microtherion

I'm not sure what Builder would have to do with default parameters and named arguments.

Builder is extremely useful to pair with a parser, e.g. SAX. The parser parses the input, and the builder then decides what to do with it.

> A factory is a factory.

Yes, but what about factory factories? https://factoryfactoryfactory.net

It could make some sense to use strchr, because in idiomatic UNIX tools, single character command line options can be clustered. But that also means that subsequent code should not be tested for a specific position.

And if you ever find yourself actually doing command line parsing, use getopt(). It handles all the corner cases reliably, and consistent with other tools.

That 80/82 bit format turned out to be problematic, as it was only used internally, and stored as 64 bits in memory. This meant that the same calculation could give different results based on whether an intermediate value had spilled to memory or not.

Wirth also wrote an extremely accessible book on Compiler Construction, using exactly the hand written recursive descent parsing approach discussed by OP.

The initial edition was published in 1976, in German, but the latest version is available online:

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...

There are also parser generators like ANTLR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTLR) which take an input not unlike yacc, but generate a LL parser using explicit code, rather than the table driven LALR parsing of yacc.

It also can initiate phone calls and play music.

And those are really the core use cases for AirPods, HomePods, and CarPlay, the contexts where a hands-free eyes-free interface is most useful.

Theoretically, yes, but in practice almost everybody would just run their Ubuntu Fridge in a stock configuration.

cf The Harvard Law: "Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases."

Unfortunately for the English majors, the poetry described seems to be old fashioned formal poetry, not contemporary free form poetry, which probably is too close to prose to be effective.

It sort of makes sense that villains would employ villanelles.

Try adding a French or Spanish accent for extra effectiveness.

Theoretically, there's a mechanism in Unicode allowing you to aim left and right: https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Direction

But I don't think it's implemented widely, if anywhere.

SVG is XML based.

It's PowerPC assembler.

I assume GP's point was that assembly language literacy was a pointless skill nowadays. I found it quite useful, precisely because it's no longer an ubiquitous skill, so you can shine with your expertise in some situations.

Was going to mention that point: http://www.seismo.ethz.ch/en/knowledge/geothermal-energy-ear...

The worst earthquake that was induced that way was 3.5, but given that one of the quakes happened in an area that had a catastrophic earthquake in the Middle Ages, some caution might be warranted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1356_Basel_earthquake

I'm not super comfortable with my body, but I occasionally frequent saunas, and in my experience, there is very little "staring" going on in the mainstream ones (obviously, there are saunas intended for orgies, pickups, etc, but that's a very different culture). Typically, just enough eye contact is made to avoid bumping into each other on the way in or out.

Anthropologically, I've heard that cultural acceptance of staring at people is inversely correlated with amount of clothing worn, i.e. in cultures where people habitually live unclothed, it's considered rude to look at others' bodies.

Of course, I'm old and fat, so I have good reasons for not fearing people being sexually attracted to me…

In many European countries, it's not at all controversial to have nude mixed-gender saunas (and concerns about homosexuals recede once it's possible to be ogled heterosexually in such spaces).

Yes, but Apple tends to lock in their supply with long term contracts and prepayments, so they often are protected from supply shocks.

My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground. Are AI usage practices different?

Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.

But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.

I took several car mechanic classes from De Anza college. Great instructor, and I did do some hands on stuff.

But my primary takeaway was that this is hard & dirty work, and there are numerous ways in which you can make mistakes that ruin the car and/or endanger your safety, so generally paying a professional to do it is a more sensible way.

Of course, if you enjoy doing this, or have a very old car, or more time than money, the trade-offs are different.

Surely Linux should be developed Google style, with a Web Scale perspective. uucp, tar, yacc, roff removed (with a 30 day notice, of course!), all the uses of "creat" amended to add the final "e", etc.

And systemd already follows Microsoft best practices, such as "Fire and Motion" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

I've seen the land that my ancestors left to become factory workers. There simply wasn't enough of it to feed everyone. In fact, the last pre-factory ancestor worked as an itinerant tailor because there was no land for him to cultivate.

I'm pretty sure factory work was a step upward for these families.

> Zero employers today would even briefly consider paying people any amount at all to not be at work while also paying for the thing keeping them away from work.

Apple definitely had programs to pay all or part of relevant educational programs, and they sometimes paid for people to attend conferences. I'm sure it was much more restrictive than the HP policy you're describing here, but it was definitely more than nothing.

> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.

— https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Another, NSFW, problem with $1 coins is that their universal adoption would lead to a lot of bruised strippers.

Woz was one of many people who designed microprocessor based computers in the 1970s (I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01_201710, and the variety is astounding), and far from the first one, though he was very good at what he did.

What really set apart the Apple II from many of its peers is that it came preassembled, in a neatly designed case (though the Commodore PET and TRS-80 were pretty much released at the same time), and those esthetics were due more to Jobs than Wozniak.

Jobs did not write product code, or design boards, but he had a constant presence in the design of Apple's products and many (though by no means all) of his inputs changed the products for the better.

Maybe Boucher's Blonde Odalisque.

You could argue that Steve Jobs was a product of very Californian circumstances: Born to parents of very different cultural backgrounds, raised in a hotbed of electronics development (and new age spirituality), started a company in an area full of enthusiasts and venture capitalists…

I seem to recall from past reading of the AppKit source code that one solution to (1) was to have version specific workarounds that worked for e.g. RecklessApp 39, but would no longer work for RecklessApp 40. I assume that the developers in question were informed of the fact, and now had every incentive to fix the problem.

Same thing happened to me with this drive: Lost the data on a RAID because two drives failed at the same time.