phlakaton

8 ms·

91.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Em-dashes have been the norm in every Dickinson poem I read, and I think it might have derived from the preferences of Victorian publishers, who I understand loved those long dashes.
92.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Emily Dickinson wept—
93.
by phlakaton 2y ago
I've been using real em- and en-dashes for decades, in more or less the way M-W describes. MacOS and iOS make it easy to do, and growing up Mac kindled a life of typographical nerdage.
94.
by phlakaton 2y ago
The Oriental Institute is now called ISAC for, ahem, reasons.
95.
by phlakaton 2y ago
And you know who we call that lone vessel on the ocean of prosperity? Bob.
96.
by phlakaton 2y ago
How far we've come from the world of the Blub Paradox. I can't resist asking, though: does this make Common LISP boring?
97.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Nice try, but you're not getting me to let go of ASN.1 that easily.
98.
by phlakaton 2y ago
I think the lie is in thinking FizzBuzz is going to give you any insight into such matters. Put aside your paranoia and just talk to your candidates. Ask them thoughtful questions that invite thoughtful answers. Probe gently to get at more
99.
by phlakaton 2y ago
If you want to assess communication skills, common sense, maturity, just generally knowing what's going on, or any other senior engineering quality, I advise you steer hard away from FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is the mind-killer.
100.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Yeah, but did BASIC have an SSL library? The bar for "basic" programming these days is much higher in many cases.
101.
by phlakaton 2y ago
At Stanford Zimbardo taught one of the most popular classes in the university, "The Psychology of Mind Control." From my roommates I understand he would talk about techniques of manipulation used by cults and despots. It surprises
102.
by phlakaton 2y ago
His "What if?" videos have his actual voice, and it sounds nothing like a stick figure. Horrors.
103.
by phlakaton 2y ago
His commencement addresses might really freak you out, then! See e.g. https://youtu.be/z7GVHB2wiyg
104.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Please try to respond to my argument without 1) straw-manning it, 2) or reading a bunch into it that isn't there. You made a point about the macro only costing a few lines of code. That is not a useful way to look at macros, as I can a
105.
by phlakaton 2y ago
The cost of a macro is not measured in lines of code. It's measured in things like adoption, clarity, and debuggability.
106.
by phlakaton 2y ago
BeOS had a database-based filesystem way back in the early 1990s. It was slow and difficult to keep up to date. They swapped it out with BFS and the rest was history. It's possible this will do better than Be's old database system
107.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Better reading IMO: Temperament by Stuart Isacoff. It is a small-ish music history book that covers the whole subject pretty thoroughly, with various tuning options that have been tried through the centuries, while treating the tradeoffs
108.
by phlakaton 2y ago
A tale like that? It might be very useful But now it is gone
109.
by phlakaton 2y ago
(More like 20 times. But what's an order of magnitude to a musician accustomed to dB anyway.)
110.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Not in my experience. Sure, music theory involves learning the "syntax" of music notation, the "semantics" of e.g. key and genre, and the "programming pearls" of common musical idioms like tritone substitutions
111.
by phlakaton 2y ago
I did get told at one gig that I was almost not hired for the sin of showing up to the interview in a black collared shirt and jeans. They might have been taking the mickey out of me, though. I mean, I thought it was the Silly Valley dress
112.
by phlakaton 2y ago
As one of the high school geometers of all time, I was always rather partial to ≅ which we used for congruence. I'm happy to share it with other mathematicians if they'll agree to keep their mitts off of ":=".
113.
by phlakaton 2y ago
When there are not protests, yeah.
114.
by phlakaton 2y ago
Perhaps this is because osascript can handle '-l JavaScript' as a single arg? The single-arg limitation is a well-known "feature" (ha) of UNIX shebangs.
115.
by phlakaton 2y ago
laughing in m4
116.
by phlakaton 2y ago
I dunno. "Rene" sounds a lot like "renege." Which probably means you'll sign on to a project and abandon it halfway through or something. Very sus. (I wish I could say my early interviewing rubrics were any better t
117.
by phlakaton 2y ago
The pain for me has been in the VM scene, as VirtualBox disappeared from the ecosystem with the switch to ARM.
118.
by phlakaton 2y ago
The good news is, you no longer need Dhall or some crazy scripts to generate your Terraform files. Just a bit more XML and an XSLT stylesheet oughta do it!
119.
by phlakaton 2y ago
They'll do what they should have done years ago: give up on all this fuddy duddy syntax and just go with XML. ;-)
120.
by phlakaton 3y ago
See if you can find – or make! – a cheap one.

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