WalterBright

4 ms·

1.
by WalterBright 5d ago
The traffic cops greatly improve throughput. Imagine how much gas would be saved if the city spent a little effort on the traffic lights.
2.
by WalterBright 5d ago
There's a major arterial near my house. One day, the power went out in the area, and the traffic lights went dead. I discovered to my amusement that throughput on the arterial and its crossings increased dramatically, as drivers simply
3.
by WalterBright 6d ago
I cannot imagine anything more dastardly than collecting his best engineers together to design & build a device to save the kids.
4.
by WalterBright 6d ago
95% of books (and I'm being generous) are not worth the paper they are printed on, let alone the time spent reading them. And then, there are the gems: War of the Worlds, and Lord of the Rings.
5.
by WalterBright 6d ago
In fourth grade, I went to the library and noticed a book with a tripod on the cover blasting people with a heat ray. Of course I checked it out. I didn't know what scifi was at the time, and had never heard of HG Wells. Anyhow, I love
6.
by WalterBright 7d ago
There's a large black zig-zag blocking reading the text.
7.
by WalterBright 7d ago
Twitter had 362 million monthly users in 2021. X has 650 million today. Looks like X has done well.
8.
by WalterBright 7d ago
What I find off-putting is the emoji style used. They look like images you'd find in a first grade workbook, or on sticker sheets handed out to first graders. I quit using emojis on my phone because of that "playmobil" look.
9.
by WalterBright 7d ago
> The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts. I'll pick this one. I've heard it before. Runaway trim is uncommanded movement. It does not have to be continuous, it can stop and s
10.
by WalterBright 7d ago
The Falcon 1 was a necessary step in learning how to build rockets.
11.
by WalterBright 7d ago
X is the 13th largest social media platform with 650m monthly active users. Sounds like a success to me.
12.
by WalterBright 7d ago
Isaacson could write the puffiest puff piece about me and I'd still never become a trillionaire.
13.
by WalterBright 7d ago
Merging his companies into one will also reduce his workload. It's a sensible thing to do, regardless of their profitabilities.
14.
by WalterBright 7d ago
I missed that connection!
15.
by WalterBright 7d ago
> put all the blame on them Nope. I wrote: "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good" > What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of? Not following the runaway stabilizer trim proced
16.
by WalterBright 7d ago
Since AFAIK I'm still the only person to write a correct C++ (C++98) compiler from preprocessor to object file, I know all about destructors. Here's a fun one for your amusement: foo(a, b, c); The parameters are pass by v
17.
by WalterBright 7d ago
Are C/C++ chars signed or unsigned? What a mess!
18.
by WalterBright 7d ago
> Elon seeks out markets ripe for disruptive engineering innovation. I.e. products that everyone else dismisses as impractical/impossible. And then people complain when he's late delivering the impossible products.
19.
by WalterBright 7d ago
I know how the stab trim system works. I worked on it (for the 757) for three years. Yes, it applies to MCAS. > the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct Nope. MCAS failure manifests itself as runaway trim, and the emergency proc
20.
by WalterBright 7d ago
The article doesn't mention subscription revenue. I subscribed to X in order to not see ads.
21.
by WalterBright 8d ago
Apparently 90% of the Twitter staff were simply baggage.
22.
by WalterBright 8d ago
And you know this how? ...
23.
by WalterBright 8d ago
Yep, a bobcat. But much smaller than the one around here.
24.
by WalterBright 8d ago
> very narrow He applied it to Tesla and SpaceX, which are very very different.
25.
by WalterBright 8d ago
Color me skeptical. There was nothing wrong with the MCAS concept. The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good. Unfortunately, two of the 3 crews did not understand the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. The 3rd crew did, and l
26.
by WalterBright 8d ago
I've watched a lot of horror shows that had no effect on me. But this one wasn't a horror show, it was for real. I found it very disturbing. I couldn't believe what I was watching.
27.
by WalterBright 8d ago
The decision to re-engine the 737 rather than design a new airframe saved the airlines a vast amount of money.
28.
by WalterBright 8d ago
I've been inspired by that to refactor my code so that function parameters are minimized (many pass TMI).
29.
by WalterBright 8d ago
Yup. I tried hard to not allow D's behaviors to be changed based on a compiler switch. Yes, we have switches to enable certain features, but not silent behavior changes. It's not perfect, but the forest of such switches in C compi
30.
by WalterBright 8d ago
If you aren't failing now and then, you aren't really trying.

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