1letterunixname

The global WF HQ has tortillas, but they're neither local nor authentic. The customer service person proclaimed I should use tortillas instead. Gobsmacked by the unprofessionalism of that, it was the last time I've been to WF.

There's nothing like the Berkeley Bowl <3. It's Trader Joe's + Davis co-op on crack^2^5.

Various cities around the West Coast and Austin also have co-op grocery stores, but Berkeley Bowl takes it to a different hypermart level while retaining a flavor reminiscent of Whole Earth Access.

And, honestly, even the Whole Foods (Amazon) flagship HQ store is a disgrace and a disaster: they don't sell any form of pita or lavash bread of any sort and half of their bulk bins are completely empty as of writing. This is a consequence of corporate bean counters who optimize for the wrong things. They were supposedly once a boutique bougie grocery store patterned after Italian grocers but instead developed into conspicuous consumption of pseudo luxury by anyone who drives an Audi or BMW.

Autotools-based build infra is always crufty, fragile, slow, and fugly. In a lot of cases, it sucks because it's what we have right now without doing the work to replace it with something equally flexible.

Build infrastructure should be minimal, standardized, and not subject to endless special, undocumented fragility.

cmake, just, conan, meson, and bazel (and forks) exist.

But I've still yet to see a proper build system that does feature detection in parallel and concurrently, or supports live, incremental, continuous, cached rebuilding.

This is why I buy old enterprise LaserJet printers. Also, the toner cartridges are more generous and recycled* ones are relatively cheap. I currently have 4 spares which is probably enough for its entire lifecycle of me printing a return to page to flEaBay or as required by some antique government bureaucratic bullshit that demands the killing of trees.

LJ4 (the plain base model) (2005-2012) -> 4000 (2012-2020) -> M402dw (2020-present).

* Modern HP LJ printer cartridges include goddamn DRM hostile to repeated refilling, but thankfully it's not a show-stopper as overseas hackers found low-cost workarounds with (fake?) chips. Fuck the DMCA and goddamn corporate lobbyists.

Underscores the importance of archival science, repair and maintenance of old hardware, and faithful emulation.

Oh damn, and I thought lemon trees were fun to prune. These can kill you and smell terrible. At least lemon trees tend to smell nice while threatening you with enormous thorns during pruning.

Somewhat worse: Krauter Vesuvius / Cherry Plum trees stain sidewalks and make a horrible mess every year.

Yes, the userland side presented such as with POSIX like ssize_t read(int fd, void* buf, size_t count). Calling that with count = 1 each time would be wasteful, but certainly libc's have been buffering this since at least the 1980's. I remember this was the case with Borland C/C++.

> Our comments are part of a thread discussing this prompt [2] that specifically requests Rust and this snippet in response [3]. Not portable C code. You can use those C stdio functions from Rust, but you really shouldn't without a very good reason. Rust has its own IO library that is safe and well integrated with other Rust things like `#![derive(Debug)]`.

Duh. It doesn't really matter what Rust has have went it comes to enabling the use of specific edge-case performance improvements for specific purposes. Inefficient AI-generated code without a clue of other approaches doesn't move the needle. Religious purity doesn't matter, only results matter.

In high school, we had a virtual stock portfolio competition. At the time, I was an assistant manager (making minimum wage because I was a depressed kid who looked about 12) at a nationwide small store software (and hardware) store. Zip drives were flying off the shelves, so naturally I checked the company's P&L, SEC statements, and stock data. So I assigned 88% of my stock in IOMG because I could tell it was severely undervalued by market cap compared to projected current sales and frontline buzz. I laid waste to that econ-history class of BMW-driving rich kids and all of their "not cheating" help from their dads. As a bit of bittersweet irony, my teacher's investment club lost on IOMG because they got in late and sold early, just 2 months previously. If they had just been patient enough to wait for that 2 week window where the market appreciated excellent sales, they would've realized significant gains rather than losses.

PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original media would go bad.

This partly explains how the Twitch and YouTube livestreamer market exists as an advancement over passive broadcast television: interactivity.

If you want to create an "Apple"-like lifestyle cultural brand heavy on goodwill, skew to either adopt a position of extreme minimalism and totalitarianism or radical crowdsourcing and customization. Waffling between them and corporate bullshit don't fly anymore in terms of cultural resonance.

There most certainly is getwchar() and fgetwc()/getwc() on anything that's POSIX C95, so that's more or less everything that's not a vintage antique.

Reading individual UTF-8 codepoints is a trivial exercise if byte width getchar() were available, and portable C code to do so would be able to run on anything made after 1982. IIRC, they don't teach how to write portable C code in Comp Sci programs anymore and it's a shame.

Never read a file completely into memory at once unless there is zero chance of it being a huge file because this is an obvious DoS vector and waste of resources.

A few notes:

- It should be generating `path: impl AsRef<Path>` to be properly generic.

- It's not setting a nonzero exit code on error.

