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fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

This title needs to be disambiguated. I had assumed that most musicians, and especially prog metal bands, were non-profit by default. I was curious why that had to be made explicit!

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: GitHub’s engineering team has moved to Codespaces

I'm a big fan of capturing the toolchain(s) with the repo. I have had to hack this for embedded toolchains out of necessity for years (decades?) using VirtualBox on a Mac. I still have a Windows 95 VM sitting around containing a copy of Keil or something that is the only known way to rebuild the code for a certain weird-ass micro from some consulting gig in the late 90's. I wonder if it still boots? Hopefully, that customer forgot about me...

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

Copilot is going to really rock the numbers on lucrative unhose-your-sucky-codebase consulting gigs. I'd feel gleeful about that but those gigs are the definition of soul-sucking so I guess still no free lunch.

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Why writing software is not like engineering (2008)

This seems to broadly conflate CS and Software Engineering. The differences have been covered elsewhere. Stuff like cognitive vs. physical science, (mostly) thinking about thinking instead of thinking about things, or quotes like "A computer is to computer science as a telescope is too astronomy." To be fair, the fact that a lot of us got CS degrees, but really ended up doing software development probably doesn't help clarify matters. The university I went to had a separate degree for Software Engineering and, frankly, it looked pretty boring to me. Even though I was a full-on coder before I got there. Perhaps there is no hope?

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Cheating in FPS by using a second computer to move mouse

Not really on topic, but it has been "interesting" to watch the cheating progression unfold in fitness games (Zwift, etc.) where it essentially IS digital steroids. Although often done in a very analog way, like attaching drill motors to $10k carbon bike frames to get that pro-level rush of achieving 5w/Kg for hours at a time. A Movistar contract, no doubt, arriving shortly...

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Towing a Tesla at 70 MPH replenishes battery at fast charger rates

I think you are on to something here. Make all elevators in hi-rises down-only and all stairwells up-only. Convert falling excess desk-jockey blubber into usable electricity while lowering rate of CV disease and generally improving fitness. Downside is probably a lot of BO that didn't exist before.

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What huge mistake did you make early in your career?

I told a fairly obnoxious and (in my mind) idiotic customer to "take a chill pill" on a conference call. This did not work out well. I did call them back and apologized before my management told me too, but I'm claiming no credit there, that was just pure self-preservation kicking in. On the plus side, after that day, I (slowly!) started to understand how salespeople can be really, really good at a really, really hard job. I very much enjoy sales now and I think I have a lot more empathy for where my customers are coming from thanks to that very dark day.

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Happy 20th Birthday, iPod

I wrote about my trip bringing up the iPod software development board. Now if I could only remember what that first song was...

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: The NSA Instruction (2019)

Maybe not for general-purpose computing. I've used it for on-the-fly code generation (hacking display rotation into the Windows 3x BitBlt engine) and programming special-purpose media accelerators. In both cases you end up creating a bunch of convenience #defines or macros that generate the bits, which immediately takes you back into tiny language territory rather than pure machine code. The relative ease of creating new programmable hardware in FPGAs is another place this might occur.

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Why Some Old Computers Are Interesting

The university I went to had used Xerox Sigma 6/7/9s. One of them is now in the living computer museum. Yeah! After programming 6502 assembler in high school, having multiple blocks of 16 32-bit registers was breath-taking. My brain was wired to the 6502 X/Y/A thing so I doubt I ever used more than 5-6 of them at a time. After doing a lot of 8-bit micro and X86 assembly, doing ARM assembly for the first time felt similarly freeing.

fortyrod | 4 years ago | on: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

Probably would have been better for the author to have taken the "don't sell out to a single cloud vendor API" angle. But I guess no clicky-baits for that approach. I've been screwed over by both AWS and Azure, and never by GCloud, but that doesn't mean I trust any of them.

fortyrod | 5 years ago | on: Someone is hacking the hackers

Or pretend you're in the southeastern US, where "Sam" and "Sue" are both non-gendered, and probably ageless, according to Mr. Cash, at least. You could also go with Courtney, Tracy, Billie, Casey, Drew...
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