sevensor

4 ms·

31.
by sevensor 8mo ago
Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fa
32.
by sevensor 8mo ago
I am not an AI and I missed the memo on this. I put that line in whenever I need to use a forward-declared type annotation. Last I recall reading about it, there were some deep issues that meant it had to stay in __future__ indefinitely. I
33.
by sevensor 8mo ago
Julia Set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
34.
by sevensor 8mo ago
I have a recording of le temps des cerises by Charles Trenet, which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack. Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void, echoing the end of everything. A little melanchol
35.
by sevensor 8mo ago
People have romantic ideas about heating with fire and burn the most awful green wood in their fireplaces, stinking up the whole neighborhood. I understand burning bad wood because you have no options -- I witnessed a chimney fire or two as
36.
by sevensor 8mo ago
I know a few farmstands here that operate on the honor system. Put $5 in the box, take your bag of apples. You have to go a bit out of your way, but they do exist in the States.
37.
by sevensor 8mo ago
I thought it was relevant context for the discussion. I’ve read some real gems in his big pasted blocks.
38.
by sevensor 9mo ago
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is. Hum
39.
by sevensor 9mo ago
> give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely) Make that 64 if you’re obliged to run Teams. I wonder how many power plants the US could retire if we all stopped using it.
40.
by sevensor 9mo ago
> manufacturing This is sadly far from the truth. Manufacturing is nowhere near metric conversion. Horsepower, foot-pounds, and my all time least favorite unit, the mil, are everywhere. And relatedly, manufacturing execution systems that
41.
by sevensor 9mo ago
> 16-bit applications are supported in the new WoW64 mode. I’d like to thank them for this, specifically! I had some old applications that weren’t working in the old WoW mode.
42.
by sevensor 9mo ago
> I wonder how many practical engineers use a fountain pen? Not a lot, but more than zero. I take copious meeting notes and I do a lot of my serious thinking on paper. I find fountain pens vastly more comfortable for writing multiple pag
43.
by sevensor 9mo ago
> Fountain pens were obsolete 50 years ago and ink in bottles is even more outdated My friend, you have no idea what you’re missing out on. Even cheap fountain pens can be very good these days, and we are living in a golden age of bottle
44.
by sevensor 9mo ago
> DevOps: Traversal’s agents function as an SRE Fascinating. How’s that working out? Whose site? How reliable?
45.
by sevensor 9mo ago
See also: librarians, archivists, historians, film critics, doctors, lawyers, docents. The déformation professionnelle of our industry is to see the world in terms of information storage, processing, and retrieval. For these fields and many
46.
by sevensor 9mo ago
I read the post to see how you would answer, not because I was unclear about what the answer would be, because the only possible answer here is “sometimes.” I especially like the point that Rust can be faster because it enables you to write
47.
by sevensor 9mo ago
Not who you’re replying to, but I do this as well. I carry a pocket notebook and write paragraphs describing what I want to write. Sometimes I list out the fields of a data structure. Then I revise. By the time I actually write the code, it
48.
by sevensor 9mo ago
To be fair, this is also what I hear from my GP when I have no complaints at all. It’s not bad advice, but I think it’s what most doctors tell patients they deem basically healthy. Nobody gets hurt by eating fewer peanut butter cups and tak
49.
by sevensor 9mo ago
My kids have fond memories of TuxPaint as it was included in GCompris. All of GCompris is worth a look, although I think they liked TuxPaint best.
50.
by sevensor 9mo ago
The observation is half right. Optimizing the wrong function definitely causes misery. What this misses is that there is no right function. Certainly not when there is more than one person involved (no two people will have the same preferen
51.
by sevensor 9mo ago
I visited the Science History Institute in Philadelphia when it was still the Chemical Heritage Foundation museum. They had a fascinating collection; hopefully it’s intact. I remember seeing lots of material from the history of plastics.
52.
by sevensor 9mo ago
My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Before the upgrade from Windows 10, it only took three. Teams, of cou
53.
by sevensor 10mo ago
That totally makes sense; in fact my gut reaction was “why does this look like it was shot on video? I could swear this show used to look better.”
54.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Sure, if writing code is applied math, deciding what needs to be written is applied philosophy. I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for applied philosophy.
55.
by sevensor 10mo ago
> Our careers depend on LLMs not being able to solve complex problems so that we don’t risk/fear losing our careers I think both this sentiment and the article are on the same wrong track, which is to see programming as solving well
56.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Semiconductor manufacturing needs supply chain a lot more than it needs fast internet. Wafers, fine chemicals, gases, consumable parts. A lot of this comes from petroleum refining, so it helps to be near a lot of refineries, although not en
57.
by sevensor 10mo ago
Ah, thank you. I’ve seen that, and it’s horrible!
58.
by sevensor 10mo ago
What is the “soap opera effect?” Mentioned in the article, but I haven’t heard of it. Also, this is probably just because I’m old, but a lot of recent TV seems inadequately lit, where you can just barely see part of one character’s face in
59.
by sevensor 10mo ago
> Master of Magic I picked up a bargain bin CD ROM of this game in 1996 and it works under dosbox as well as it ever did. Which is to say mostly ok but sometimes hilariously crashy. I think what needs to happen for us to spend another 30
60.
by sevensor 10mo ago
> a lot of jobs are CRUD web apps and those are certainly gone at this point We thought Rails would do this. I think it’s safer to say that CRUD is now cheaper than ever, and that changes what the job of producing it looks like. Remember

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