Posts by Ignazio 156 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2009
When the fashion for trackpads to scroll the other way started (what stupid nonsense that is, bah humbug) I configured mine to stay the usual way.
Now the work laptop comes with trackpad set that way and no software to select what you want (yeah, windoze, looking straight at you). I cart my own trackball around when moving desks. Can't be having with that crap hardware and crappier software.
Amazing Admiral Grace Hopper was right.
Your assumption that AI can grow past hallucinations to be the future of coding, well, isn't proven to be right. Matter of fact, you cite yourself the fact that it's currently making people less productive.
Use of higher level languages helped developers build better, more powerful abstractions - at the cost of resources. It also enabled poor abstractions to be put together - inevitably. You give people a bigger hammer, they'll bend more nails.
Is this the same situation AI is in, or is it just a crooked hammer? You jump the gun a bit there.
Pessimism? You didn't notice we're back in a 1925-1935 sort of thing?
By which I don't mean to imply they should be allowed to win easy. But the risk that they win, even for just a decade or two, is not pessimism at work.
Having learned both at uni, I disagree that C teaches any better. *Pascal* taught better. C is like a circular saw from before the safety covers were invented. Cuts just as well fingers and wood. I'm sure Moxie has a list of exploits due to lack of those safety covers that's longer than I am tall.
That's literally the root of all evil for C and C++
In your hands, they do fine (for a decent value of "fine", as you have complaints too).
And "give full control to the developer", the much vaunted philosophy of the languages, works fine *for excellent developers*. On their good days, anyway.
But I got out of uni 22 years ago, and I still have to meet people who are excellent developers a significant number of days of the month, whether I look in the mirror or not. Perhaps I need to keep better company, but the truth is that there aren't enough good developers, and therefore tooling needs to avoid the dangers.
Plugging my android phone on my windows worl laptop and activating the usb tether creates a network device that claims 433 mbps. *Claims*, I haven't had a chance to verify that, since the 4g uplink was never faster than 50.
Might not be as fast as the latest wifi but it ain't bad either.
So in their opinion I come to the shop, install all the stuff required for the typical builds I do during the day, THEN complain that 8 gig aren't enough for my needs, when I know the builds will take more than that and memory compression can't get far enough?
"We are much more efficient in memory use", yes but zipping data has limits not even Apple can break and not all the software I use is written by Apple, especially that which is written by me, and making all the changes needed to be the best M3 native app, with the lock in that brings, is a bit much when all I needed was 32 gigabytes of RAM.
I fixed a 3.5 inch floppy drive with a similar application of sharp blades.
Brand new PC (tower case) wouldn't write or read fro floppy. Year about 2001. My uncle gave me a ring about it two days after he bought the thing.
Much messing about looking for loose cables, at some point we had the thing on with the case open and its front off. To our surprise, floppy worked fine. Front back on, floppy failed again.
The front had a plastic facade in front of the floppy and a thingamajig to allow the operator to push the eject button on the actual drive. The thingamajig was about two millimetres too long and would keep the button half pressed when the front was screwed on. Snip snip and all was well.
When I told my dad I wanted to study computer science, he said: but why? The things have been built already.
Same as "Write it right the first time"
Funnily enough, in his daily job* he was very well acquainted with "needs change, things get old, stuff breaks". He'd even joke half his work was fixing the stuff he'd built twenty years before. Microsoft has just made a business that ensures things break at scale, instead of at their usual pace.
* he was a plasterer before retiring
Fine grinding? Remote location? Waste of energy.
Chuck them in a spare steel container and leave it wherever. In a hundred million years it'll be a nice lump of easily mined minerals, with lower chances of poisoning the local ponds.
But if you wanted to finely grind DRM proponents, I shall start carving out the millstones.
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