TheRealDunkirk

At least it wasn't Halliday and Resnick. It's been 35 years since my BSME at Purdue, and I can still remember their names. God I hated those textbooks. If someone tells me that this Jackson book was worse, I won't believe it.

27 years for me. Started with FrontPage 1997, with extensions for Apache on Linux! Then I wrote a PHP site with Smarty. Then I wrote a Rails app. Then I moved to Wordpress. Given that I've done another 15 years writing Rails apps, I should rewrite it in the new Rails 7/8.

Because I use a ton of 3rd-party JS libraries which don't work well with Turbo, I'm kind of stuck with Rails 6 with turbolinks disabled on my main project. I've been looking for some reason to get to grips with the new additions, and I think I just talked myself into it.

It increased mine yesterday, by quite a bit. I was writing some JSON-to-array-of-arrays conversion code, and when I started to type it out -- dreading the inevitable off-by-one hunt -- CoPilot spat out the code, and it was correct! It helped that I've done this many times, and knew it was correct, but it saved me needing to think about it, or track down any bugs.

This conversion code was in service to using Plotly (the JS graphing library) for the first time. I was trying to get the axes of my surface plot to be labelled with the correct values (instead of just their index), and spent probably a half hour looking at the demos and the docs, and not finding what I needed. I asked CoPilot in the VSCode chat window about it, and it gave me exactly what I hadn't been able to find. As soon as I saw it, I understood the natural extension of the API call I was seeing in the demo, but I still hadn't found a second data point to even start extrapolating, if you take my meaning.

Anyway, I'm paying the $10/mo out of my own pocket, and yesterday -- at least to me -- it paid for itself for the month in just those two examples. I find it delightfully surprising. I just need to find a way to make it stop suggesting comments. I can type my own comments, thank you very much.

I wouldn't worry about the people who quit and leave. I'd worry about the people who quit and stay.

I think relatively few corporations are offering Macs to people. It's all bog-standard POS Dells, with locked-down Windows images that often do not even allow you to change the screensaver settings or the background image, in the name of "security." I'd love to be wrong about that.

The other alternative was to violate her sacred beliefs. You clearly have no idea how nasty this litigation has been.

https://www.washingtonian.com/2023/07/24/how-a-battle-over-a...

Not to worry. My company is still on version 15. We stay BEHIND the curve, where it's SAFE.

Tiffany Cianci is at the dead center of a battle with private equity trying to monopolize young child development centers. Her horrific personal story will open your eyes as to just how depraved and soulless private equity can really be in their attempt to take over the world. (TL;DR: they literally forced her give a deposition while she was having a miscarriage.) The government should be writing laws to curtail these kinds of bloodsucking parasites.

https://www.tiktok.com/@tiffanycianci

That belies that fact that the play is usually to finance a bunch of debt to prop it up, pay themselves PHAT bonuses, and then let it burn to the ground. Honestly, it's gotten way past tiring that the government continues to let this same scenario play out over and over and over again.

Classic case of #CorporateIT applying white paper "rules" and not understanding what they're doing. If I had a nickel...

Could this simply be a result in Microsoft getting more traction in foisting Edge on people, and presenting pop-ups to make it the default?

Seems like precisely the sort of thing ESR's new de-autotools tool is designed to eliminate. https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe

> They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

Aaaannnndd?... You're just going to leave out the banning of TikTok while claiming a victory for sending my money to other nations for wars I do not want to fund?

And another thing </Andy Rooney>, government shutdowns are problems created ENTIRELY BY CONGRESS for never operating under a proper budget since 1997. All they're doing is fighting each other over a massive shell game of sending the right amounts of money to their donors' interests to guarantee reelection.

"Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built.

They're doing work alright, just not any that I want. Our system is nakedly and brazenly corrupt, and we don't seem to be able to do anything about it.

What specific topic(s) of technical questions came to your mind in making that comment?

I can't even begin to fathom why anyone would want to train an AI on this corpus. Reddit isn't a social media site. It's not organic. The vast majority of the content of the site is created by just a dozen users. (Those people have to be doing it as a full-time job.) At the end of the day, Reddit is a top-tier porn site, with just enough "social" thrown on top to give people something to read between wanks.

I see a lot of people express that they get value out of the technical subs, like finding answers to programming questions there, but for the life of me, I can't see it. Ninety percent of the time, there's not even a bad answer. If there is, there are narcissists and sociopaths pedantically arguing about it. If Reddit has captured a particular search, and is taking up the first several slots, I will add "-site:reddit.com" (and YT) to my terms. I keep wondering what I'm missing, and it's starting to feel like I'm being gaslit into believing there's something of value there with internet-wide astroturfing.