- Edge case handling is a vital property for production-usable tools at scale. I'm wondering if it can yet special case situations such as creating a conditional compilation version for Linux that uses the splice syscall when the arguments are 2 file handles.

IIRC, the qualitative (or proven quantitative) connection between exercise and improved sleep is most pronounced with morning exercise (HIIT/weight lifting).

TL;DR - Scalable DNS, TLS termination, app firewall, caching, and CDN

Also check out fastly which was/is Varnish-based and built by ex Wikia peeps.

If you have enough budget, engineering talent, or customers & ARPU, you can build your own AnyCast CDN, DDoS defenses, app caching, and app firewall. Until you have very high bills with SaaS third-party vendors, that's the time to think about migrating to DIY, but otherwise stick with division of labor and specialization of trade for things that aren't your core business.

Ouch. Big egos in tech are a cliche to be dispelled whenever possible by contrary example setting and not taking oneself too seriously. I turned down a ~ £ 2.5 million exit to avoid being golden handcuffed to an absolute dick co-founder for 3 years. Sometimes, your sanity is worth more than any amount of superficial or external stuff.

Genuinely cool, reliable peeps with a sense of humor are the best peeps to work with.

Do spaces and spelling fixes count?

Copilot, so far, is only good for predicting the next bit of similar patterns of code

If airline customers weren't extorted and humiliated enough already. Maybe I'll just swim or bicycle to my destinations from now on.

Doesn't do much good if the OS doesn't enforce them like seL4 can.

Almost no one grasps, or interested in, formal verification. It's difficult to get software devs to even do unit testing much less prove their compilers always produce correct code.

Shared read-only core volumes combined with write overlay volumes at the hypervisor level are the way out of this.

Containers are pseudo isolation lacking most/all of the isolation, capacity allocation, and rate limiting guarantees that type-1 hypervisors offer.

There is no substitute for better technology (like partially paravirtualized VMs, mem deduped) used correctly, similar to Kata Containers.

Are any shops here paying Sr SWEs/SREs in the neighborhood of $350k+ USD TC remote, Austin, or SF Bay Area, or do they all suffer from startup haircut$?

The hard part about playing chicken is...

Yep. This is the average societal memory horizon. The absolute cultural memory horizon tends to be roughly 250 years (10 generations) as that's about when most civilizations fail. At least once every generation, there is a moral or cultural test event that pushes that civilization writ large closer to disorder or makes it stronger by recovery, preparedness, and prevention.

1918 not-Spanish "Spanish" A/H1N1 flu pandemic.

Pandemic commandments:

0. Thou shalln't eat wild animals.

1. Thou shalln't mix wild animals and animal agriculture.

2. Better yet, thou shalln't eat any animals to prevent this entire risk category.

I worked with someone at big name university biomedical informatics department who found out only in their early 30's by emergency health crisis that they had Crohn's. Perhaps with some people it requires an emergency for there to be clinical investigation, or epigenetic conditions silence some pathologies until there is a specific stressor or gene activation.

I sure hope a CRISPR edit treatment comes along to permanently cure some of the serious Crohn subtypes.

This is just 1 of the problems with animal ag.

- Pandemics

- Antibiotic resistance (The sheer stupidity of using the same antibiotics we depend on to stay alive just to make animals grow faster and be more profitable.)

- Climate change (1/6th of all emissions)

- Soil, air, water pollution

- Deforestation

- Higher food prices

- Less net food available

I wrote CGI scripts in bash before it was hipster cool.

s/Old/Lazy/ because these are different properties.

There's no specific numeric old, it's all about health and fitness for "age" and adaptation for tech relevancy. What is a shame is when engineers get complacent. This can happen at any age.

AI is somewhat hype like all things that came before, but deep learning and LLMs are useful approximate automation effort multipliers and nothing more. The offerings are not (yet) instant mastery nor (yet) replacement for human experts. Long term, it's important to understand where and how to use AI as a legitimate assistant but not as substitute for learning, supervising, or thinking.

Synchronous socialization and meeting their friends and fam. Not knowing people well is a vulnerability.

Yep. In the greedy drive to monetize the Meta's and Motorola's running Cent to force them onto RHEL, they're pulling a grenade pin and daring people to stay in the boat. Instead, they're alienating most of their future business of potential users and decision makers by attempting to emulate a worse than Oracle while disrespecting their users.

The value in something like Cent/RHEL is LTS stability. Really, the only valuable part of Cent/RHEL is the stable kernel because the userland rapidly becomes old and useless. Something like Ubuntu with a RHEL quality kernel with a 10 yr support lifecycle but without a separate foss/commercial version would be superior to either RHEL or Ubuntu. Canonical went full shark-jumping mickeymouse with their "Pro" subscription and non patching model unless you pay $.

IBM: Footgunning before the XT and before the Republican conformity dress code when it was cool to enable genocidal regimes for money. IBM is the quintessential big, dumb company that innovates in spurts and then is a perpetual loser because of all of its corporate bs.