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hapless

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Human Bottlenecks 2 months ago

"Most people are not autodidacts because most people have no material reason to learn a specific topic (i.e. their job does not require it) and the problem with learning for the sake of learning is opportunity cost: there is no a priori reason to learn one thing over another, so better to do nothing and wait for something to appear which actually grabs your interest. Again, this is likely rational! Could you imagine if you found everything interesting? You’d spend years living in a basement curating a wiki of late Soviet military hardware or something."

uhoh

i've been spotted

10g-base-T is a sick joke

high latency, high error rates, and terrifying heat output from SFPs (which the author noted for himself)

the only cat6 left in my home network is the link to verizon's ont, because in their infinite wisdom the ONLY connectivity offered was 10g-base-t

Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.

The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution

But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?

The Concorde and the Tupolev both relied on afterburners, because they operated under similar design constraints -- the "western" jet engines in the Concorde were not that much better than what Soviet design bureaus could produce.

The Concorde was much smaller, and lacked one of the major innovations of the Tu-144 -- forward flap canards to improve handling on a larger jet.

Probably for the better. The Tupolev killed a lot of its passengers, and it was almost immediately withdrawn from service after the first few incidents. The Concorde, a simpler and smaller design, served for decades.

Chaika was not a copy of a Packard. (They certainly admired the Packard bodywork, but Soviet industry was in no way ready to clone a Packard sedan)

Tu-144 was not a copy of the Concorde. (Convergent evolution is not the same as copying a design!)

The Soviets did clone a lot of DEC gear but I don't think SM-1, specifically, was a DEC clone. (In this lastmost case, the Soviets were left cloning computer equipment because it was forbidden to export to COMECON states)

the reason "reader mode" isn't the default is to discourage website authors from intentionally breaking reader mode

-_-

You don't have to actually do #3. What most companies do is just get a UL certification (to reassure consumers) and put the label "no user-serviceable parts inside" on the case (to meet UL mandates for safety)

That's more than enough to avoid civil liability for user stupidity

Locking shit down is something you do for other reasons entirely

humans without credentials are bad at basic algebra in a word problem, ergo the large language model must be substantially equivalent to a human without a credential

thanks but no thanks

i am often glad my field of endeavour does not require special professional credentials but the advent of "vibe coding" and, just, generally, unethical behavior industry-wide, makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be better to have professional education and licensing

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

spiritual successor? how about "ghoulish horror" ;)

the worst example of "second system effect" i have ever heard of

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

amusingly Motif and CDE were derived from HP attempts to copy Windows 2.x and the betas of Windows 3.0

not windows 3.1 -- windows 3.1 was popular! Windows before 3.1 was distinctly unpopular. It had basically no installed base. The only Windows 2.x applications I know of actually shipped an embedded Windows copy on the floppy disk.

HP was carefully tracking all the much less popular stuff Microsoft was doing in the late 80s because they thought this "WIMP" paradigm had staying powers, even if Microsoft was not exactly selling a lot of units

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

the common element between VMS (the subject of this post) and Windows NT, is Dave cutler.

Cutler lived in an extremely overcomplicated world of VMS kernel primitives, and given the chance to let his freak flag fly, he really overcomplicated his past work for Windows NT

In case you ever wonder why your 1 gb/s ssd has ~100 mb/s throughput on windows. there are often quite literally hundreds of layers of filters on even the simplest i/o

but it is super flexible! just slower than iced treacle. aren't you glad you had an object oriented I/O subsystem supporting microkernel services and aspect-oriented programming? i bet you use those features way more often than you read or write files from disk

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

motif had the opposite of versionitis

from 1989 to 2005 everyone used more or less the same version (from 1989) because vendors and standards are painful

it wasn't like, meaningfully standardized. just no one ever updated anything. or set a meaningful version string. you just guessed which bugs were un-fixed based on `uname`

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

The Motif default theme was quite handsome, and the "demo" Motif Window Manager worked pretty well, but Motif was something of a nightmare to work with

The API sucks real bad, and even at the height of Motif popularity, the package itself was riddled with bugs because proprietary UNIX vendors never updated that shit

Motif was super-obviously designed by C++ programmers who could not ship a C++ library for technical reasons. So they tried to do a C++ API in C. And it hurts like a pineapple thrust into the wrong orifice, leafy-part-first.

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

I think aix still ships CDE, too

which would be unremarkable except none of the UNIX vendors has produced a new build in like 30 years

so if they are still shipping CDE it is probably 32 bit binaries from AIX 4 or AIX 5L

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

"deprecated" is not "removed"

it can take literally decades for a deprecated package to actually get removed, because customers get mad

DECwindows Motif 6 months ago

It's Motif on VMS, which is not remotely UNIX-like

eventually HPE got tired of dealing with VMS customer requests and sold the rights to VMS Software Inc, who ported it from Itanium to x86 as soon as humanly possible

now VMS Software Inc, is stating that they wish to support ye olde DECWindows and Motif on the modern, x86-enabled VMS

How wealth dies 8 months ago

Roughly half the gold produced each year vanishes into gold hoards. Half.

This has been going on for forty years. There's literally decades of gold production sitting in hoards all around the world.

Gold prices could get very strange very fast.