devnull255

Has Halo and Master Chief appeared on any of the other consoles in the contest? No? Then the war is far from over.

If I try giving this as an explanation for churn on any issue I'm investigating, they'll probably take longer paying me ...

Right? And King Crimson sold one of theirs to Tony Banks of Genesis. At least that's a claim here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron I loved its use on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Maybe one reason a job becomes a bullshit job is because the objectives such a job is defined to achieve are themselves bullshit. And whoever has stated the objectives are critical to the mission of the enterprise is either bullshitting themselves or believes the bullshit premises of the objectives.

But then again, it's probably important to truly know what bullshit is. Is it, as expressed in the book "On Bullshit" intentional deception or even lying to advance the bullshitter's own interest? Or is it an unfounded or unsubstantiated belief in a value or goal that has not been subjected to enough careful scrutiny or deliberation?

Why don't more people see this capability as an accelerator and/or amplifier? To borrow from the book "Smarter Than You Think" by Clive Thompson, it can turn us into "centaurs", fusing the minds of humans with the computing power of AI.

Doesn't this show that we can now use this technology to generate and execute code for modest problems that have already been solved, while we can spend more time on even more complex problems?

Wasn't it this kind of desperation that led to the apocalyptic conditions of "Snow Piercer" ?

The information technology industry is a disruptive force in this economy. The way it has disrupted the global economy has changed over time as newer generations of technological innovations (e.g., software, programming languages and development paradigms) have overtaken older generations of information technology. As a consequence, these changes have demanded new sets of technical skills from programmers. Those who master the skills (and a lot who learn just enough of them) can command premium pay because of the labor scarcity they now find themselves in.

In my own 30+-year career, I've had to continually re-skill and up-skill to keep pace with the changes over the years and stay competitive with new programmers entering the industry. I have also been able to command a premium wage (even through the dot com bust) because I was always watching the industry and was able to anticipate and/or pick up whatever skill I needed to know next to remain in play.

I would conclude that the OP is right only if the IT industry itself stops being such a fast-moving, almost COVID variant-like industry disruptor, demanding brand new, rare skills or programmers decide to exit the tech skills arms race. I think I can go for another ten years at least myself.

My first employer, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) had a repayment agreement which stipulated that any employee accepted into the Systems Engineering Development (SED) program would be required to fulfill three more years of employment following successful graduation from the program or be required to pay for the cost of the training. Each year of employment fulfilled after graduation reduced what the employee owed until the last year satisfied the obligation. I forget what the amount was but remember that they changed the terms of this to make "time served" retroactive to the first day of employment.

I created a password management utility using shelve and the rsa library for a company that is still using it after 15 years. Though today the company is transitioning to Hashicorp Vault, the utility will still serve as an interface to Vault.

When I worked at Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in the 90s, I was doing development on applications that both produced and ingested EDI documents based on a custom EDI standard General Motors imposed on both internal and external suppliers for Shipping Schedule (862) and Planning Schedule with Release Capability (830) documents. GM was able to persuade many EDI software companies to include the GM specs in EDI software releases.

I don't miss working with EDI.

I really loved this episode. Especially when someone pointed out the fallacy of believing north = up and south = down, which is that way only because we live in a world where most map projections on a wall show north as up and south as down. It doesn't look like that at all from outer space.

The Mercator projection map was the map I was most exposed to in school and was on my bedroom wall at home when I was going to Elementary school. Later on when I went to college, I saw the Peters Projection map (and had that on the wall above my desk in my apartment. This map rebooted my brain in that it showed a more truthful representation of how large an area was in relation to other areas.

I do happen to think that the prevalence and persistence of the Mercator projection's use with its grossly distorted representations of northern hemisphere land regions encouraged distorted thinking about geopolitics. That the since the northern continents and their countries appear larger than southern countries, this also encouraged the mistaken belief that the north was more important than the south.

Sounds to me like Viking is as Viking does. Raiding and pillaging still inflicts the same result on victims whether carried out under a monarch's banner or by independent agents. Maybe use of his word describing where the pillaging and plundering was happening is similar to why the word 'typhoon' and 'hurricane' is used to describe the same meteorological phenomenon. It depends on where it is happening. Use of the word in history will also depend on the perspective of who is telling the history, whether you identify with the conquerors or the conquered. Alexander the Great to western historians is Alexander the Accursed to the Persians.

I was introduced to programming in *NIX environments by Informix 4GL, which after learning I could generate the intermediary C code files with an option provided by its 4glcc (or something like that) command, led me to C. I was fascinated by how many lines of C code were generated with a 'let' assignment statement, and also by how assignments in 4GL were mapped to push and pop operations on a stack variable.

I also saw the link to RPG in the article. I took an RPG programming class in 1983, and I'm glad I forgot most of that.

You can read about many of these historical methods of organization in Judith Flanders' A Place for Everything: The Curious history of Alphabetical Order - https://www.amazon.com/Place-Everything-Curious-History-Alph..., and The Library of Alexander: Center of Learning in the Ancient World by Roy MacLeod - https://www.amazon.com/Library-Alexandria-Learning-Ancient-R...

These are still good guidelines. I would propose some additional guidelines, that as a tool developer myself, will make the tool more accessible and useful.

Provide custom format options, such as --format-json or format--<x> to produce output in JSON or other popular formats.

Implement both short and long options (e.g., -f/--filename) consistent with other command line tools.

Implement a --verbose and/or --debug option to enable more detailed output when needed for troubleshooting.

