deckard1

when Sound Blaster came out with SoundFonts and the AWE32 they really made .MID files shine. Old MID files that sounded pretty bad on a previous Sound Blaster or AdLib suddenly sounded amazing.

And you think, wouldn't it be cool if the .MID contained the SoundFont? And... you get .MOD files, which were unfortunately seen as this weird demo scene format but were quietly doing things the music industry had not gotten around to yet. It was MID that would sound identical on any machine you played it on (assuming said machine had PCM playback)

Paul Graham's mistake was he should have made an NFT of the link and posted that.

/s ...maybe? I honestly can't tell anymore

if we have a time machine then yes. In fact, it shouldn't even be an option. UTF-8 period. Always.

But alas, we do not and someone will plug in a memory card or USB drive with some FAT formatted drive and your nice universe crumbles before you.

After getting a ThinkPad, I went out on a quest to get trackpad kinetic scrolling working and I came to the conclusion that it will always suck on Linux. Some apps feature it (Firefox, certain Gtk apps). But the problem is that libinput does not implement it (for good reasons, AFAIK) which means it's left up to the GUI libraries to implement. Each. And. Every. Time. If you have a Qt app running next to a Gtk app, good luck. And this is, yet again, why Apple wins in UX. Their kinetic scrolling is implemented across the entire desktop. As it should be. You can't get a consistent feel when you let individual apps implement it with wildly different parameters.

> And battery life ... Holy hell, Mac is so great and Windows is shitting the bed with their smart suspend.

On Linux you can get close to what Mac does. I believe what the Macbook does is it has a hybrid hibernate/suspend. Suspend, for me, only lasts 2-4 hours and then my battery dies. I think there is another suspend setting that improves this, but there is actually a hybrid suspend that will hibernate after X hours of suspend. My laptop can be closed for a week or more and still have battery.

> I thought assembly mapped 1-to-1 with actual HW instructions.

on x86 it's a 1-to-many relationship. There are, for example, many different MOV instructions that can be encoded based on the parameters used. All assemblers I know of hide this from the user, as well as featuring labels, macros, etc. which are not defined by the hardware at all. For the most part, the x86 assembler hides the details of prefix bytes and ModR/M+SIB from the user. Some assemblers are quite advanced and if you took them just a few logical steps beyond where they are you would end up with C.

Welcome to the world of OKRs/KPIs/Scrum, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.

not even remotely true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

> basic concepts of usability seem to have fallen by the wayside

Sadly, the tech may have changed but both our ideas on usability and the incentives at play have remained the same. Which is to say, the devs I know of all know that popup videos, banners, modals, etc. are all trash much like the popup ad banners of 1997. But we do them anyway because the people that pay us have financial incentives that have been proven via misguided A/B testing that they work. And by misguided I mean... we're talking about manipulation, right? That's the whole shell game of A/B testing. You're testing your way to what works best for you and not your users. It's Tinder knowing the perfect match for you but not showing you that person because you'll quit the app if you ever met them.

I can't even take a11y or people that advocate a11y seriously today. You built modals and carousels with frustrating timeouts that slide content before I'm done looking at it! You're a circus clown.

The creditors must enjoy Elon talking about bankruptcy already. Maybe he thought he could stop the bleeding by firing everyone. But with advertisers out and revenue gone, he's set for an ugly legal battle in a few quarters. This has to be the most perilous business deal in the history of business and deals.

> His reference to ‘LISP’ is, of course, referring to CLOS.

Definitely not. The all-caps "LISP" should be the strongest hint, but he name drops McCarthy and Carl Hewitt. McCarthy's LISP didn't have closures, so I'm thinking Alan is referring to something closer to Scheme. Which might make sense as Scheme is based on ideas from Hewitt (actors, message passing, etc.). But Alan isn't being terribly specific. You have to understand there are thousands of different "LISP" systems in the world. Many of which are just in some thesis or white paper.

septic tanks?? You're talking about rural America. Not suburbs. The only suburbs I've seen with septic tanks were in neighborhoods sitting below the main sewer line. Because shit can't run uphill. Power and water? Do you know a single suburb not connected to the power grid or doesn't have running water? Do you live in the 1800s?

> It's tough spending all day, every day with someone

You literally do this with coworkers in an office. Except, you didn't get to pick those people and you have to be even physically closer to them. The last office I worked in was an open floor plan and the guy three feet next to me typed so hard I thought he would break his keyboard. And he was on a rubber dome!! It was louder than the loudest mechanical keyboard. Before that I sat next to the sales department. They would talk loudly on the phone for 8 straight hours. One time my desk was next to the break room. You like hearing people talk all day long?

