sevensor

The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: Like this :))

I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?

Thanks, that’s what I was afraid of. The ping ponging described in the article seems hard to avoid regardless of what language you’re using.

Does this apply also to std::shared_mutex in C++? This is a timely article if so; I’m in the middle of doing some C++ multithreading that relies on a shared_mutex. I have some measuring to do.

Stalin is said to have gifted a large amount of Georgian brandy to Churchill at Yalta, which made Churchill more pliable during the proceedings. Until now, this is all I knew about Georgian food and drink.

There’s a palpable assault on expertise afoot in the Anglosphere. It’s been going on for decades, at least since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but what’s new is how pervasive it feels. Even software companies, once the nerdiest of institutions, would now rather fail to produce functioning software than identify and cultivate expertise. Ten years ago, we, or at least I, failed to recognize “nerds are cool now” as the cultural trojan horse it was. Nerds, experts, were never going to be cool; the cool kids saw money and power accumulating around nerds, and they muscled their way in.

A good abstraction relieves you of concern for the particulars it abstracts away. A bad abstraction hides the particulars until the worst possible moment, at which point everything spills out in a messy heap and you have to confront all the details. Bad abstractions existed long before React and long before LLMs.

What then am I meant to take away from the piece on Zoroastrianism? I don’t know enough about the subject to navigate to the point around the distortions.

Fair point. This makes much more sense when you make it about your git identity + ssh configuration.

Github account switching. A git account is not an idea that makes sense.

It’s an interesting blog, he seems well read, but surely he knows better than “Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world.” Plato lived through the execution of Socrates, the fall of the Athenian democracy, the tyranny of the Thirty, the humiliation by Sparta, the demolition of the walls. I’ll grant him “aristocratic”, but that’s all he gets. Makes me wonder whether he mischaracterized Zarathustra too, and my suspicion is yes.

Unfortunately, hoppy IPA seems to constitute the majority of the survivors. I have no interest personally in suffering through another hazy sour grapefruit triple ipa, but that seems to be about 90% of craft brewery output these days.

Gotcha: once you get into it, hacking the game gets to be way more fun than actually playing it. Way back in the day I used the DOS debug utility to edit my Bard’s Tale savegames. But once everybody has 127 hit points and -10 AC, the game gets way less interesting.

And like the article says, early computerization produced way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion, we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users were able to produce for themselves exactly the computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets became widespread. LLMs haven’t had their spreadsheet moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward, as if more noise meant more productivity.

I switched from Fedora in 2013 because the ArchWiki was answering all of my questions. It’s very, very good.

Hams, by and large, despise pirate radio.

This is my process as well. I find it’s a good way for clearing out bad assumptions. Usually I’ve committed to my first idea, and writing it down gives me space to consider the alternatives. Usually I have a better idea that I haven’t worked out because the first one was lodged in my brain, and once that first idea is out on paper, I don’t have to worry about losing it anymore. The second idea is almost always better.

Making illegal states unrepresentable sounds like a great idea, and it is, but I see it getting applied without nuance. “Has multiple errors” can be a valid type. Instead of bailing immediately, you can collect all of the errors so that they can be reported all together rather than forcing the user to fix one error at a time.

Yeah. I tried that at the eight week mark, but I heard nothing back. Obviously not a process-heavy company, but that’s part of their appeal.

A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.

I used a Sun workstation as late as 2008, but by that time it was ancient and kept around only for the expensive engineering software that wouldn’t run anywhere else. Even at the time, using CDE felt like a blast from the past. I didn’t dig too deep because I wasn’t using it for long, but I’m pretty sure the vi was original.

IDE vim support suffers from three problems. First, performance. I have yet to try an IDE that can match the responsiveness of vim. You can obviously tank vim’s performance with plugins, but you don’t have to. Second: clutter. Modern displays are gigantic, and yet most IDE users don’t have more than 40 lines of code on the screen at a time. The rest is occupied by a file picker, command palette, integrated terminal, LLM chat interface, and so forth. You have to go to some effort to reclaim those pixels; big context is not yours by default. Third: uncanny valley effect. Vim implementation is usually incomplete, especially when it comes to ex-style colon-prefixed commands. It’s jarring to run into a spot where your muscle memory doesn’t work.

In short, IDE vim support does not measure up to the experience of using the real thing.

Yeah, why would billionaires sell us something that lets us chill out all day, instead of using it themselves and capturing the value directly? You claim to have a perpetual motion machine and a Star Trek replicator rolled into one, what do you need me for?

I could not agree less. The line of reasoning here is: relying on the type system to prevent error lets people writer fewer tests. Tests are the only way to assure quality. Therefore fewer tests is bad, and powerful type systems are bad too, because they cause you to act against software quality.

Furthermore, Uncle Bob sets up this weird opposition between the programmer and the type system, as if the latter is somehow fighting the former, rather than being a tool in their hand.

I think that sadly this is just the narrative of a man whose life’s work consists of convincing people that there is a silver bullet, and it is TDD.

Thanks! I’ll look forward to these landing in Python.

What you’ve described is very much not writing code though. It’s the tedious and unpleasant outcome of having a flaky or under resourced CI setup or pulling in a misbehaving dependency. Neither of those is typing code per se. I don’t think it’s fair to conflate that kind of problem with the creative work involved in implementation itself.

“Writing code is boring and tedious” says more about the speaker than it does about programming.

Ooof, good luck. Civ3 copy protection was intense. I had to get out my old Win2k disk and stand up a VM. Attempts to rip an iso will be complicated by the fact that they deliberately wrote bad data to the disk. All of this is surmountable, but unless you enjoy a very particular kind of fun, you may prefer to spend $2 on GoG.

I know competent adults whose login flow for most websites is “forgot password.” Might be better off writing your passwords on post it notes at that point.

I wouldn’t bet against cramming more and more business processes into Excel. The guy who was copying cells from one workbook to another yesterday, tomorrow can have a single mega-workbook with all the macros more or less deconflicted.

Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools.

LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.