Provide a --version option to display the tool's version and then exit.

Provide a --help option to display program usage and options and then exit.

Provide useful error messages that at minimum inform the user what went wrong when the program aborted.

As a corollary to the previous guideline, output noisy error output like stack traces, etc. when --verbose is used and an error is encountered.

After exploring this for a while, scrolling through these comments with the up and down arrows was a bit disorienting for me. The illusion of of navigating more than 2 dimensions persisted a little while on this page for me.

Unless you consider the result of two tasks performed simultaneously a product of two tasks rather than the sum of two tasks.

I live in the Twin Cities, but moved there from Detroit over twenty years ago when a Minnesota-based company bought the company where I was a contract developer and offered me a permanent position if I relocated (which they completely expensed). The company also agreed to fly me out for a weekend to visit the Twin Cities. I visited the downtown and Uptown and knew I would love living there. And I still love it here almost 25 years later. (I did live in the SF Bay Area from early 2016 to late 2018 then moved back to the T.C.)

I just wish I could get some decent coney dogs or Buddy's Pizza out here. (No I haven't been to Uncle Frankie's yet)

Going back to mason's point though the size of Greater Detroit metropolitan area is hugely underestimated. And not tapping into that area for market or talent opportunities (or delicious Coney dogs) is an unfortunate mistake.

Moral Politics, by George Lakoff: this book offered a new perspective on not just the discussion and language of politics, but sent me down the rabbit hole of cognitive linguistics and "embedded mind" in books he authored or co-authored, such as "Metaphors We Live By", "Philosophy in the Flesh", and "Where Mathematics Comes From".

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond: Gave me a deeper insight into the geographic underpinnings of civilization and history, and how available resources and climate allowed some early settlements to grow into mighty empires, while others struggled to subsist. It also improved my Civilization 3 game playing. ;)

The Language of Mathematics by Keith Devlin: Sparked a renewed interest in mathematics through historical narratives of the development of our number systems, mathematicians and numerous mathematical topics.

The Code Book by Simon Singh: Kicked off my historical and professional interest in cryptography and keeping secrets.

Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi: Showed me how to make the best use of every minute, especially waiting at bus/train stops, and helped me recognize what I really like doing.

The _Autobiography of Malcom X_ was co-written by Alex Haley, the author of _Roots_. _Autobiography_ was required reading in a "Black Political Thought" course I took years ago. But it was inspirational for me too.

At our company, we actually built ETL-Framework-agnostic wrappers, monitoring, logging and scheduling tooling around the different ETL tools we used for four different ETL Product Frameworks we used: Microfocus COBOL, Torrent Orchestrate, Datastage (which incorporated Torrent) and Abinitio. The wrappers invoked the ETL command, reformatted and consolidated logs. For scheduling, we relied mostly on CA Autosys, instead of whatever scheduling mechanisms came with the ETL Product.

We found this approach made it easier to transition from one product to another. As it consistently faster to plug the ETL framework into the supporting framework than to implement everything a new ETL Product offered.

As we move from our on-prem environment to the cloud, we hope we can implement a similar strategy even if we have to switch the support frameworks.

That would be invoke tasks. https://docs.pyinvoke.org/en/stable/getting-started.html, which I first encountered in fabric: fabfile.org, which has the fab utility and fabfiles (analogous to Makefiles) but is so much more.

Awk is advanced in the sense that it is a programming language by itself. Years ago I had to migrate an old version of an Informix database to a newer version. The old version did not have tools to export the database as DDL and DML statements. So I had to create a tool myself to do it. The system did not have perl installed so I had to use awk. It worked nicely enough.

Generally, that mutable data is on externally mounted volumes or stores though and not in the container itself, right? Except for what is read into container memory and written out to temporary or work files.

"Scrumfall" sounds like a rejected James Bond movie script.

Is this post about being willing to look stupid or about not being afraid to ask questions? In my own experience, I was more afraid of asking questions because I was afraid it would expose me as not paying attention in class or not being prepared. I was afraid of being embarrassed by the question. I suppose one could say this might also be read as afraid of looking stupid, but stupidity itself is ironically not as simple as some might believe.

I remember the first time I heard the statement: The only stupid question is the question you don't ask. This statement bewildered me, because I thought I might be the one that asked "that" question. If this sounds confusing, I most likely read that statement as "the only stupid question is the the one you shouldn't ask and if you don't know what makes a question stupid, you're probably too stupid to know."

This fear of asking stupid questions made me unwilling to take math courses beyond Geometry. I ended up getting further math education when I started my IT career in 1990. I overcame my fear of asking questions in the course of doing my student teaching assignment before that.

Yes. I bought this on vinyl when it first came out. This was my first introduction to King Crimson. And surprisingly, when I bought Court of the Crimson King in college, I could hear the thread that connected their first album to the first album by them I ever bought. The more I listened to it, the more I took it apart, the more I broke it down, it remained consistent.

I still think it's good! I wish you were here to hear it!

One of the links to wind cowls in London suggests they finally found a peaceful use for the Daleks!

Incorporating the "learning x the hard way approach", which is about typing the code, rather than just copying and pasting the code, also aids with learning quickly and giving more lasting power to the lesson. The best part of this is the mistakes you're more likely to make by typing, which forces you to look more closely at the original code so you can retype it correctly. I remember much more that way. Even more than that, making such mistakes may draw more attention to the object in error and consequently learn more about that object and how it fits into what you're trying to do.