gregmac

58 ms·

541.
by gregmac 6y ago
It's a standardized piece of kit at a great price point with broad and long-term availability around the world. There's simply not anything that hits all those points in the x86 world. It's a good target if you want to provid
542.
by gregmac 6y ago
Some more: Change their profile photo (github/slack/etc). Flip their monitor orientation. Swap to left-handed mouse buttons (or vice-versa). Go on Amazon and add some "interesting" things to their wishlist/cart. Go
543.
by gregmac 6y ago
Having used Windows 10 basically since it came out, on many different devices, I've never experienced this, and I lock my PC every time I step away (or at least I did when I was working in an office). I also can't find anyone disc
544.
by gregmac 6y ago
I think a good model would be splitting it up so the physical plant and internet uplink are run by separate entities. Local government would run the fibre network and terminate everything to a central POP (or several). They're responsi
545.
by gregmac 6y ago
Part of a way around this is broadening your definition of "documentation". For example, in code: good naming, simple structure, unit tests, and useful comments all can count. A set of easy-to-understand unit tests that cover rea
546.
by gregmac 6y ago
At the highest level, this is a leadership issue. There's a lack of someone at a sufficiently high level (eg: C-suite) that properly understands technology, and that's probably caused by the rest of the leadership team not underst
547.
by gregmac 6y ago
I knew someone who was a specialist in doing calibrations on some very specific industrial measurement equipment, much of which was out-of-date but massively expensive to replace. He had retired, but took another 12 or 18 month contract fly
548.
by gregmac 6y ago
I think this was at its peak when basically every computer had only USB 2.0 ports. You pretty much could plug in anything to anything, so long as it fit. Not to say there were no issues -- USB 1.1 hubs, cable length limits -- but they were
549.
by gregmac 6y ago
> What if everyone but one says it fits in their head? "It depends". If the one person is a junior it's maybe not a code issue (unless junior-level people are expected to maintain it). On the other hand if it's a skil
550.
by gregmac 6y ago
I've seen bits of this, and I've seen it happen in code bases that were built as "abstract" so its components could re-used. But I've never seen it happen in any way close to resembling what the original architect t
551.
by gregmac 6y ago
> The obvious criticism here is that now any developer who wants to defend their code will simply claim a given spaghetti incident easily fit in their head. The thing is: that's just a bad defense. If the people who are going to be
552.
by gregmac 6y ago
> I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source. Contributors is easy to judge, but the s
553.
by gregmac 6y ago
Really the only time a future developer will care about the old code is when there's a bug in the current code. (Or maybe an edge case like a request to "make it work like it used to in v1.0"). Looking at history via "bl
554.
by gregmac 6y ago
It happens on the system making the initial DNS request: so, for example, your PC.
555.
by gregmac 6y ago
> Only four I/O ports is a little tight Maybe, but how many do you really need? I have lots of stuff plugged in at my desk -- but it's plugged into a dock, and there's just a single cable that goes into my laptop. Thinking
556.
by gregmac 6y ago
I don't understand this criticism. On every other laptop on the market today, if you want different ports you either buy dongles or buy a whole new laptop. Every laptop I've ever owned has at least one port I never use, and after
557.
by gregmac 6y ago
In the worst case (they change the interface spec and no one else produces old modules, or the company folds entirely) it's not any less maintainable than any other laptop on the market today. I think most laptops still allow storage a
558.
by gregmac 6y ago
> it makes me feel safer This for me is one of the biggest things I like about working under version control, even solo. It gives me the freedom to explore some crazy idea or refactor without having to think about the way back if it does
559.
by gregmac 6y ago
> Also, if I can answer your problem in less than a minute then you didn't even google it. Don't undersell this ability, it takes years to develop, and honestly is part of the value a "senior" person brings to the job
560.
by gregmac 6y ago
I wish everyone would treat email as the temporal medium it is. It's fine to use email to announce for example that a new procedure/policy exists, but if it's not posted in some canonical location (where the latest copy will
561.
by gregmac 6y ago
A coworker, about 15 years ago, was telling me about bringing out some old VHS tapes for his kids. They were absolutely amazed at one particular feature: you could put the tape in and it would be at exactly where you left off! This was a gr
562.
by gregmac 6y ago
The methods easy for beginners to build small systems and the ways experts use to build complex systems are often so different as to be totally incompatible. Think about it: It's exceedingly rare to find a language/framework where
563.
by gregmac 6y ago
> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway What a disgusting attitude. How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are goi
564.
by gregmac 6y ago
The most insidious part about misusing ORMs is it's often not visible for a while. Modern DBMSs on modern hardware are crazy fast , so when you have only a few tens or hundreds of thousand rows in your table, those inefficient and poi
565.
by gregmac 6y ago
> I really like answering questions; it's nice to know that the thing I'm writing will be immediately useful to somebody, and maybe a bunch of somebodies Totally agree. Explaining something to somebody else is a great way to le
566.
by gregmac 6y ago
You're missing the point I believe the OP was trying to make: ten+ years ago, jQuery was often by far the easiest way to implement most things. One line of jQuery could replace a dozen lines of plain JavaScript, even ignoring all the
567.
by gregmac 6y ago
> No electricity = no heat, regardless of natural gas supply. You're confusing furnaces and fireplaces. A fireplace is soemthing that sits in a living space usually with a visible flame behind glass and is designed more for aestheti
568.
by gregmac 6y ago
Buy home automation products with local control and no internet communications at all. Ideally with an open protocol, and open source control software. Same protection against vendor death/depreciation/etc, and on top of that your
569.
by gregmac 6y ago
You need enough "why" so someone reading it doesn't ask, but not so much you're writing a history textbook. Mostly, think about what someone reading this in 6-24 months will think. Without some background reasoning, part
570.
by gregmac 6y ago
My first experience with homebrew (as a non-mac user) was setting up a build agent a few years ago. It seemed like a nice way to get everything going, as well as being analogous to the ways it was setup on other OSes (using packages to mana

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