williamaadams's comments

I came all the back from my Thanksgiving slumber just to say; really?

I love this library, and have made a C++ friendly version of the same.

What you get for a few hundred lines of code far outweighs any of the shortcomings it might have. It's a great starting point. If someone wants to make a full on format, they'll probably be better off just using the new JPEG XL, rather than trying to shape this thing.

It's a good exploration of what can be done with run-length encoding.

Just came here to say, good job. I was doing my own run-length encoding thing using the TGA format, but this is nicer. It's good enough that I am able to run a little screencast thing using it.

Depends on the community of course. Sub-Saharan Africa leap-frogged copper and went to 4g/5G. Probably same for broader band.

Not too long ago 10 mbits was ‘broadband’, so, maybe various forms of wireless will be just fine. Certainly more flexible in terms of long term options

And yet, without any analysis, anyone I've talked to was moved by the poem, and thought it was the best part of the inauguration. I think the moment, the black young girl standing at the pulpit of power, the collective relief, the joy of seeing a female (black/asian) as VP, culminated in an emotional uplifting, which the words did not capture at 100%. It had meaning in the context of 4 years of trump, of 400 years of oppression, of a summer of outcry for justice. Reading later will leave you flat I think. I thought it was perfect for the moment.

I use it as a way to rapidly prototype stuff related to new C-APIs https://github.com/wiladams

Currently using it to create a tiny Postscript interpreter: https://github.com/wiladams/lj2ps

ok, so it is exactly the move of someone trying to kill it all from the inside...

But really, it's something easily judged over time. Everyone will be able to judge how our open source attitude is in coming years.

And hay, look, there's more absorption of Linux into Windows... Is that embrace extend, or recognize reality? Or hold on for dear life? From my perspective, it's evolution, and nothing but good.

I've worked for MS for 20 years. I sat in one of those Steve Ballmer meetings where he decried OpenSource. But, more soberingly at the time was that he said "we won't sell on Linux because we simply don't know now", in answer to the question "when will SQL Server be available on Linux"?

Times have changed. I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of someone that's trying to destroy from the inside. If it were, we would have immediately just slow rolled it, but we're actually making improvements.

I don't think we're collectively smart enough (nor are most orgs) to pull off grand conspiracies. Just a bunch of humans trying to do what's right for the company and customers.

So, I agree with your assessment. Lots of good, still bad actors, modern times have changed.

There was quite a lot of openscad replacement going on in 2011. I even made a lua based alternative.

Ive worked for Kevin during his tenure at MS. Ads have not been the focus, so I'm not sure the innuendo means much.

I work for Microsoft, and the back of my employee badge says: Our Mission; Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

To me, this implies that our engineering organizations, and entire company, need to have an appropriate amount of empathy across a broad spectrum of geographies, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and the like. You only get that by having a diversity of talent, and more importantly, inclusion in your engineering practices.

When I talk about diversity, I usually say; "There are two forms of diversity, DNA diversity, the stuff we usually talk about in terms of color, sex, etc, things you can see, and then there's diversity of perspectives and experiences. You need the diversity of experiences and perspectives. In some cases that's conveniently wrapped in some forms of DNA diversity, but is not exclusive to that".

I don't think the question is at all controversial, and we should not be afraid to openly talk about it.

I think it's more interesting than that. This is a mixture of C and Lua code!

Looking at it, I can imagine redoing it as LuaJIT and using ljsyscall to deal with the system calls on all platforms. Might be even more snappy.

...and, this guy being fired has nothing to do with political correctness or any of the other inane arguments people are rallying around. It's simple corporate calculation.

He release something that turned into a fire storm. Google no doubt did a law suit calculation and figured firing him was cheaper than the inevitable "hostile work environment" lawsuits they figured would be filed if they didn't take such action.

If the goal was to not get fired, but still have the dialog, he probably could have found a forum to do it. Instead, he blasted into their internal interweb, and here's the outcome.

Most large companies would probably end up doing the same thing, regardless of what they might believe about what was actually written.

This whole episode leaves me a bit perplexed because in tech we keep missing the mark when it comes to diversity.

I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.

As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I've been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).

I want more women in engineering precisely because they're not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.

So, I'm just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: http://aka.ms/leapit

"worse before better"... It's all a matter of perspective. For anyone who's been the "minority", things have always been 'worse'. Things can only get better.

If you can truly embrace that perspective, you'll discover a profound truth.

The transition might cause some discomfort for those who've been on the privileged side of things for a while.

"diversity" and "inclusion" often go hand in hand. Throw in some "unconscious bias" training, and you begin marching down a path. I think it's something only time and a diverse gene pool will heal. Relevance to the job is a key thing, as simple as it sounds. You always want "the best", and in tech, that often means "people like me", which necessarily means "not people like them", and we find ourselves where we are today.

It's a journey.

Here's the minority's perspective: 1) Why is it required that there can be no more than 20% women in a tech company? 2) Why is it required to have a minimally diverse company?

If you look at these two questions and just say "hah! that's not the same thing at all!", then that's why.

When I read this manifesto, I thought "well, this is going to generate a lot of news".

What I did when I read it was substitute "woman" for "black", rolled back the clock to Jim Crow south, and read it again.

That might be an instructive exercise for anyone who hasn't actually experienced discrimination, or rather, primarily lives in the dominant side of any culture.

I would rather see this stuff out in the open, rather than hidden behind the glares and glances of colleagues. His firing is unfortunate, but totally understandable. This dialog could have ocured in a much better format.

In the famous words of Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other..."

I'm personally not into diversity for diversity's sake, because I'm not quite sure what that is.

What I am for is equal opportunities. In some instances, giving that "equal" to one set of people requires work because they have been put on an unequal footing for some time. This was true in America for blacks because the origin of blacks was slavery (blacks were considered chattle, nothing more than cows, pigs, and goats). That kind of disadvantage requires some amount of work to overcome. The voting rights act wasn't enacted until 1965, the year after I was born, so that's something to consider.

With respect to tech, it's really easy for me. The back of my employment badge has our company's mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

I believe we greatly enhance our ability to do that by creating a more inclusive and diverse workforce. It's not simply about DNA diversity (women and 'minorities'), but it's also a diversity of experiences, from around the world. I'm willing to take the math major from Tunisia and teach them to be a great coder so they can contribute their experience to our mission, and help create software that's appropriate for their origin.

So, long answer I guess.

To me, everything is about learning and growth (probably due to my current age). So, I see your experience in Oakland, and say "great, you've gained another perspective on life". Let's see what you can do with it.

unconscious bias, conscious bias, outright discrimination. What a quagmire of human existence these topics drift into eh?

No secret, I'm a 51 year old black man living in America. I've been in "high tech" all my life (Commodore Pet). I've run my own company, and worked in and around others, and now reside at Microsoft. My current non-tech mission is the promotion of diversity in hiring in core tech jobs http://www.industryexplorers.com

These are complex issues in complex times. I can say one thing though, much of the current set of biases will slowly dissipate as our children get into positions of power. Ethnicity itself is starting to get very blended. My college aged daughter (who is mixed herself) has friends of all stripes. As they form companies, and hire people, they'll hire like themselves, which is to say an eclectic bunch of people.

The next frontier in bias might be economic stratus, or hair color, or which side of the egg you break open.

I think the best we can do is be as aware as possible, and simply strive to find and work with good people, while holding everyone in high esteem and with respect.

heh... I've written a bit about our favorite abandoned language ;-)