jwmcq

8 ms·

31.
by jwmcq 4y ago
If your 'general principle' doesn't apply to the most important and popular software in the world (open source) then perhaps it is not very general, and not very principled.
32.
by jwmcq 4y ago
> I prefer if people keep their politics out of IT infrastructure. I find it interesting that people only ever say this when talking about free software initiatives. Nobody moans about software getting 'political' when talking
33.
by jwmcq 4y ago
Volokh made this query of ChatGPT: “Whether sexual harassment by professors has been a problem at American law schools; please include at least five examples, together with quotes from relevant newspaper articles.” The program res
34.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I think the main problem with MIT is that if you offer the largest industry players the opportunity to “do whatever the fuck [they] want” then they will. Historically, this has not been great for users. As an obvious example, I honestly can
35.
by jwmcq 4y ago
As someone who works building technology for commodity trading in the energy industry... you get used to it. Kinda.
36.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I'd say it even makes a difference for single player games that don't "phone home" - I was actually thinking about this the other day in relation to the recent (and mostly welcome) trend of remastering older games, and h
37.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I wonder if there's somewhere that people can propose a name for things and people can tell them why they might want to use something else - 'Pony' is fairly common slang for 'crap' in London / Southern England
38.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I feel this. Once had something locking up a production SQL Server instance, and it turned out to be a dreadful partially-recursive web of sprocs, views, and TVFs that worked fine until apparently one day the query optimiser decided otherwi
39.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I remember about about 15-20 years ago, I noticed that a bunch of spam emails would open using multiple disjointed snippets of public-domain poetry before the dodgy links to try and get around these sorts of filters. I used to love reading
40.
by jwmcq 4y ago
>What's the solution here to get more in taxes? Easy - increase corporation tax. The main rate has been literally halved over the last 30 years.
41.
by jwmcq 4y ago
This is the best way I've seen it put.
42.
by jwmcq 4y ago
Heaven forbid someone asks you to define the terms you're arguing from. You're right, though, it's absolutely a rhetorical device. But I'll continue to use it because it's quite effective - I've yet to see a de
43.
by jwmcq 4y ago
Wow, what a theory. Please, tell me more about the authoritarianism of the least powerful people in society. To be fair, I was being glib there. This probably is the best attempt I've seen to define it - certainly better than when I us
44.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I couldn't tell you exactly why (though I have some ideas), but Lisps seem to settle into amazingly stable languages. Even Clojure, with all its initial trendiness, has been remarkably resistant to bloat and churn. Such things as it&#x
45.
by jwmcq 4y ago
I think it's also worth noting that OSS did not 'make' Blender initially - it was a closed-source application. It's a resounding OSS success these days, but had already been 'productised' before the the release
46.
by jwmcq 4y ago
This would be kinda cool, but also kinda the most terrible idea I can think of. MMORPGs rely so heavily on network effects to gain and keep players that any barrier to entry - and the requirement to have dedicated hardware is a pretty huge
47.
by jwmcq 4y ago
Unfortunately, the wages for a vast majority of workers are set by the owning class. I believe some beardy German bloke wrote a couple of volumes all about the consequences of this over a century ago.
48.
by jwmcq 4y ago
Fully agreed. There seemed to be a trend in mid-20th century sci-fi for authors to expand short stories into full books, and I've yet to find an example where the novel was an improvement.
49.
by jwmcq 5y ago
I don't know C very well, but what little I know is from Beej. I don't know network programming very well, but what little I know was learned from Beej. It's actually been quite rare in my professional programming career that