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koala_man

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I will try to remember him for his far too relatable Dilbert comics about corporate office life, and not his, uhm, later work.

One of my favorite strips was Dilbert in the 90s only being given a 286 PC for 3D rendering work, with the boss saying "besides, how often will you do 3D rendering in your career?"

Dilbert replies "Once, if I hurry"

The intention was to prevent tooth decay by regulating candy intake.

Yes, but crucially not by reducing candy intake.

The result of the study was that the amount of sugar didn't particularly matter, but frequency of intake and stickiness did.

I'm Norwegian and concluded that she meant when ordering, such as for a choice of potatoes or pasta.

This makes sense since the context is translation for tourism.

Otherwise, the normal, casual way would be "kan du sende potetene?" i.e. "could you pass the potatoes?", lit. "can you send the potatoes?"

(This assumes it wasn't physically possible to simply reach across people to grab it yourself with what's known as "the Norwegian arm")

My bad. I had been reading about how there's a frustration in the community that allistic people refuse to explain why such statements are wrong, and instead just repeat "you know what you did!" to people who genuinely don't.

I tried to be the one who didn't do that, but missed the mark. I'd delete it if I could.

The article starts off saying that if you want people with real full stack experience, from kernel to UX, you need to grow it.

It goes on to say that it's hard to find and develop expertise for low level software like hypervisors.

What's the connection between the topics? It feels like two different rants.

If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX?

It feels like we're back in 1900 when anyone's clever idea (and implementation) can give huge performance improvements, such as Ford's assembly line and Taylor's scientific management of optimizing shovel sizes for coal.

I'm surprised there are no UTF-8 specific decode instructions yet, the way ARM has "FJCVTZS - Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero"

I worked on this project for a week during the FB team matching process.

I had previous Haskell experience, but what struck me was how irrelevant that was.

To their immense credit, they had managed to use Haskell to write an entirely entreprise focused, "boring" business rule backend serving millions of QPS, and people who were not Haskell fans could easily use its sensible DSL to accomplish their goals.

Way too many Haskell projects are about Haskell itself, so this was really fascinating to see.

doesn't use enough anesthetic

My school dentist always botched the anesthesia, and afterwards I had to grind my teeth for three days to make them fit together again.

I never told anyone because adults kept saying dentistry hurts so I assumed it was normal. I didn't realize how fucked up this was until I went to college and experienced a competent dentist for the first time.

extremely large functions quadratic behavior

*High five*

I fixed several of these during my time as a compiler engineer too.

It's true what they say, quadratic is the worst possible time complexity. Fast enough to work on all your test cases, slow enough to explode in prod.

Tbh if you've never done either, I can absolutely see why getting on and riding a machine 1000x your size is a bigger deal than seeing various animals from a distance.

Back in the day I ran Bochs in all its 4 Bogomips glory on a university IP address and went to IRC channels where script kiddies were "trading root".

I let them go first, and watched through an instrumented terminal how they clumsily installed a rootkit, then inevitably refused to give anything in return and laughed calling me a noob.

Their laughter was short lived.

I had even spent quite a bit of effort kludging the kernel to report much higher specs than Bochs could deliver, but all that effort was wasted because no one knew how to check.

A coworker similarly said "WAIT--reindeer are REAL??"

I'm thankful I had maturity to simply say "yes, they're in the deer family, native to Canada and Northern Europe".

They were from China where they probably rarely mention reindeer, and only in the context of Santa Claus.

It's no different from a Westerner rarely hearing about tanukis, and only in the context of trickster spirits in anime and Super Mario Bros 3. How are you supposed to know they're real?

YX Problem 2 years ago

My favorite example that I see pretty often is "In posix grep, what's a regex that matches lines that don't contain the word `test`?"

The X answer is a lecture on language theory including the construction and inversion of finite state automata. Absolutely interesting, but a long and dense chapter in a CS textbook with no practical applications.

The Y answer is `grep -v test`

Meta Loves Python 2 years ago

I know I keep posting this, but my favorite (half-joking) programming advice was from a Google dev infra engineer who said "Any Python script over 100 lines should be rewritten in Bash, because at least that way you're not fooling yourself into thinking it's production quality"