greyhair

Can it import DOT data? I have too many graphviz tools to just abandon dot.

Sometimes the least useful ideas are the best.

Nice job.

As a developer, I really don't understand the lovefest for XP, other than in the context of Windows 98, in particular the Windows 98 ME fiasco, and the evolution of Windows NT into Windows 2000.

Windows 7 pretty much fixed all the brokenness of XP, granted much of that brokenness was XP being a victim to the progress in hardware buses.

Yes, Windows Vista was a hot mess, which carried over into the first release of Windows 8, though by the second release of Windows 8, it was pretty solid, but still tainted by the stench of Vista.

But Windows 10 completed so much of what Windows 7 started. Everything in '10' was so much better. The network stack, particularly WiFi. Printer drivers. USB support. All of it really.

When I think how far forward 10 moved from XP, and having lived with Windows from '95' on forward, including writing NDIS network drivers for NT, I just don't have any nostalgia for XP at all.

And I know a lot of people hate Windows 11, but I have to say, USB support for Linux under WSL2 in Windows 11 is good, so it has that going for it.

That assumption of politeness and civility was well on its way out around 1998.

That was the year I recall netnews turning into something resembling an open sewer. By 1999, I had dropped off netnews completely. It had gone from a wonderful community of spaces for almost any topic imaginable, to a constant stream of trolling and porn.

Dell Vostro laptops are not as sleek as their consumer models, but they are tanks, and they are a breeze to repair.

I do like what Framework is doing, and my next laptop will likely be from them.

Is it a Lenovo ThinkPad, or one of their other models?

But pure ASICs get rid of even more of the GPU than just the output stage. A pure ASIC to cover the fundamental calculations in hardware with just a CPU to feed them data and pull results is the most efficient.

Think of something as direct as a cell phone modem. The batteries last as long as they do because a ton of the low level modem behavior is done in accelerator blocks direct in hardware, and the DSPs just route data between the blocks and manage the higher level protocols.

It is really hard to design an efficient ASIC to predict the future compared to just designing an efficient ASIC after the future arrives.

The tools available today support such rapid design/test cycles.

Oddly enough, the best time to bootstrap a brand new startup is just at the tail end of a crunch. I see a bunch of early startups popping up by the end of October.

I think human extinction through human stupidity or hubris is much much much more likely than through an unpredictable path down general AI.

For example, some total whack job of an authoritarian leader is in charge of a sufficient nuclear arsenal and decides to intimidate an adversary by destroying a couple minor cities, and the situation escalates badly. (stupidity)

Or we finally pollute our air and/or water with a persistent substance that either greatly reduces human life span or reproduction rate. (hubris)

I think either of the above is more likely to occur, and I am not commenting on current world events in any way. I think when something bad finally happens, it is going to come completely out of left field. Dr Strangelove style.

And the last of us will be saying "Hmmm, I didn't see that coming".

> you’d almost shit yourself in excitement, your heart would race

You need to watch "Being Ned Devine" if you have never seen it.

Where greed comes in is where people dive into a market precisely because it is going up like crazy, which you only know after it goes up like crazy, then when it takes a down turn, hang on too long because they don't want to give up that expensive thing, then finally sell in a panic.

Buying high and selling low is a sure path to being poor.

Rick Scott says there was no right to a free public education in the Constitution.

Ponder that for a while.

This. Exactly this. In some ways, this mirrors the current student debt crisis.

Only 13% of the US population holds student debt, and 80% of student debt is held by earners in the upper 20% of income. But suddenly, we are supposed to cancel all that debt. ?????

Same thing with the market crash in 2008. Oh, we have to bail out all those banks because otherwise pension funds will lose value. Not close completely, but lose value. So a bunch of people with no hope of ever having a pension have to be taxed to bail out existing pensions (in effect). And then AIG having the gall, after effectively failing, and only being propped up by Federal dollars, complaining ten years after that the government unfairly held back some of their profits because the government backing came with stock holdings to back the loan, and AIG had to buy the stock back.

