geophile

8 ms·

61.
by geophile 11mo ago
This is a very minor but pleasant surprise. An action like this is beyond what I thought the US government (my government, sadly) was capable of. It is kind of puzzling to me that this issue, like every other one, didn't get politicize
62.
by geophile 11mo ago
I came to source code control reluctantly. CVS, SourceSafe, others I’ve forgotten. One of them was very expensive, very complex, took months of customization, and then it scrambled our bits following a disk crash and the vendor had to piece
63.
by geophile 1y ago
I did, very briefly. It did not compare to Intellij.
64.
by geophile 1y ago
I got tinnitus in my late 20s. Forty years later, it's still there. Research into the causes, and treatments, has been disappointingly slow. I would really like to experience total silence at some point, but that seems very unlikely.
65.
by geophile 1y ago
Turbo Pascal was completely amazing. I remember resisting it for a long time, because IIRC it implemented non-standard Pascal. But the competitive tools were less powerful and far more expensive, (e.g. the Microsoft tools). And then I tried
66.
by geophile 1y ago
Disappointingly shallow article. One point though: It is not necessarily the case that visual imagery is the only alternative to an inner dialogue. In both cases, that dialogue, or those images, are things you are aware of. There is somethi
67.
by geophile 1y ago
[flagged]
68.
by geophile 1y ago
How is this guy tenured at Harvard?
69.
by geophile 1y ago
Serious question: Is Ada dead? I actually had to google Ada, and then "Ada language" to find out. It's not dead, and it has a niche. When I was in grad school in the late 70s, there was a major competition to design a DoD-man
70.
by geophile 1y ago
I agree completely. They were from the same era (COBOL is a few years older), and they do have that dweeby, earnest, natural language influence.
71.
by geophile 1y ago
Wow, that was a trip down memory lane! I have used six of those languages: BASIC, APL, COBOL, Pascal, Algol-W (a derivative of Algol 60), PL/1. Mostly in school. My first dollars earned in software (brief consulting gig in grad school)
72.
by geophile 1y ago
"Can confirm". In the mid 70s, I would order a small pizza, all dressed from McGill Pizza, when feeling peckish. $1.10, delivered to your door in no time at all.
73.
by geophile 1y ago
I'm not sure what point you are making with your scenario involving HTTP response codes. What if the HTTP server crashes , and doesn't send a response at all? I don't know from Writer Monads. But if you only emitting log ent
74.
by geophile 1y ago
7.2G/day doesn't sound terrible. And I'd reduce it by a factor of 25, since in normal operation (i.e., not looking into a problem) I would have either 2 log statements per call (entry, exit), or none at all. It might be more
75.
by geophile 1y ago
A logging library is very, very far from a Turing complete language, so no Greenspunning. (Yes, I know about that Java logger fiasco from a few years ago. Not my idea.) I don't want logging done automatically for me, what I want is too
76.
by geophile 1y ago
I don't know what's "important" at the beginning. In my work, logging grows as I work on the system. More logging in more complex or fragile parts. Sometimes I remove logging where it provides no value.
77.
by geophile 1y ago
BTW, your username is a bit too on-the-nose, given the way you are arguing, using "anti-pattern" as a way to end all discussion.
78.
by geophile 1y ago
You are very attached to this "voluminous" point. What do you mean by it? As I said, responding to another comment of yours, a distributed system I worked on produced a few GB a day. The logs were rotated daily. They were never tr
79.
by geophile 1y ago
> There is no value for logging "function entry/exit, with param values" when all collaborations succeed and the system operates as intended. Well, I agree completely, but those conditions are a tall order. The whole point
80.
by geophile 1y ago
I am also in the camp that has very little use for debuggers. A point that may be pedantic: I don't add (and then remove) "print" statements. I add logging code, that stays forever. For a major interface, I'll usually st
81.
by geophile 1y ago
Snobol was a major part of my formative years in computer science. I don’t recall how I came across the language, but it spoke to me in all sorts of ways. - Elegant and weird syntax and structure. - Powerful pattern matching. - It was the f
82.
by geophile 1y ago
Of your three possible critical endings, the only one that affects me, even a little, is the new UI, but then I tend not to care too much about UIs. I appreciate a good UI, will give up on a product with an unintuitive UI (looking at you, E
83.
by geophile 1y ago
This is a love letter to JetBrains. I started using Intellij with the 3.0 version, I think. It just worked, even on Linux. (It was existence proof that you could build excellent UIs in Java.) Unlike Eclipse, and other forgotten IDEs that w
84.
by geophile 1y ago
But there is so much highly motivated malice right now.
85.
by geophile 1y ago
> The software you mention can be designed to simulate self-reflection, but it is limited to executing predefined instructions within rigid parameters—it mirrors logic without altering the fundamental architecture of its own values or mo
86.
by geophile 1y ago
I can build software to reflect upon itself, and understand (model) its place in the world. That doesn’t make it conscious. You are agreeing with my point. “Suggesting” self-awareness is very different from actually being self-aware.
87.
by geophile 1y ago
I haven't been following recent Java releases, but unless Java has some equivalent to Erlang's OTP library (at a minimum), I stand by my statement
88.
by geophile 1y ago
What constitutes consciousness in a natural system? That is still completely unknown, so good luck figuring it out for artificial systems. There is no way to detect consciousness. So you will have a very hard time distinguishing a system th
89.
by geophile 2y ago
In 2003 I joined a startup building a horizontally scalable archive. You could add nodes to add capacity for storing data and metadata, and the system could tolerate up to a configured number of failures and carry on without loss of data or
90.
by geophile 2y ago
> relational concepts are sneered at That is remarkably dumb. Don't use an RDB if it doesn't fit your requirements. But "relational concepts" covers a lot of valuable ground, and rejecting them out of hand is a combin

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