mprovost

13 ms·

121.
by mprovost 3y ago
My company did the same which led to lots of questions to determine the exact value of n so folk could move n+1 miles away and stay remote.
122.
by mprovost 3y ago
Back in college we ordered pizza and when the driver arrived there was some confusion finding money for a tip and after he was gone we realised that three of us had given him cash. After that every time we ordered it seemed like the pizza a
123.
by mprovost 3y ago
Apparently (according to TikTok) ending a sentence with an ellipsis is also a Gen-X thing...
124.
by mprovost 3y ago
We used to receive so many automatically generated emails and I really doubted that anyone was reading them but every time I asked if I could disable them people would swear that they were essential. I got so sick of them that I commented o
125.
by mprovost 3y ago
Totally agree. If you focus on the money you'll just be frustrated. I could have made more money spending those hours driving for Lyft instead. I deliberately haven't tracked my hours so I won't be discouraged at my hourly ra
126.
by mprovost 3y ago
Kodak invented the digital camera. Being first doesn't mean much. New competitors don't have anything inside the moat (their existing business) to protect and can move faster.
127.
by mprovost 3y ago
There's only so much you can do to keep an 80 year old technology developed with slide rules from being reverse engineered by a dedicated group of scientists with the benefit of 80 years of advancements in physics and access to a super
128.
by mprovost 3y ago
(As I always point out...) This is known as the "Dead Sea Effect" and it was traditionally associated with companies like IBM but now we're seeing it across the board with tech layoffs. The best people know they have options
129.
by mprovost 3y ago
I would be surprised if anything has ever been removed from terminfo. Thomas Dickey is doing God's work.
130.
by mprovost 3y ago
I used to buy old DEC terminals on Ebay in the early 2000s (there seemed to be a lot of stock from US Post Offices, you could tell from the burn in on the screens) and hook them up to a x86 FreeBSD desktop. I think the 320 was my favourite
131.
by mprovost 3y ago
The OS notices when disks or NFS servers ("NFS server not responding") go missing, but there's no way to generally broadcast this information to every process. And then you would have to build in error handling everywhere. Wh
132.
by mprovost 3y ago
At the point where it disappears for seconds it's a distributed system not an attached disk. At this point you have to start applying the CAP theorem. At least in Unix the assumption is that disks are always attached (and reliable...)
133.
by mprovost 3y ago
At this point how many AirPods does Apple have to sell to buy a license and preinstall it on every Mac instead of TextEdit?
134.
by mprovost 3y ago
You remember... right. The Apple 2e blows away modern computers (in terms of latency). https://danluu.com/input-lag/
135.
by mprovost 3y ago
I don't think anyone had any illusions about "teaching" us anything other than the value of hard work. We made minimum wage, no benefits (what does that even mean for a kid, we all had health insurance through our parents). I
136.
by mprovost 3y ago
I spent my summers from ages 14-18 picking shade tobacco (for cigar wrappers) in Connecticut's Tobacco Valley. I'm not sure if it was state law but you couldn't start until you were 14. This was during summer vacation when sc
137.
by mprovost 4y ago
This is great and a lot of it rings true to my experience writing a book to teach Rust. It's basically a giant topological sorting exercise to find the optimal order to introduce syntax so that you steer clear of rabbit holes. Or you j
138.
by mprovost 4y ago
Meltdown/Spectre pulled back the curtain and revealed just how much magic is going on with modern CPUs.
139.
by mprovost 4y ago
In the mid-2000s I built a pretty large webhosting company entirely on Intel servers bought off Ebay. They had really high build quality and were less idiosyncratic than Dell or Compaq/HP. (I never had to deal with weird management con
140.
by mprovost 4y ago
Reminds me of this classic Steve Yegge post: "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they w
141.
by mprovost 4y ago
We’re just starting the first “performance cycle” at work since ChatGPT came out and I strongly suspect next year’s won’t be based on producing so many written documents (self reflection, peer feedback, etc).
142.
by mprovost 4y ago
I chose to use InDesign to typeset my self-published book, and I have to say the quality it produces from just placing some imported text with no other changes looks 1000 times better than this. It's easy to go down a rabbit hole and s
143.
by mprovost 4y ago
We saw this one iteration back with VMWare. Once it became easy to spin up a VM without getting a PO for a server and finding rack space, the number of "servers" in the org exploded. And of course we lost track of what they all di
144.
by mprovost 4y ago
Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile client.
145.
by mprovost 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Association_with_...
146.
by mprovost 4y ago
There’s an official HP version as well: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hp-15c-calculator/id503720774
147.
by mprovost 4y ago
HP sold an official IOS version of the 15C for years but stopped updating it at some point. It still worked but didn't scale correctly on new iPhones. About a year ago I noticed that it had updated. It looks like they sold it to "
148.
by mprovost 4y ago
In Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 book "Pacific Edge" (part of the California Trilogy) he envisions a utopian future where company sizes are legally limited to stop the formation of huge, multi-national corporations so that cont
149.
by mprovost 4y ago
ReiserFS handles this really well but I don't know if you can call it modern anymore. I can't think of any other filesystem that followed its design choices though.
150.
by mprovost 4y ago
This is very true - to fully explain a "hello world" program you'd have to dive into macro syntax... When writing my Rust book I often start by showing the naive solution, and then later move to more canonical code once I&#x2

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