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"We build our computers the way we build our cities -- over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." Ellen Ullman

I was pro-closed source in Turbo Pascal days.... once the licences turned to complete shit I went pure opensource.

XP was a sane and useful thing before the sc(r)?umbags came along and shat in the Agile pool.

You could ctrl-u any web page, understand it, and do all the cool things you actually cared about yourself.

The web peaked before javascript f*cked it up completely.

Nobody played Matryoshka doll's with VM's and Containers, they did real work that mattered instead.

HTML and CSS standards and browser support for the standards were evolving semi-sensibly before M$ strangled it and the javascript "html5" spat on the grave.

Scheme/Lispy Lambda's just worked decades before these halfarsed modern languages came up with dozens of borked half- baked versions of it.

GUI's were an almighty colossal pain in the proverbial to write, so almost nobody did that and as a result were about 20 times more productive than they are today.

Threading implementations were borked, so nobody did that. They used processes and everything was much better. If you have any sense you will _still_ be using processes and not threads and your life still will be much better.

An, oh yes, pen plotters were fun to watch. Laser printers are absolutely wonderful.... but it's like the difference between a wood fire and panel heater... Which would you rather sit with a whisky in hand and just watch?

I might be an old curmudgeon, but I do have a very longer list of things that are much better than they were in the Bad Old Days if anyone cares.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN!

Their funding has been cut to within an inch of their lives....

Promise 'em pizza and they'll ban the UK too.

Yup and a simple embedded version of a useful subset of that is (just counted) about 4000 non-comment non-blank lines _just_ for the header files.

And assumes you then understand what the API does which is probably less comprehensively documented than the underlying HCI spec.

A tiny (but still HUGE) part of this VAST spec is the fact that these bluetooth chips are ruddy frequency hopping radios.

Something that a decade or two ago was only seen in high end military radios.

But _none_ of your consumer level gadgets are made by broadcom.

Broadcom will sell millions of these cheap as chips chips to second tier players.

Who may sell on to third tier players.

Who buy or pull a bluetooth stack and sort of vaguely maybe know what they doing, tie it all together and get the BT compliance stamp (which sort of means it doesn't shit all over the RF spectrum and vaguely works)...

...and then the sell it to you.

ie. The chip manufacturer hopefully has clue.... then it gallops rapidly downhill from there.

Do you have any idea how bloody insanely complex bluetooth is?

Just the the core stuff,

https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/bluetooth-core-spec...

without the various protocol specs... https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/protocol-specificat... or the GATT or ...

The bloody core spec is 3000 PAGES of standardese.

All in stuff that costs less than a dollar per chip.

Try Pretoria or Johannesburg when it is too late to start studying for end of year exams....

I always got a wee chuckle out of the fact that, probably the most massive book in the entire library, was entitled, "Gravitation".

Admittedly I'm not exactly in the center of the known world.

In that past age of the world long gone... I could have advanced the state of a science in dire need of advancement, I could have done really interesting cool stuff, I could have landed a lectureship and maybe a professorship. I could have written a book or two. I could have even received industry funding to do all this.

These days? Do a Phd in Comp Sc? You're joking.

I'd be in debt up to my ears, no guarantee of a better job at the end, endless academic horseshit in between, and your expected gain from the book is less than from cleaning toilets.

Then we wonder why the state of Computer Science as a Science is what it is.

Even the officials knew anything about the flavourings today, they will spin another five flavours by tomorrow.

And even if knew everything about a flavour.... what's in the mass produced / delivered to consumer flavouring will not remain the same day on day.

This whole thing makes my spidey sense tingle.

If you're not prepare to wire an auto-indent into every ones commit hooks....

....you're just not serious are you?

Bottom Line on White space....

Have some.

Be mostly consistent.

1. Tried this incredibly cunning and creative trick... 2. It didn't work. 3. Try another incredibly cunning and creative trick... 4. goto 2.

And then just before the end, Get Very Very Lucky with something that had nothing to do with cunning or creativity.

Now put that together with my personal experience of extreme weather events both in NZ and ZA, the jet streams has _always_ been involved.http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/shemjetstream_model.html

ie. If I see a major stream coming near me... Big Stuff happens with the weather. If something extreme is happening with the weather, I check and a big stream is going very near by.

ie. I expect we will see more interesting stuff happening with the jet stream as the climate cooks.

Yes, in any period of turmoil sociopaths will attempt to abuse all and every lever of power.

But over the centuries we have made a lot of progress.

Humanity needs to get _much_ better at how we organize ourselves and decide things and grant authority to others.

..our present is locking us into a narrow range of dystopian futures.

Andrei is quite amazing to me...

Clearly capable of writing code that is wonderful... and incomprehensible to mortal man.... but wonderfully focused on not doing that.

On making it comprehensible, and producing facilities that are friendly and nice and doing so with a kindly attitude.

Kent, in addition to the stuff he has done on the TDD front... https://www.infoq.com/presentations/self-image/

Sadly the "Jobs you might be interested in..." from linkedin are, despite knowing quite a bit about what my skills are.... almost always completely irrelevant.

ie. They have the data... they are mind blowingly incompetent at using it.

Hmm. This is why climate change deniers can get a foot in the door....

....the door has been jammed open by skewed commercial interests for decades.