mhoye

somebody just showed me a development strategy calling itself "waterfall agile", which they shortened to "wagile", if you were holding out hope that anyone in this field has any idea what they're doing

2024-04-22 01:36:05

Before he had to stop writing them because our banking systems are so brittle, Don Knuth wrote 275 physical cheques to people for finding errors in his drafts of The Art Of Computer Programming.
Only 9 of them, he reports, have ever been cashed.
Economists are very silly people.

2024-04-18 03:19:28

You have to assume that these guys are spending the week shook.
https://www.rabbit.tech/

2024-04-16 19:00:40

Since I see that a notable VC-famous jerk is now telling us that he wish he'd "stood by" Eich way back, I'd like to tell you a true fact: Eich didn't lose the CEO's job for his (reprehensible) Prop-8 donation.
Everyone wants to believe that's true, because fits nicely into useful narratives a number of invested camps want to champion, whether it's somebody being ousted for reprehensible views or the woke SJW mob somehow pulling down a great leader (tm) but that's not what happened.

2024-04-04 19:00:15

The most important thing about A and AAAA DNS records is that they're also the noises you make when you realize the problem is DNS again.

2024-04-03 01:03:37

We should be about 1000% more suspicious than we are of the companies that insist on calling a small army of underpaid south asian or african people a "technology".
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-grocery-stores-1851381116

2024-03-28 14:45:43

- reply

@npub1tx6…rtam The theoretical existence of eigenpants should concern us all.

2024-03-26 02:47:45

TIL that the “blood geyser” trope in sword fighting movies, animated or otherwise, comes from a technical failure on a Kurosawa set in 1962 that the man himself refused to reshoot because the actors stayed in character and the shot looked so cool.
https://screenrant.com/akira-kurosawa-sanjuro-mistake-change-action-movies-violence/

2024-03-24 02:29:41

Two fediverse client features I want:
First, I'd like a client that is sorts by people, and is "last post only". A list of people I follow, that offers _only_ their last post. Nothing else.
And in that vein, I'd like negative-space alerting; that is, if somebody hasn't made a post in a week, a month, two or three months, whatever, I'd like a nudge. "you haven't heard from this person in X time", so maybe I can reach out.

2024-03-24 01:15:14

I saw this go by earlier today, and I wish I'd bookmarked it:
"Salary based on location" isn't a salary. It's a class stipend.
Update: it was @npub17c6…05yx here: https://social.wxcafe.net/@wxcafe/112142711541211940

2024-03-21 17:24:24

- reply

@npub1su4…a0dw c'mon, though. "Readers should remember that whatever penalties result will only be felt when affected software is performing specific cryptographic operations. For browsers and many other types of apps, the performance cost may not be noticeable."

2024-03-21 17:23:46

A lot of people are cutting out out the "when executing cryptographic operations" part of the phrase "could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations", and glossing over the parts where it says "The researchers don’t yet know what kind of penalty will occur when this performance optimization is turned off" and "For browsers and many other types of apps, the performance cost may not be noticeable" for the rageclicks today.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

2024-03-12 23:56:00

- reply

@npub1lrv…tth9 If you add a filter for "/t.co/" that catches the URL shortener Twitter uses, which seems to deal with most of them.

2024-03-08 15:29:31

Happy The Gap Between Your Inept Bro Colleague's Salary And Yours Is Less Than They Paid That Agency To Make Your Company Logo Pink And They Told You To Smile More In This Awkward Video Day to all who celebrate.

2024-03-04 17:03:54

- reply

@npub19lt…qfjk A better argument is, what if all the ways we subsidize cars were put to subsidizing public transportation instead. Even just in North America that's quite a bit more than $10b/yr.

2024-02-28 23:39:01

"Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct." [citation needed]

2023-12-19 15:26:49

- reply

@npub1upk…tcwy The recent renaissance in open source documentation is long overdue. The TLDR people are heroes, and the "similar projects" section in their readme - https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr - is also great.

2023-11-29 17:23:46

Re: my recent rant, Cloudflare threw up a "har sanitizer" shortly after the OKTA HAR debacle.
https://har-sanitizer.pages.dev/
It's nice, it works, etc, and it is completely the wrong thing.
Yes it all runs locally, yes it does what it's promising to do on the tin.
The only thing wrong with it is that it is teaching people to throw random security-sensitive information into web pages, and that's going to lead to disaster.
(Fun thing: audit the source on that page to see if it does what it claims.)

2023-11-01 17:10:29

- reply

@npub1y0e…mm9n @npub1s8j…k8k0
My dude you have gone from "the problem is that people are stupid and illiterate" straight to "asking developers to be competent at communicating in writing is bad", and you can fuck right off with that. You don't want to write docs, we get it. Just own the fact that you'd rather sneer at people than rub two synapses together to think about usability and leave it at that.

2023-11-01 16:33:19

- reply

The number of people in this thread who are willing to tell me that the real problem is how stupid everyone is is incredibly embarrassing.
Look, here's what happens when you compile Hello World with single quotes instead of double quotes.
Note, please, that these are warnings, not errors. GCC finishes and produces an a.out executable.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/335/996/277/270/635/original/fc502c496e2d894f.png

2023-11-01 14:48:06

People go to Stack Overflow because the docs and error messages are garbage. TLDR exists because the docs and error messages are garbage. People ask ChatGPT for help because the docs and error messages are garbage. We are going to lose a generation of competence and turn programming into call-and-response glyph-engine supplicancy because we let a personality cult that formed around the PDP-11 in the 1970s convince us that it was pure and good that docs and error messages are garbage.

2023-09-12 16:27:59

- reply

@npub1az9…swru I've been using this for the last few weeks and it's terrific, thanks for sharing it.

2023-08-20 04:00:35

Just reflecting on the fact that this joke in Zoolander about cellphones had about a four year window in which it could be comprehensible as a joke at all.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/919/468/216/323/474/original/eb7b09b2732a349a.png

2023-08-20 03:17:51

Ok old timers, fess up: what was your first cellphone?
Mine was a Sony Ericsson z200: https://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_z200-523.php

2023-08-18 01:34:55

Proposal: ban private vehicle subsidies.
Parking priced as high as the market will bear. No laws saying houses need driveways or that apartments need parking spots. No manufacturer subsidies. Curb-weight taxes for street maintenance, life-of-the-vehicle fuel efficiency taxes to cover the cost of environmental cleanup from the exhaust.
If car owners had to pay what cars actually cost instead of foisting those costs off on society we'd find out fast that cars are a ponzi scheme.

2023-08-11 16:56:44

I keep thinking about how Google invested, keeps investing, billions of dollars in tools that functionally do nothing more than generate an unlimited supply of statistically plausible text completely disconnected from any that there's such a thing as truth or veracity or verifiability, and I have to imagine the search team just screaming into their pillows every night knowing it's going to destroy the company and everything it ever claimed to stand for.

2023-08-04 15:54:00

Tired: "the classical Greek myth of Leda And The Swan".
Wired :"Duck Duck Zeus".
(This was my daughter's idea but I love it.)

2023-08-03 04:30:12

why are we calling it machine learning when we could be calling it stochastic errorism