> in order to have private work spaces

With open floor plans the only privacy you get is when you put on your headphones. Anyone walking by still sees your screen and wearing headphones all day is not great for your health.

Probably not the best idea to commit crimes that carry prison sentences if you want to start a family. I agree with OP. This is truly horrifying narcissism.

run a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the worth of that? Based on what metric?

the whole thing really does feel like when VW tried to blame engineers for their emissions scandal. Engineers do not set hiring goals or vision for the company. They are not responsible for coming up with features. Yet they are getting 100% of the blame right now.

This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.

Wow, he's still tweeting. Does he not have a lawyer? At all? Half the thread are deleted messages from days ago. And he's still continuing on the same thread! Unbelievable. Here's a giant pile of shit I shouldn't have said that can easily be recovered through archives along with some more text messages I really shouldn't have said.

> Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

this reads like a Trump quote. People are free to use their speech to pressure advertisers into dropping Twitter. Or, rather, "voting" with their wallet.

I did not see any mention of structure.

Reddit has a different structure than Twitter. In fact, go back to before Slashdot and Digg and the common (HN, Reddit) format of drive-by commenting was simply not a thing. Usenet conversations would take place over the course of days, weeks, or even months.

Business rules. Twitter is driven by engagement. Twitter is practically the birthplace of the "hot take". It's what drives a lot of users to the site and keeps them there. How do you control the temper of a site when your goal is inflammatory to begin with?

Trust and Good Faith. When you enter into a legal contract, both you and the party you are forming a contract with are expected to operate in good faith. You are signaling your intent is to be fair and honest and to uphold the terms of the contract. Now, the elephant in the room here is what happens when the CEO, Elon Musk, could arguably (Matt Levine has done so, wonderfully) not even demonstrate good faith during the purchase of Twitter, itself. Or has been a known bully to Bill Gates regarding his weight or sex appeal, or simply enjoys trolling with conspiracy theories. What does a moderation system even mean in the context of a private corporation owned by such a person? Will moderation apply to Elon? If not, then how is trust established?

There is a lot to talk about on that last point. In the late '90s a site called Advogato[1] was created to explore trust metrics. It was not terribly successful, but it was an interesting time in moderation. Slashdot was also doing what they could. But then it all stopped with the rise of corporate forums. Corporate forums, such as Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook, seem to have no interest in these sorts of things. Their interest is in conflict: they need to onboard as many eyeballs as possible, as quickly as possible, and with as little user friction as possible. They also serve advertisers, who, you could argue, are the real arbiters of what can be said on a site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato

no, you have to run "restic forget" with the policy you want (keep last X, last monthly Y, etc.) followed up with a "restic prune". Or you can pass "--prune" to the "forget" command I think.

You don't always want to forget/prune snapshots. Especially if you're using a cloud service like B2. It can easily cost you more to prune than actual storage costs if you're not careful.

See here: https://www.seanh.cc/2022/04/03/restic/#maintaining-your-bac...

and

https://kdecherf.com/blog/2018/12/28/restic-and-backblaze-b2...

yeah, it's a bit weird that Marques Brownlee recently gave a better presentation on Meta/Metaverse than what Zuckerberg cooked up.

But I think that's the intent. Because when you lay out Meta's strategy so naked, like Marques did, then you realize that no one is going to buy into it. You need early adopters and those are the ones that are going to sniff out that you're actually building a dystopian privacy-invading Skinner Box platform controlled 100% by Meta and they will predictably eviscerate you.

Marques brings up the part of what Meta is focusing on now, which is creating replacements for everyday functions with a VR twist. He claims some of them are actually quite good. But I think this is the way Google approached Google+. People don't want something good-as or marginally better. What Meta needs is a killer app. Something that can only be done in the Metaverse and is so compelling that people are willing to give Meta full control over their life and spend the money on the hardware. That's a tall order.

> at least tweak some things

That's really understating the problem. Oracle, for example, can be wildly different from MySQL or PostgreSQL. SQLite makes selects extremely cheap, so cheap, that if you try to do a straight migration to a server-based DB it will probably just choke. Assuming any devs on your team realized the benefits of SQLite and took advantage of them.