So yeah, Crypto is an issue, but the major banks are also an issue, and people that are stupid (or greedy) about money are an issue.

The problem of transferring currencies is that you are always buying through currency traders, who are attempting to make a profit on knowing current exchange rates and predicting near and long term exchange rates.

I was visiting Montreal from the US a couple decades ago, and I wanted to exchange some US dollars for Canadian, and in the financial center, I found five different exchanges with five different rates. I had to walk about six blocks total to hit them all, but the difference between the lowest and highest was significant.

Victim blaming is wrong, I agree with that completely. But a lot of 'coins' are just paper dreams, and live somewhere on the spectrum of the Nigerian Prince scam. (that, I realize, being the extreme example) I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone that wires $10,000 to a foreign country so that a wire transfer of $20,000,000 can be processed to their bank.

People just don't go around handing out money. Early Bitcoin miners went through the effort of setting up mining rigs (which is no longer practical for an individual). They actually did something, and had some skin in the game. Did they hang on to those early coins until this year? I have no idea.

But people that just buy into coins because OMG its the next big thing, are purely speculating, which is nothing more than a form of gambling. Do I feel sorry for people with a gambling addiction? Yes I do, and I know someone that 'retired early (35)' to play poker professionally.

To much of the coin and NFT space to me smells of a combination of pyramid scheme and MLM. By its very nature it rejects regulation, it is decentralized. Which is one of the reasons, to me, that it is suspect.

Did not know that. Makes sense though, given that decaying fruit is acidic.

I had an interview question that dealt with knowing some crazy shit about C data structure layout and pointers and casting. (Embedded development position)

You had to solve it on a blackboard, with chalk, and the intent (I later learned) was not necessarily that you got the right answer, but how you worked through it. Did you just lock up? Did you get frustrated? Did you ask the interviewer to clarify with more data? They wanted to see your thought process.

I was able to answer it (not everyone that got hired did), and when I was done, I looked at the interviewer and asked "Do you write code this way, here?". He laughed and said 'no, no no no'. I told him, I wasn't sure I would want to work there if they did. We both laughed. He ended up being my first supervisor at that company.

Hello Dan! (If you happen to read this...)

You and me both.

The last two thirds of my so far 38 (next month!) year career have been "call Doug, he knows this particular topic and he is a great team player". Most of those from people I never worked with, but they were asking friends for recommendations.

So yeah, good behavior has fueled the two thirds of my career where I earned about eighty percent of my income.

This is why I never have conversations with philosophy majors at parties. You are crawling through that same morass of specific straw man arguments that drive me nuts.

Everyone should work some form of retail job at least once in their life.

I was a motorcycle mechanic for six years before going to college. Some customers where a joy, you looked forward to seeing them, most were just average Joes that needed work done, and a very small few were arrogant self entitled jerks, but it was a job, and you had to deal with it.

Some of the nicest people I know have had retail experience in their life.

You catch more flys with sugar than with vinegar.

I had an interview at a startup years ago (got the job) that was grueling, about six hours total, you met with six different teams of three people, from different disciplines across the company. It was sort of a good cop/bad cop thing. Not to aggressive, but just seeing if you were willing to admit you didn't know when you were asked a questions you didn't know (and there were lots I didn't know) and how you reacted in the situation. Some people don't handle 'not knowing', and try to BS their way through. Then, some are apologetic when they get called out, and some dig in. If you fell into that last group, you were not getting a job. If you fell into the second group, it was more of a sliding scale. Did you attempt to BS your way through multiple times across the multiple teams? Or did you realize, the first time you got called out, that it wouldn't work.

It has been these waves for the last forty years I have been doing this for a living. "The New Thing" shows up, people run around like chickens with heads cut off chasing "The New Thing", then "The New Thing" becomes "The Old Thing". Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

What you have to do as a developer is try to keep up with the hundred new things, possibly dabble in them to see what they are, and decide for yourself how much effort you want to put into that particular "thing". You have to use judgement or you will burn yourself out.

