jfb

15 ms·

151.
by jfb 6y ago
Honestly, the idea of a soft keyboard is a great one, particularly one as well integrated into the OS as the Touch Bar is. However, while I have a Mac with the Touch Bar, I never ever ever ever use it intentionally, as I spend 90% of my tim
152.
by jfb 6y ago
ADTs allow you to more bring more of your problem domain into the compiler, which reduces the number of places you need to shim your models.
153.
by jfb 6y ago
This isn't even remotely true. Well, the insane price part is, I guess. But speaking as someone who was around then, the Mac was impossibly advanced, compared to the C64, Apple II, IBM PC.
154.
by jfb 6y ago
I've only been up here for eight years, so.
155.
by jfb 6y ago
One of the low-key weirdest things about moving from California to Ontario, Canada was that, until earlier this summer, basically no gas stations ("gas bars") had the auto-shutoff triggers. They seemed to make a lot more sense her
156.
by jfb 6y ago
This is awesome, thank you!
157.
by jfb 6y ago
I worked with a guy who had in fact once found a javac compiler bug, and he was maddening to try and get to fix bugs, because he'd just always point at the compiler.
158.
by jfb 6y ago
Or, "Hold AAPL". Either way.
159.
by jfb 6y ago
I last touched Solaris back when I had 39 1.44mb floppy disks of Slackware. I don't miss anything of that vintage, save for Mac OS 7.
160.
by jfb 6y ago
See, I was a SunOS user BITD and Solaris was terrible for as long as I needed to engage with it. I'm certain that it's quite good now.
161.
by jfb 6y ago
On the one hand, having basically one default Unix these days makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people; but at the same time, I don't like software monocultures. So, it's a mixed bag. But I'll tell you what: I do not
162.
by jfb 6y ago
As a resident of the great Dominion of Canada, I was very happy to see that Chrystia Freeland, the new Canadian minister of finance at one point sort of kind of endorsed the LVT.
163.
by jfb 6y ago
I agree that the proposition system, whatever purpose it may have served to rein in the railroads BITD, is now a horrible destructive anachronism; but I don't think you need to make a moral argument against Prop 13; a purely functional
164.
by jfb 6y ago
The central dysfunction of California governance is Proposition 13, the worst law in the state, if not the world.
165.
by jfb 6y ago
"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts". —James Nicoll
166.
by jfb 6y ago
Oh, they have plenty of users; they're just not the people whose labour they're harvesting.
167.
by jfb 6y ago
There isn't really a distinction to be drawn between "a documentary to inform decision makers" and "propaganda". Everybody in the Soviet Union was lying to everyone else -- they were responding rationally to the inc
168.
by jfb 6y ago
It's a piece of internal Soviet propaganda. Draw your own conclusions.
169.
by jfb 6y ago
Right. My old boss at Apple used to encourage me to rant about how our products should work, and then shake his head and with a Gallic chuckle say, "we'd go broke if we made products for you".
170.
by jfb 6y ago
I mean, this is what Android did, right? They use a Linux-based kernel but completely reimplemented the display systems. The real problem is that there isn't anybody who is willing to pay for that sort of work, either on the supply sid
171.
by jfb 6y ago
I've wanted something more like Emacs for the web -- a bunch of fast primitives and hooks everywhere, with a good-enough language to allow me to modify everything about the browser as I see fit, without having to drop down into the C++
172.
by jfb 6y ago
There used to be a Mac app called "Bluephone Elite", IIRC, that could do this for a very specific group of phones. It worked with my Sony Ericcson thing BITD.
173.
by jfb 6y ago
All of the money was coming from Google's antitrust lawyers.
174.
by jfb 6y ago
I always lusted after a T3100. God, that was an amazing machine.
175.
by jfb 6y ago
> They just don't listen Quelle surprise .
176.
by jfb 6y ago
Why on Earth should the Pareto optimality of the advertising business matter to anyone not in the advertising business? That is an extremely alien concern to me.
177.
by jfb 6y ago
Same in Canada. Chatted online, got a case #, turned around in less than a week. Good service, not the best product.
178.
by jfb 6y ago
There are multiple dimensions you can use to measure success. Market capitalization is certainly one of them, but it is at best only tenuously related to engineering quality.
179.
by jfb 6y ago
> The meaning of "joins don't scale" is that they don't scale across database servers, when your dataset is too big to fit in a single database instance. Joins scale across rows, they don't scale across servers.
180.
by jfb 6y ago
That is a wonderfully written report, that gave me the screaming meemies towards the end.

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