boisterousness

2009: "A new study [1][2][3] out of Harvard University seems to give Utah an unflattering distinction: No. 1 in the nation for pornography consumption." [4]

There are more recent studies that rank Utah in the bottom 10. [5]

[1] Edelman, Benjamin. "Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 209–220.

[2] http://www.benedelman.org/publications/redlightstates.pdf

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2009/07/14/Top-US-States-For-Online-Por...

[4] https://www.ksl.com/article/news/utah/utah-not-necessarily-n...

[5] https://www.yahoo.com/news/narrative-utah-leads-nation-porno...

Excerpts from Mark Smotherman's ACS site [1] ...

> To achieve a profit for the ACS program, Amdahl asked IBM management to approve three ACS/360 models: the high-performance design, a 1/3 performance version, and a 1/9 performance version. He felt that these performance goals would be a good fit with the System 360 marketing plans. He remembers that IBM Corporate Marketing evaluated the targets and reported: "1) the supercomputer alone was a loss leader! 2) the supercomputer plus the 1/3 performance computer was break-even! And 3) the supercomputer plus both the 1/3 performance computer and the 1/9 performance computer was normal profit -- 30% pre-tax!"

> Gene Amdahl interview in April-June 1997, IEEE Design and Test of Computers: "The company decided not to build it because it would have destroyed the pricing structures. In the first place, it would have forced them to make higher-end machines. But with IBM's pricing structure, the market disappeared by the time performance got to a certain level. Any machine above that in performance or price could only lose money."

> In his autobiography, Father, Son, & Co., Tom Watson, Jr., writes about the Model 90 series in competition with CDC and his decision to cancel their sales (Bantam Books, 1990, page 384): "Finally my business sense overcame my pride and I belatedly figured out that we couldn't compete with Control Data for the same reason that General Motors can't compete with Ferrari in building two-hundred-mile-an-hour sports cars. Supercomputers had become so highly specialized that even if we came up with a design equal to theirs, it would never fit in with the rest of our product line, our style of selling, our volume and profit targets, and so on." He goes on to say that his "temper was partly to blame for IBM's erratic behavior in the supercomputer market".

[1] https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html

> I've tried meeting him on every level of understanding. Graphs, story telling, Jira issues, business cases, ITIL, OLAs and SLAs, customer interviews, user interviews, you name it.

Your concept of "every level of understanding" does embody the PM stereotype. From an engineering perspective, most of your list tends to be 90-95% timewasting fluff and toil. Hopefully with as much as 5-10% valuable content that can help the team to accomplish their mission.

A good PM (IMO) would take responsibility for dealing with the fluff, and engage the TL with the 5-10% useful fraction.

Also, a good PM will strive to learn and understand what the team is doing and why... well enough to act as an advocate for the team, and explain to the many people you interact with throughout the organization.

A team will respect and appreciate a PM's effort to meet them on some technical level of understanding. Being embedded with a team of experts in a particular technology gives you a unique opportunity to raise your understanding of their tools, technology, tasks, challenges, and successes.

A good PM is valued as a colleague contributing to the team's success.

"From rich archival sources, [Haigh et al.] reconstruct the evolution of a program first run on ENIAC in April 1948 by a team including John and Klara von Neumann and Nick Metropolis. This was not only the first computerized Monte Carlo simulation, but also the first code written in the modern paradigm, usually associated with the 'stored program concept,' ever executed." - IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2014)

See it in action: In this video[1], a signaller instructs a railfan in routing a couple of trains through Swindon (UK), using such a panel.

Shortly after the video was shot, this panel was decommissioned and removed. In 2018 it was brought back to life at the Didcot Railway Centre [2], where it continues in operation, backed by a simulator. Centre visitors can try their hand at operating the panel [3].

The panels "utilise square tiles called ‘Dominos’, patented by a Swiss company called Integra, to construct the panel diagram. Each Domino is 40mm square and has a small section of the layout on it, such as one signal, or one set of points. Many hundreds of small Dominos are then formed into a mosaic to build up the required panel diagram." [4]

Photo gallery [5]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76fAHAxv0Dw

[2] https://didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk/article.php/116/the-signa...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1Jfm9Zqo_M

[4] https://didcotrailwaycentre.org.uk/article.php/680/more-abou...

[5] https://photos.swindonpanel.org.uk/

Day of the Tentacle

60 days before shutdown, a game company just needs to transition their game to subscription-required. That gets them out from under this law. Then if enough players subscribe, the company could decide to keep the servers going longer than planned.

They call it a FLOP (Functional Loss Of Performance, or something like that), I was told on a tour of an FAA ATC computer facility.

These are good ...

"Python for Data Analysis" by McKinney (2018)

"The Go Programming Language" by Donovan and Kernighan (2016)

"Hacker's Delight" by Warren (2013)

"Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena (2008)

"Purely Functional Data Structures" by Okasaki (1998)

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman (1985)

No draft in 1948.

In Thunderbird's message list, you can bring all the starred emails to the top by sorting on the star column. Just click on the column header.

Also, in the Quick Filter, you can click the star button to "Show only starred messages".

It appears to belong to another subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation: MZFO GERMANY GMBH, which would be subject to German, not US, law.

Stacked Git (StGit) [1] is a git CLI add-on for working with stacked commits in your local repo.