But it gets worst with SQL on things that are not relational DBs. The exact person that SQL-on-Elasticsearch is designed for is also going to be the person that won't know the idiosyncrasies of Elasticsearch well enough to know when they are in trouble.[1] They will end up trying to get explanations for what is going on in Elasticsearch in terms of what they know (i.e. SQL on a relational DB). The end result will then be confusion and ultimately re-learning Elasticsearch from the ground up.

[1] https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?t=368

There's a lot of woo-woo going on in this thread.

You need to find the actual problem. You're making it to the interview, so all these companies feel you're at least minimally qualified for the job. Are you just getting unlucky that all these companies are in a hiring freeze and aren't willing to commit right now? Have you changed up your interviewing, tried anything new? Are you having further post-interview discussions that are turning sour? Money discussions?

I would look at doing a few paid practice interviews online. Their services are designed to provide you honest feedback to help you. There may be something going on that you're not aware of and interviewers don't want to tell you.

> Doom was written for the IBM PC. This PC had a clock speed of 4.77MHz and 64Kb of RAM.

well, not that PC. Doom required a 386 and 4MB of RAM. But you really wanted a 486 or Pentium to run it smoothly. Catacomb 3D, a real early id Software 3D game, actually would run on an 8088 XT.

Also noteworthy, Doom was created on a NeXT computer, which was also a bit ahead of PC at the time. So there was a power differential applied to what they were creating.

$10k seems really low. Like 1980s low. That's not even earnest money on a $1M house typical of California. That's a down payment on a car slightly nicer than a Civic today. Saw a Civic listed for $30k at the dealer last week.

if it doesn't already exist, someone is bound to make a truly horrible hack involving Zoom and aalib

https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2012/04/play-movies-in-ascii-art-...

> The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking.

I've often thought of and lamented the former idea. That the serendipity of the algorithms is less serendipitous than browsing a local record store. But what I've not considered much is that we, digital age folk, leave nothing behind. When I was young my mom had a pile of 45 rpm records. It was great browsing through those as a kid, knowing what my mom was into as a teenager. What do we leave our children? Our Spotify account? It's just not the same. Records have character. Worn dust jackets, scratches. A physical human held and cared for these. It's a snapshot of a point in time. Newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, it's all going away. They can look at a long-dead iPhone 3G and wonder what music or videos I played on it.

Zuckerberg is surrounded by yes men/women. That's the only explanation I can think of. I watched a few of their videos. The video with him talking about Zoom integration with Meta and splitting off in groups with avatars, etc. Does anyone really want to work like this?? The entire benefit of remote work is that I don't have to deal with this BS. Please stop trying to force these weird extroverted fetishes like avatar huddle groups and awkward virtual whiteboarding sessions onto remote work. We have 2d whiteboarding apps that already work!

The overall bland soulless corporateness of it all is creeping me the fuck out. These presenters are all 100% dead inside.

the whole Jira thing really pisses me off. I hate Jira almost more than this scrum/agile nonsense. If no one wants to look at the damn board, why are we doing this??

> with non-dev stakeholders running the meetings

9 out of 10 standups I'm in have zero of the stakeholders necessary to unblock the work. I'm announcing my blockers to other devs that zoned out 10 minutes ago and the scrum master that will say something hollow and silly such as "keep working on that" or "make sure to ping so-and-so." Thanks. Want to come to the restroom with me and hold my pee pee so I don't fuck that up too?

We are all infants.

Also. Allllllso. Scrum Master. Scrum. Master. Shouldn't you people be Scrum Main? Or Scrum Primary? Or did you not get that memo? They are literally keeping their developer minions in check. It's a bit... how do I say this? On the nose? Much more in a way than a branch name of git ever was.

been there. Worst offender I've seen is an eslint rule that forces you to not mutate the object you're creating with reduce() because mutation is bad. So now you're doing object spreading and went from an O(n) algorithm to an O(n^2) algorithm. Wonderful.

There is a lot of unquestioned dogma going around in this industry.

The Future of the Web is Peddling Endless Amounts of Cloud Frameworks

The number of web sites that need global edge computing is vanishingly small. More realistically you need a 20+ year old technology called a CDN to run your mostly static site.

Edge computing doesn't even solve any of your real problems here. I18n, l10n, international taxation/currency/payments, data-at-rest/GDPR/privacy laws. And then it introduces new problems, such as data partitioning. Are you going to partition at the edge and deal with tricky sync issues (CAP, anyone??) or are you just going to call back to your centralized DB server a thousand miles away from that edge? You know what's even faster than running that code on an edge device? Running that code on the user's phone or laptop. And you can get there. With a CDN.