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dajt

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GenCAD 2 months ago

I'm stumped by things like this. The drawing & modelling are not the difficult bit - the CAM programming is.

That seems difficult enough that I have not found an open source program to load a 3D model and allow me to set the toolpaths in a UI, never mind have an LLM generate them from the model.

Halt and Catch Fire 2 months ago

I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.

I have AuDHD - there is no way I'm running my own company. I'm a good developer but I need someone else to have the idea and run the business and I can lead a small team to bring it about.

Given I'm now in my mid-50s, things are looking grim. And I'm not getting paid SV silly money. I'm not even getting paid US dollers.

I think the number of non-programmers who think 'I want to learn to program; I'll start with common lisp but emacs is too difficult!' is so small it is not a group worth considering. It's probably MIT & Stanford undergrads?

It's their IDE and they can design it how they want, but that's a weird goal for a CL IDE.

We would not be sad if they were lawyers. But I'm sure they were not lawyers. Lawyers are how Oracle generates revenue.

Developers & QA are cost centres and liabilties.

This is still happening. The org I work at was all-in on Google stuff, then just before I joined 5 years ago, some senior exec joined. Must have been in tight with Microsoft because suddenly the org was all in on Microsoft. The exec left, job well done, and the org suffered for years during the changeover; we still suffer because all the Microsoft stuff is total garbage these days.

I yearn for the Microsoft software of the 90s and 00s, pre-cloud, pre-webslop, pre-AI.

I know how you feel. I'm 54 and resisted this stuff until about a month ago when I decided if I want any hope of staying employed as a coder I'll need to get on board.

Using codex has allowed me to add bring up my current project so much more quickly, and I'm enjoying saying what I want, asking for suggestions on how things could be improved, and having what is essentially a junior dev who knows way more about web tech than I ever want to, to put it all together. Every few days I go through the codebase and templates to look for redundancies, opportities for cleanup, check on db queries, etc.

Early days for me but it seems like a great way to build a system.

Of course the problem is you need to be a senior dev to keep things in check and know what you want and mostly how you want it done, and look for problems.

I've written enough code over the last 40 years that I don't feel the need to type every character.

MacBook Neo 5 months ago

I'm (unfortunately) running Tahoe on my M1 macbook pro and don't notice it to be slower than Sequoia. Where is your slowdown?

I'm dislike Tahoe as much as anyone else but performance isn't the problem for me.

MacBook Neo 5 months ago

I use UTM, it's simple and seems light. I can share my source directory with the VM so I can edit using macos pycharm, and test the containers in the VM.

What really caught me out was I downloaded an x64 image once (there was no arm64 image) and it somehow just ran anyway in the arm64 VM. That may have been some qemu magic?

I love the macos/virtualised linux dev workflow, but is isn't better than plain linux. I'm just still not convinced GUI stuff works on linux as well as it does on macos and macbook hardware is so nice (if you're not paying for it).

I never used the Turbo stuff, but I know they were very good for the time by reading about people using them in Dr. Dobbs.

I started with C on the Amiga and then went to UNIX and only later starting doing Windows coding on Windows 3.1.

Exactly, VSCode is done by well known people from the GoF book, Visual Age and Eclipse IDEs.

That doesn't mean it's any good - which I admit is subjective. I'm sure they've put good devs doing a ton of work into making an IDE they believe in but having used it for a couple of years I don't enjoy the experience.

Nothing feels obvious or simple, and trying to work in Python or embedded C++ compared to using Jetbrains tools feels like I'm missing so much. I've gone back to pycharm community edition because IMO it's light-years ahead of vscode in usability.

I guess people say the same about emacs.

I maintain VC++ was a better experience than vscode; whoever is working on it.

With all the problems that recent Windows updates are causing, and a blog post about how the Windows team are using Native React to deliver changes to the apps such as a part of Settings outside the usual updates I got to thinking how great it was back in the Windows 3.11, 95, and XP days when you got Windows and it mostly worked and it didn't get updated (aka more broken) every day. It was quick enough, it was yours, and it didn't tell you what to do.

You'd reinstall every year or two to clean out the disused DLLs etc, but it was mostly fine.

Of course it wasn't exposed to quite the same hostile environment it is today.

Weird, I don't recall having an alt-account and posting this. That's old age I guess.

I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.

It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.

I'm guilty of this. I started with a C64 and love hardware and programming, but modern CPUs and MCUs are so complicated I can't be bothered learning about them.

The old 8-bit Arduinos were pretty understandable, but with an ESP-32 I just assume the compiler knows what it's doing and that the Espressif libs are 'good enough'.

I disagree. I generally don't get too upset by UI changes - having been programming since before Windows I've seen many of them - but LG is a loser.

I upgraded my mac to Tahoe and I don't like any change to the UI that I have noticed.

I upgraded my phone the other day, thinking it was just an update to whatever it already had, and ended up with LG on there and it is a disaster. I enabled the 'more opaque' feature and it did almost nothing.

LG is an awful experiment IMO. I'd put it at worse than Vista (which I skipped) and Gnome 3 which didn't bother me because I don't expect anything from linux desktops. I also skipped Windows 8 so not sure about the ranking there. But I'd say it's that level of disaster.

I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!

I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.

Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.

Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society.

It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value.

The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.

I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.

I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.

Stop Breaking TLS 7 months ago

This is a massive pain at my work, same as I'm sure most other comments are saying.

I use Platform.IO for firmware development and can't build my firmware unless I hotspot my phone. I would say that's a PIO bug unless there is a flag I don't know about, but it's exposed by this nuisance of a firewall.

The devs where I am spend much of our time hotspotted to our phones with the corporate network never connected so IP goes out over the mobile network.

Whenever possible we use 'do not verify server certs' flags in libs and commands which is not ideal.