I never bothered with Pascal. I learned enough Java to be dangerous, but it didn't really apply to my problem/solution domain. I did learn C++ and also learned to distinguish between when a solution looked like an object (C++) and when it did not (ANSI C). If anyone tells you to 'always use C++' ignore them.

I learned Perl, because I found it more useful than AWK for large problems, but AWK still reigns supreme for 'one liners'. Then I learned Python, and discovered that the problems then fall into Python or AWK. I rarely use Perl anymore.

I tried my hand at Go. I don't find it very satisfying. I am looking at Rust.

Everything else I have ignored, by virtue of choosing what problem domains I am interested in solving.

So that software engineers are not screwed, not by any margin. Just choose the problem/solution domain that you want to work in, narrow down the tools you want to be competent in, and move forward. Try to avoid the 'Look! A Squirrel!' response mode as much as possible, but do poke your head up to see what the world is doing on occasion. But be aware, a lot of it us useless noise.

They are not talking about cognitive decline, they are talking about speed of processing. I am mid 60s, engineering for the last 38 years, and the depth of work is not a problem, but I definitely don't make the same snap judgements that I made even just ten years ago. It also pertains to physical reaction time. Meaning, after 60 you best leave a little more gap between you and the car ahead.

You may doubt this now, but you will see how life changes for you after age 50, and again how life changes for you after age 60.

It is all fine, it really is, but you will find yourself saying "that didn't used to hurt", and you will also find yourself shoving people away from your mouse because they want to click on something that you haven't decided to click on yet.

It's just nature. Yes, some people abuse their bodies and their minds, but even the most careful are going to see changes. Just life, just how it goes.

I have said negative things about someone's favorite product and then abandoned a thread (not here on this site) because the stream of hate that followed drowned out the original message.

People can be irrationally attached to the things they use.

As a farm kid growing up, you didn't step between two guys arguing the merits of I-H and J-D farm equipment (1970s...)

I think one thing that makes an external stream deck work, is that it is a separate context sensitive device, that is mentally separated from the keyboard.

So when you go to the deck to perform an action, you mentally context switch away from the keyboard, so your brain is looking for different clues.

So even with a touch bar + function keys, the function keys stay in keyboard context, but the touch bar requires that switch in any case. Maybe taking your eyes to the touch bar is enough of a context switch, mentally.

I have two different headsets I use for conferencing, on a USB with a mid-cable control for volume and mute, and a BT headset with physical buttons on the ear cups. I have messed with both, under Linux and Windows 10, and when they are muted, they are really muted.

I have not disassembled them, I am certain that the USB HID is inside the mid cable control unit, but the headsets themselves must be muting the audio stream.

If you use the mute button on the conferencing app? Then I assume all bets are off, but with controls on an external headset, I would assume all behave similarly.

Worse than that are the SEO results that don't give you what you want at all.

For products, one of the worst offenders is Target. Yes, Target. They show up near the top of about 60% of my searches, including for things they simply do not carry. But hey, they carry a similar product that you might be interested in! (not)

SEO results make Google money, but they also make the results suck.

Hence what happened to Usenet. I was active on comp.lang.c comp.lang.c.moderated comp.sys.3b1 comp.sys.3b2 back in the mid 1990s, by 1998, it had become a total hot mess. The moderated groups imploded, or shutdown, when the moderators just gave up. In particular, comp.lang.c.moderated was a fountain of knowledge on C language implementation specifics, then a few really pedantic asshats joined, and their MO was purely slandering and shouting. They had agendas, and they had no interest in sharing knowledge. I think a couple of them thought they could affect the evolution of the language, from outside ANSI, to suit their own personal opinions. Nasty little dictators. I completely dropped off usenet around 1998. In retrospect, I hung on for to long, hoping for a return to rational behavior.