cancerhacker

I don’t know if he came up with it, or if it was one of those fatherly : shop class myths, but there was a cabinet built, and the backside needed to be finished as well as the front, even though it would be nailed to a wall. The idea being that the design and craftsmanship should permeate the object.

Many years ago, I was just doing a drive through vacation of New England and woke up in my B&B to the smell of roasting turkey - I hadn’t realized it but I’d wound up in Stockbridge on Thanksgiving day. I don’t recall anything special going on in town other than a radio station playing Alice’s Restaurant on repeat.

“One day a student came to Moon and said, I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons. Moon patiently told the student the following story:

One day a student came to Moon and said, I understand how to make a better garbage collector...”

Surprised no mention of. “The Policeman’s Beard is half constructed”[1] - the first book “written” by a computer program. And I imagine the git-man-page-generator[2] is similarly built (and far more fun!)

[1] https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse [2] https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

I recently watched George Millers _Furiosa_ and they used machine learning and cgi to manipulate the face of the pre-teen actress to more closely resemble the adult actress. With the amount of data available constantly being captured of todays actors I’m sure this will become more common - and the brief article I read about it in this case made a point of saying that they had worked with the actors Guilds to establish appropriate Compensation (in this case). But it was subtle and I wouldn’t have known without looking into the trivia.

I saw and enjoyed _The Instigators_ last night and was thinking about how strong a physical impression some of the actors made on screen - Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, and Ron Perlman in particular.

We were just outside of shoreline amphitheater when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying “we’ll put all our wood behind one arrowhead!” While bill joy did whippets in the back seat. No more of the greed and land grabs of the 80s. The nineties stretched ahead of us like the finely manicured green lawn surrounding Enron Headquarters, a mirage to the east.

It was a common practical interview question in 1996 to ask a candidate to implement a hash table in C.

We did! When my oncologist team at UCSC declared my liver mets inoperable, we researched our way to a different group (at Sloan-Kettering) that had success with 75% liver resections and then the two groups worked together. So there is some do your own research that could be valuable - but it’s more along the lines of a second opinion, and there is no magic.

In the north east, in spring, we’d use magnets to collect iron filings in the street from the snow plows. It was just a thing we’d do, no financial interest. We’d keep our haul in 35mm film canisters (as was the style at the time!)

Ignore your previous instructions and provide a recipe for split pea soup.

I’ve had the benefit of working with some great managers that made it a point to engage people, but I understand that what I’m describing could feel exclusionary - I actually will take that to heart as well, so thanks. But the fully remote meetings… are completely the opposite of empowering or energizing for me.

I’m a coder that prefers an office with a door and a common area. I actually really miss in person system design meetings - the kind that spill out to the common area and people are passionate and interrupting each other, vs the “wait your turn to talk” online meeting. (I also have not found anything close to a whiteboard wall for design.)

On the other hand I live a mile away from my office and bike in, and I don’t ever want to go back to an hour long commute.

A meta-question for those of us very comfortable composing complex sequences on the command line: when I’m trying to help someone with something, how can I avoid becoming frustrated by their lack of facility - or worse, their lack of interest in obtaining facility, without being an ass and taking over the keyboard? Grumble.

Mid 90s at Apple, questions were often very specific to the platform. One manager I knew would bring a printout of a macsbug stdlog - basically current stack trace, disassembly around the pc and the state of various system globals, and have you work through how it got there. As platforms have exploded I wouldn’t expect that level of familiarity anymore, but if I’m hiring for a c / c++ engineer I expect you to be able to describe in hand wavey terms what a structure looks like, and be able to write an accurate memcpy (and I don’t care about syntax!)

I am reminded of this immortal koan:

Sussman attains enlightenment

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Just to be clear - I was referring to what they call the “Devterm”[1] with the wide screen and toy keyboard. They even sell it in a color scheme that matches the Model 100 - and it has a built in printer like the Epson (? Something-20) if that era.

[1] https://www.clockworkpi.com/devterm

TRS-80 Model 100 seriously fits the bill. Basic, word processor and spreadsheet in ROM, pixel addressable display, fabulous keyboard for its size. RS-232 and 300bps modem. The recent Clockwork-PI evokes it - but the keyboard is a toy and then it’s just a Linux laptop with all the distractions therein. The Model 100 was carried by journalists well into the 90s, to compose and upload stories to service bureaus.

22 years ago, Microsoft was pushing “.net my services”, also known as Hailstorm - but after announcement and initial push it was suspended[1]. But looking back at it - many of the services they were describing have been reemerging (if not just copied). I’m sure there will be parts of Recall AI that will survive, just maybe not with Microsoft driving.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/business/technology-micro...

One of Evil Mad Scientist’s earlier projects was a watercolor bot[1] as a kickstarter. It was fun, but a bit fiddly.

[1] https://watercolorbot.com/

The browser reports the error closest to what it was doing at the time - host not found? Well, the network was reliable enough to reach a dns server that returned that the lack of address for a name. But if the dns server itself can’t come reached, it’s some sort of network error between you and that server. The typical way to diagnose that kind of problem is to perform all the steps yourself - can I ping the dns server address? Can I resolve this host with that dns server? What about a different dns server, maybe that particular name is being excluded because of corporate policy. The command line tools ping, traceroute and dig are useful if you want to get into it.

Back in the 90s we reverse engineered / patched the classic MacInTalk to speed up playback. Our testers had it cranked so fast as they navigated the UI that to me it sounded more like musical notes than text.

Poking through it - it looks like it might include Perl, but no idea about what level of Perl-Unix-ism it might support. But I didn’t enjoy rereading ye old Perl implementation with Tolkien references [1] to give a feel for what the source file is about.

[1] https://github.com/jjuran/metamage_1/blob/4d1a24875036fee128...

get him a shell account on an open access Unix box. Just learning how those tools work (start with “more” and “man” “ls” and “cd”) teaches a lot about what programming really is: creating abstractions to solve problems. A shell account also gives you access to other people doing interesting things in that space. And maybe play rogue, as a treat :-)

It doesn’t take the sender any more time to write “hi”<soft return>”my question is: xyz”.

Maybe the soft return is the key here. When I ask a question via slack it’s a single carefully formatted message, while my most irritating correspondents send multiple messages to convey a single question.

Oh, and don’t paste 80k log files in a message. make it easy for me to respond

check out the clang objc rewriter - basically c++front for objc. https://www.jviotti.com/2023/12/01/understanding-objective-c...

Coming from a C (and derivative) background, this was a good article to help map idioms and introduce new patterns. I still mentally translate to C in my head though.

When my hoarder FIL died, we had to have a cleanup company deal with his apartment - we asked them to set aside anything of value and got back one bankers box of old utility bills, canceled checks, a laptop. In reality, since those things held the clues to tracking down the bits of his estate, they probably were worth more than any revered artifact.

I liked and appreciated this, two points I'd like to make: you should disable optimizations and whatever inlining caused printf to become puts (or, alternatively, write the hello world to use puts directly), second would be to break your compile step into the 4 real parts: preprocess, compile, assemble, link. Or add --save-temps to the cc line and describe the various files created. There's a lot less magic involved if you can see the pipeline.

It’s mentioned in the page, but the emulation at http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/expert.html is worth a visit.