kabdib

16 ms·

151.
by kabdib 4y ago
I will never willingly use YAML on a project ever again. It's a bloody disaster. I would actually prefer XML over YAML.
152.
by kabdib 4y ago
HR is not there for you. HR is not there for you. HR is not there for you. Do not forget this. The nicest, most approachable and apparently friendly HR staffer will happily stuff you down the chute if they are so directed. Through bitter ex
153.
by kabdib 4y ago
They did not. Raises and promotions happened as usual. The two contracts were mostly the same, with the non-compete section added in the WA version. I don't think that HR really understood my question, but I sure wasn't going to c
154.
by kabdib 4y ago
About 20 years ago I joined a large company in California, where non-compete clauses are essentially disallowed. A few years later, I moved to the company's offices in Washington State, where non-competes are allowed. Before the move
155.
by kabdib 4y ago
I've seen code that (a) issued an async read (b) did some computation (c) used the buffer filled in by that async read ... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that s
156.
by kabdib 4y ago
If we're talking about binaries for game titles, meh. Load time for the executable is utterly insignificant compared to the load time of a title's assets. Heck, shared libraries probably slow things down. Typical games I have expe
157.
by kabdib 4y ago
That's not it, but thanks. Here's a pretty good recreation, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjWD-CnasPc&list=PLGxaqBTVsg... I've been unable to find the original. I'll keep looking.
158.
by kabdib 4y ago
I was 8 when my dad handed me a set of headphones and had me listen to the first few minutes of Switched On Bach . Still vividly remember that experience, it was like a rapture. Wendy's works are tough to find on streaming services th
159.
by kabdib 4y ago
I'm wading through a sea of third party projects right now that variously use uint8_t, u8, byte, tchar, BYTE, and endless variations that prepend one or two underscores for no apparent reason other than simple paranoia. Now, on to othe
160.
by kabdib 4y ago
Mixed feelings. Sucks to lose that much money (though he's likely young enough to recover from this loss -- I had to very nearly start over, for different reasons, at about that age). Contrariwise, he was an idiot to make that "in
161.
by kabdib 4y ago
Putting an executive in jail because they wrongly and deliberately caused a customer to be jailed seems pretty reasonable. What else do you do, make them pay a fine that's just a rounding error on their checking account? Having them we
162.
by kabdib 4y ago
Those are really good choices. I re-read the Mars trilogy every couple of years, though the differences between the book's timeline and our own are getting a little embarrassing :-) Here are some early "cyberpunk" books that
163.
by kabdib 4y ago
I wonder how much of this was labor law in California. For instance, non-compete clauses are essentially forbidden in CA. There were a ton of small companies in SV, and it was incredibly easy to interview, change jobs, and your commute woul
164.
by kabdib 4y ago
That explains a lot about MV/OS (or whatever it was called). It definitely felt like they had Unix envy, and were trying for a fairly nice environment for writing software.
165.
by kabdib 4y ago
I used the MV/8000 (what the machines were eventually called by DG marketing) for cross development of games when I was at Atari. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the OS and tooling on the MV/8000. It had a very capabl
166.
by kabdib 4y ago
I knew a guy (Marc Crispin) who had a PDP-20 in his spare bedroom. His power bill was . . . large.
167.
by kabdib 4y ago
Microsoft actively discourages its Xbox employees from talking to customers. Valve actively encourages talking to customers and helping them out. (I've worked in both places. It's night and day in that respect).
168.
by kabdib 4y ago
s/user/sucker/g
169.
by kabdib 4y ago
For exercise, I walk with audiobooks. They're great for this. Figured out 30 years ago that I can't think independent thoughts with one of those going, though. For thinking, I walk with nothing. If I want to remember something, I&
170.
by kabdib 4y ago
SGI had some seriously cool tech that they could charge a premium for, then $300 3D graphics cards for PCs came out and ate their lunch (around the time that Windows NT was basically destroying the Unix workstation market). I remember sneak
171.
by kabdib 4y ago
I remember when SGI (Silicon Graphics) paid a bunch of money to rebrand to . . . drumroll . . . SGI! The consultants must have been high-fiving each other after that one landed, it's like trading in your car only to find that the sales
172.
by kabdib 4y ago
That sounds like a lot of work unless you absolutely have to have a contiguous allocation of every element. If you don't need that, you can get "O(1.1)" access and nice heap behavior with an indirection or two, and the implem
173.
by kabdib 4y ago
That's exactly the strategy that was tipping over. Once you start resizing vectors of tens of megabytes, it's kind of over. You can start playing games by accelerating capacity allocation when a vector rapidly starts growing extre
174.
by kabdib 4y ago
Right, the ability to relocate a chunk of memory to a new virtual address (with more capacity at the end) without doing a physical copy would be an interesting way to solve the problem. I don't know if anyone has done research on integ
175.
by kabdib 4y ago
Right, though we didn't need full tree semantics (just fast random access and an append that didn't spool up the fans on the servers). I would hate to have to do a full balanced b-tree on short notice. (We also had rather terrible
176.
by kabdib 4y ago
The first week into my prior job, I had to fix an in-production bug involving quadratic vector growth that was tipping over servers. The vector implementation guaranteed too much, namely consecutive memory layout (which wasn't needed,
177.
by kabdib 4y ago
In 40+ years in the industry, I've only been unwillingly unemployed for about a month, when the startup I was at imploded (frankly, much to everyone's relief). Doesn't mean it won't get really bad, or that you'll be
178.
by kabdib 4y ago
C+- is pretty common. I last read the Google C++ guidelines maybe ten years ago. They were pretty much in line with the decisions that other large C++ projects I've worked on had made, like we all encountered the same footguns and lang
179.
by kabdib 4y ago
One large phone manufacturer maintained a room full of PCs, each machine configured to build for one model of phone. I don't know if they kept backups. I wouldn't take that bet.
180.
by kabdib 4y ago
I stuck difficult-to-find easter eggs in my game cartridges precisely because I wanted to prove that I'd written them. The eggs are not spectacular, nor do they subtract from the player experience. It was just signing my name, when I w

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