRE. The year I took it, it was 3 sections: Quantitative, Verbal and Writing. The year I took it, the writing section replaced an older Logic section. Quantitative and verbal were scored out of 800 points (like the SAT), but the writing section was scored 0-6 in half-point increments. I think the writing section has also since been removed.

I need the entire paragraph above just to _explain_ my GRE (decent) score because the test has changed yet again in the interim 20 years or so and I suspect the SAT is similar.

Actually, if you interpret his requirement literally, it would suggest that he only accepts trans employees: no him/her, just they/them.

Nobody likes to hear it, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. We had an unprecedented economic shock, and we're dealing with an unprecedented economic fallout. The only question is how much longer it will last.

I've been doing these exercises regularly for years and haven't made much progress ;). I still perform music regularly and get positive feedback. I do hope that some day I'll get to where these exercises seem easy - I haven't made much progress, but I do make a tiny bit at a time.

the right wing has also enforced censorship

Not familiar with Korean politics, but both left and right are immensely pro-censorship here in America. For the most part, the only thing that's saving us (at least so far) is that they can't agree on what to censor.

Spending time doing deep work on hard problems also doesn't go so well with the "track your hours against approved JIRA tickets and compare your logged hours against your estimates at review time" that every corporate culture devolves into. If you're looking to survive the next round of layoffs, quick wins are your best bet.

Yeah, this type of advice rubs me the wrong way: I feel like the author is thinking of "hard" as though it were back-breaking day labor that any fool could do, but nobody wants to because it's so unpleasant.

The sort of people it's usually directed at, though, are knowledge workers (like computer programmers). "Hard" in our context is "something I don't yet know how to do". Always. No exceptions. Every time. If I know how to do it, it's trivial. If I don't, I have to figure it out.

And in my experience, the "do the hardest thing" VC-founder cheerleader types (who are always telling you, never themselves) absolutely lose their shit when they see somebody trying to figure out how to do something. Reading docs? Setting up controlled experiments? Why are you wasting time with all of this nonsense and not just getting to the "hardest thing" so I can bill the client and you can move on to the next "hardest thing"?

I mean, so has Microsoft, so...

They were trained to mimic our behavior. So they do.

They just inserted an exclamation mark after the first word.

Isn't this globalization working as designed? People in "rich" countries will get less and less while people in "poor" countries will get more and more until there are no more rich or poor countries. Rich and poor people will still exist, but the standard of living will regress to the mean worldwide.

I doubt it. We've seen time and time again that what the USCIS considers "extraordinary" are actually very, very ordinary circumstances. Anybody with proof of employment will qualify.

Grandstanding and misinformation on whose part? I want this to not be true (i.e. I want data centers to not be poisoning groundwater and killing us all) and I don't think that elected representatives are above misrepresenting things for political gain, but just going by the content of the article, it would appear that data centers are contaminating drinking water.

I fear we'll never see another Donald Knuth... even if there were somebody else like him (and maybe there isn't!), there'd be nowhere for him to go in today's world.

A lot of this stems from trying to insist that char just means "small" and not "8 bits" and that int means "bigger than that" and not "32 bits". In fairness, K&R dealt with an era where 9 bit architectures existed, but char is 8 bits now. Everywhere.

I don't know... If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration. Your heart might like all that running, but your knees are going to make you regret it.

Even if you fix the law today, the law can change tomorrow. As Bruce Schneier put it: "it's not enough to protect ourselves with laws. We must also protect ourselves with mathematics".

I'm having some house painting done and the painter asked me what line of work I was in. When I said computer programming he said, "ooh, bet you're worried about AI! At least painters are safe!"

The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc.

There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.

I was in my 20's at the time. I saw all of those guys as being inferior GnR, Motley Crue or Metallica wannabes.

You're making his point for him.

The 90s were incredible

I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.

I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.