Why are stacked commits useful? Multiple patches can be developed concurrently and efficiently, with each patch focused on a single concern, for a clean Git commit history and improved productivity. The tutorial [2] says:

> One common use of StGit is to “polish” a Git branch before publishing it to another public repository. The kinds of polish that StGit can help with include:

    Complete and correct commit messages.
    Each patch limited to one coherent topic.
    Each patch standing on its own: passing tests, etc.
    Considerate patch (commit) order

> Careful curation of Git commit history, as enabled by StGit, can be of high value to those reviewing pull requests or trying to understand why or how code came to be the way it is. ...

> As a concrete example, consider a situation where several Git commits have been made in a repository with commit messages such as:

    “Improve the snarfle cache”
    “Remove debug printout”
    “New snarfle cache test”
    “Oops, spell function name correctly”
    “Fix documentation error”
    “More snarfle cache”

> While the above may be the “true” history of commits to the repository, it may not be the history that is most helpful to code reviewers or the developer who needs to understand what happened in this area of the code six months after the fact. Using StGit, this history can be revised to be higher quality and higher value.

Originally written in Python (2005, pre-GitHub) by Catalin Marinas, the current version is in Rust. StGit is free and open source [3]. It was inspired by Quilt [4], an earlier system credited to Andrew Morton and Andreas Grünbacher.

[1] https://stacked-git.github.io/ [2] https://stacked-git.github.io/guides/tutorial/#development-b... [3] https://github.com/stacked-git/stgit/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilt_(software)

Drilling down, one finds a link to a paper from Usenix Security 2018: "Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption using Exfiltration Channels", by Damian Poddebniak et al. [0]

[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

2020 update: https://wateroperator.org/blog/featured-video-why-are-960000...

Another contender: Russ Cox's "fast unrounded scaling" [1].

Cox writes: "The main idea of this post is to implement fast unrounded scaling, which computes an approximation to x · 2^e · 10^p, often in a single 64-bit multiplication. On that foundation we can build nearly trivial printing and parsing algorithms that run very fast. In fact, the printing algorithms run faster than all other known algorithms, including Dragon4, Grisu3, Errol3, Ryū, Ryū Printf, Schubfach, and Dragonbox, and the parsing algorithm runs faster than the Eisel-Lemire algorithm. This post presents both the algorithms and a concrete implementation in Go. I expect some form of this Go code to ship in Go 1.27 (scheduled for August 2026)."

[1] https://research.swtch.com/fp

Great minds think alike!

For $99.95, you can own an exquisite 0.75m USB-C 2.0 "High-Definition Audio Cable" [1], featuring "high-purity 0.5% Silver conductors and a Metal-Layer Noise-Dissipation for the most efficient dissipation of radio-frequency noise."

It has "Direction-Controlled Conductors: All drawn metal strands or conductors have a non-symmetrical, and therefore directional, grain structure. AudioQuest controls the resulting RF impedance variation so that noise is drained away from where it will cause distortion. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. When applicable, arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality." Power Delivery: No. Country of origin: China.

My web search didn't reveal any $1000 USB cables - doubtless those are offered only privately to the most discerning connoisseurs.

[1] https://www.audioquest.com/products/forest-usb-c-c-digital-a...

> For things that are not visible, there are much fewer brands e.g. underwear.

Personal care products - shampoos, soaps, lotions

Nutritional supplements

are counterexamples

Decentraleyes hasn't been updated since late 2024, so I switched to LocalCDN [1].

[1] https://www.localcdn.org/

There's a Cookie AutoDelete plugin [1] that cleans up cookies, cache, etc for a site after all of its tabs are closed. You can exclude sites that you want to stay logged in to.

[1] https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete

> These [cameras] are mounted above the stoplights and aimed against traffic at stoplights to read faces.

Those cameras are for traffic detection, so the signal can turn green when a car comes. They aren't reading faces.

Maybe at last we'll find out who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

They're different. Multiplication by i gives a quarter turn counterclockwise. -i gives a quarter turn clockwise.

Opposite quarter turns cancel: (-i)(i) = (-1)(i^2) = +1

Quarter turn twice counterclockwise gives a half turn: (i)(i) = -1

Quarter turn twice clockwise also gives a half turn: (-i)(-i) = -1

Drivers could change lanes safely if everybody wasn't tailgating.

Not so. Keeping a constant distance from the car ahead means both cars are moving at the same speed. When a jerk cuts in, after a moment all 3 cars will be moving at the same speed.

That's fine when traffic is light. At rush hour, all lanes are full and nobody is overtaking.

Code golfing originated in APL.

One place to look is https://thedailywtf.com/

It's the "Lava Flow" antipattern [1][2] identified by the Gang of Five [3], "characterized by the lava-like 'flows' of previous developmental versions strewn about the code landscape, but now hardened into a basalt-like, immovable, generally useless mass of code which no one can remember much if anything about.... these flows are often so complicated looking and spaghetti-like that they seem important but no one can really explain what they do or why they exist."

[1] http://antipatterns.com/lavaflow.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming)

[3] http://antipatterns.com/

FAANG cargo cults are all around. Too many CEOs and VCs imagine they can succeed like Bezos by the bold strategy of hiring ex-Amazon executives and imitating Amazon's culture and HR practices.