And the same thing goes for any other sub, too, from mechanical keyboards to so-called "audiophile" gear (don't get me started) to various specific gaming "communities" I've tried to participate in. Contrary opinions, no matter how delicately expressed, are run out of town on a rail. There may be a useful comment now and again, but they are drowned by rudeness, ignorance, stupidity, pedantry, and -- most of all -- gatekeeping. Do I sound bitter? I'm bitter. Good luck with that.

AND the function is hard-limited to 1600 columns. Don't ask me how I know; you already know.

This hits all the right notes for me. I recently bought a full set of SA Retro keycaps for my WASD CODE v2 (in blues), on my Mac. While pricey, I love them. I get warm fuzzies every time I sit down at it. I use this board on my Mac, and out of a dozen mech's I've tried, I just don't think it gets any better than a WASD.

The article also mentions new buckling spring boards. I have a Mini M from Unicomp on my work computer. The action doesn't seem as crisp as I remember on actual Model M's from back in the 80's, but given that it's supposed to be the same internals, made on literally the same dies, I have to chalk it up to memory. I like it too.

For "just" $110, I will probably buy one of these. I don't have a Kailh-based board, though I've like the feel of that brand of switches in various testers I have.

And after 30 years of blogging, it made me finally realize the stark difference of writing for yourself vs writing for an audience. This is a great example of the former.

As a show about a mystery, it bears some similarities with Lost. To the frustration of everyone, Lost explained _nothing_, and raised more questions than answers in its last forsaken season, and ended the worst, cheapest, and dumbest way possible. Because of this, I spent a lot of Severance screaming at the screen, "ASK THE OBVIOUS QUESTION!" And they did! And those questions got answered along the way! It gave me hope that there's a central idea at work here, and they're not just making it up as they go along, hoping the show gets popular enough to demand a huge retcon in the finale. They don't have to answer every question, or explain every plot device; I'm just hoping they finish telling a cohesive story.

In a crowded field filled with things like The Boys/Gen V, Blue-Eyed Samurai, Shogun, Invincible, Stranger Things, and Chernobyl, Severance is literally my favorite. thing. ever. Hands down. No question. I'm dying for another season, and I desperately hope that there's a single, definitive story they hope to tell within a another season or 3, and then stop.

Everything about the article tracks, but why do I get the feeling that it's really just a veiled screed about this particular genre succeeding when we've become enlightened as a society, and should have learned by now that we aren't supposed to enjoy stories like this any more?

You're getting close. Over the past 30-40 years, American corporations have focused more and more and more on profitability, and "making the numbers go up." They have sacrificed employee retention in order to pay executives eye-watering packages to focus on eliminating literally everything that doesn't contribute to that goal. They gutted all the R&D they can, years ago. Apple seems to be almost alone in retaining enough business acumen to think further out than the next quarter. It's not magic. They're just continuing to do what places like IBM and HP were famous for, decades ago. It's like the quip in Days of Thunder (and I have no idea why it sticks with me): "I'm not going faster. Everybody else is going slower." Wall Street has killed the future of America, and slowed human progress around the globe, in order to buy a bunch of already-filthy-rich people even more stuff.

Not that I'm bitter and jaded, as an engineer, or anything.

> In return, quality has fallen off a cliff. Moderation on some of the most popular subs is scarce, so all the popular ones have started to coalesce into a 'blob' of sameness. Discussions are poor as well, and misinformation is rife.

All the more poignant in light of the recent announcement that they were going to sell access to their "content" to train someone's AI. Good luck with that.

What percentage of their sales does the China market represent?

This was 25 years ago: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/, and nothing has fundamentally changed about the music industry in the interim. More and more digital tools are at hand for anyone to make professional-sounding music, yet it's harder and harder to be found in the "long tail," and it's a wash. Big corporations continue to monopolize distribution, performance, and search. We need a renaissance of anti-trust legislation and enforcement in the US. IMO, companies should be kept small enough to have at least a dozen competing players in a market. We already see what it's like to have a half dozen (which are colluding), so let's try forcing it to be double -- and suing the pants off of their officers for colluding -- and see what happens.

So... you fed the GP comment into some LLM, and it produced this meaningless pablum?

> By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right?

Now THAT would be a use of my tax dollars I could actually get behind.

All they need to do is buy StackOverflow from the PE that owns it now, and the circle will be completely jerked.

When Intel proposed the CPUID in the Pentium III, everyone panicked. I felt confident that, if there were nefarious things happening at that level, people would have figured it out. After many months of hand-wringing in the tech spaces of the time (/., et. al.), people started waking up to the fact that Intel had, in fact, already buried the CPUID in the Pentium II all along, and "we" had already been "had." Moral of the story: do not ever trust that "it would have been news already," for anything.

I stand corrected.