kabdib

23 ms·

241.
by kabdib 4y ago
Or mandate surveillance software (keystroke logging, etc.) on the phones or computers. "For the children". End to end encryption doesn't matter if the ends are p3wned.
242.
by kabdib 4y ago
One of the few movies I've walked out of.
243.
by kabdib 4y ago
He's 80, and as far as I know he's still checking in code at Microsoft. And people think that software engineers are over the hill at 35, or 40. Feh.
244.
by kabdib 4y ago
I spent a LOT of time in the late 80s and the 90s wrestling with class hierarchies, coming up with one tower of abstraction after another. So much wasted time; perhaps it didn't help that my vehicles were C++ and Java, but I think that
245.
by kabdib 4y ago
If cryptocurrencies are "democratic", then so in the same sense are disease, starvation and violence. Available to anyone. Doesn't make them a good thing. All I see are scams, hype, and tricks to get marks to stuff more money
246.
by kabdib 4y ago
Having seen the code for a couple of "intelligent assistant" features: Yeah, basically a bunch of "if" statements. (The IA for the Apple Newton was a ton of special cases. It was clever, but certainly not 'intellige
247.
by kabdib 4y ago
You are correct on both accounts :-) (I mis-remembered the ROM size).
248.
by kabdib 4y ago
Describing Win32 as a "narrow waist" (hundreds of interfaces, thousands of calls, no idea how many structures) seems off the mark. I don't get it. It seems like the target got painted where the arrow landed.
249.
by kabdib 4y ago
My family has had 4 cars in the last 15 years (I won't mention models, but they were fairly reasonable, middle-of-the-pack vehicles). Three of them had no defects at all. The most recent one, a hybrid with a bunch of fancy electronics,
250.
by kabdib 4y ago
My first job out of college at Atari in 1982, writing game cartridges for the 400/800 computers, paid $25K a year. My first raise after a year was to $30K. There were programmers in other divisions making royalties off of their games.
251.
by kabdib 4y ago
That depends on where your profits are coming from . If a large number of your customers depend (say) on VC funding . . .
252.
by kabdib 4y ago
I think we can agree that if you don't have tests, you don't have a compiler. You don't have anything , really not even a toy. But there are too many languages out there in production that don't have debugging support w
253.
by kabdib 4y ago
If we're the forerunners, it's our responsibility to leave behind huge and mysterious artifacts containing the secrets of the universe, filled with traps for the unwary. "Figby, get those doom-chompers synchronized with the s
254.
by kabdib 4y ago
Someone made a video that imagined changes a company like EA or Blizzard might make to Elden Ring, charging for extra arrows, fees for questlines, microtransactions for boss assists, and so forth. It made me feel sick. I could totally see a
255.
by kabdib 4y ago
If you are designing or implementing a language, do the debugger first . Well, very early, anyway. Think of this as deep introspection into how well your design holds together. If you can't write an effective debugger for the thing yo
256.
by kabdib 4y ago
I've been using a catchall domain for 25+ years. Caught some companies leaking or selling my email addresses, too (the one I was most irritated with was Godaddy). Including the company's name in the salted address is usually confu
257.
by kabdib 4y ago
I spent one memorable Christmas-to-New-Years holiday tracking down a bad bug in the Newton kernel that (for a while) only happened up on those kiosk devices. I spent nearly two weeks tracking down a timing window where an interrupt between
258.
by kabdib 4y ago
Don't know about other professions, but all of the proposals I've seen for licensing software engineers have been highly bogus (with lot of irrelevant material) and politically suspect. Here's a great summary: https:/&#
259.
by kabdib 4y ago
> I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal Entering into a subscription with no knowledge of that, let alone any up-front information about price or other terms, is very scummy behavior. The after-the-fact em
260.
by kabdib 4y ago
I can guarantee you that "We have to add a bureaucracy to fix all of this" won't actually fix anything. I've seen proposals for regulating software engineers. They've all been transparent and embarrassing land-grabs
261.
by kabdib 4y ago
Why not use Valve's game networking stuff? Just curious.
262.
by kabdib 4y ago
It's a power law. Increased mass more than proportionally decreases the lifetime of a star. (A star with 100 X the mass of our sun would last about a million years).
263.
by kabdib 4y ago
Recent-ish experience: - Wrote a distributed app in Python (it aggregated a few GB / day of info from several thousand servers). Performance was terrible, though I was doing all the right things (async I/O, etc.). - Rewrote it in
264.
by kabdib 4y ago
Unclear what you're asking. Generally I've stayed 5-8 years at any one company (the most so far was 11). My time at a few startups were far shorter than that, for pretty guessable reasons.
265.
by kabdib 4y ago
All but one of the jobs I've had in my 4+ decades of mucking with computers have been through networking. (Even the gig I had as a dishwasher in high school was a referral through a friend). That one job that I got at a generic Silly V
266.
by kabdib 4y ago
I recently took a year off, and started interviewing in March. I spent a fair amount of time in fear of interviewing, doing LeetCode pushups and feeling miserable about my performance, and wondering if I could swing retirement rather than g
267.
by kabdib 4y ago
I once worked on a project in 6502 assembler where my turnaround time was about three seconds from build-to-run. It was absolutely magical. Compare that to an environment I was in a few years back where I was lucky to get two builds a day.
268.
by kabdib 4y ago
Read, read, read. It's okay to read Knuth, and even do the problems. Just don't tell anyone. :-)
269.
by kabdib 4y ago
The "... or equivalent experience" has been in job descriptions for as long as I can remember. Since the 80s, for sure. I have only seen one instance of a software engineer not being hired because they lacked a degree, and the thr
270.
by kabdib 4y ago
I once told a manager that I'd been using C longer than he'd been alive. He took it the right way. :-)

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