pcblues

I did TDD properly the first time in my Masters Degree (ongoing). It was an eye-opener. Write your program in two different ways to make sure you know the requirements by making their outputs match. That's not me being snarky. It actually works well. Just make sure you can type quickly.

I still don't understand microservices for anything short of a NAG of four level architecture.

In the 25 odd years I developed software, I learnt all the rules the hard way.

Relax. You will make all the mistakes because the laws don't make sense until you trip over them :)

Comment your code? Yep. Helped me ten years later working on the same codebase.

You can't read a book about best practises and then apply them as if wisdom is something you can be told :)

It is like telling kids, "If you do this you will hurt yourself" YMMV but it won't :)

4 kings.

Wipe if you think you can do better :) It can and has been done.

That's amazing. I used to live under an architecture student (our building). His command of design history was great. His command of maths? Well, not so much.

Interesting they had to redistribute the numbers to take account of its natural bias.

I just throw 17d6 and subtract 2.

Problem solved.

(I am joking!)

Good luck to him. If he was behind the Neo, then he deserves the post. That's the perfect new product in the mac world.

I always enjoy these summaries. I took my bachelor of computer science in the early 1990s. It covered a language in most of these categories.

We didn't learn APL (Who is teaching the use of those custom keyboards to 100s of young students for one semester?)

The processing power of systems at the time made it clear which language classes were practically useful and usable for the time and which were not.

Prolog ran like a dog for even simple sets of logic.

We had the best internet access and pretty powerful desktop systems for the time.

I'm still curious why we didn't learn smalltalk. Could have been the difficulty of submitting and marking a system in a particular state rather than a file of code :)

This is silly reporting with a couple of interesting stories. Forget about the technical ways of doing it. Doing it at all changes the game experience.

Pausing a game has a massive impact on the game experience. It lets you break the fourth wall experientially. Not wrong, but it changes the dynamic of the game.

Same as saving at any time does. As losing your loot or your life permanently does. Not wrong, but a hard choice that appeals to some players and not to others.

I used to pause pacman on my Atari 800 so I could run to church and sing in the choir or be an altar boy. Then I ran home and unpaused to continue. Sometimes in summer the computer over-heated and I lost everything while I was at church.

Lessons learnt? None, I think :)

The idea that travel to work is necessary, most work is in the middle of a city, and people need affordable places to live that are far from the city led to both the road and rail catastrophes we have in nearly every modernish city. A better question is "Why can't the employer be close to home?" or "Why can't the employer pay for my commute?"

Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.

Before AI and the swell of papers for money(tenure), not necessarily in that order, science mattered. As a result, the science mattered more in the past. RIP Rabin.

Write simple code. Do what you said, which is a very good idea. Test LLM security against the compiler too.

Decompilation and you are back to the level of security you started with. OpenSSH is open for a good reason. Please acknowledge your error. Are you AI?

Security by obscurity. Good luck. So novice.

If you were loyal to the country you chose to live in, you would support the protection of their people, not yours. Ask the Somalis.

What are you trying to do. Affect the policies of a democratic country that isn't yours? Shame on you, and go do it in Russia.

Overseas citizen foments government trouble? That's terrorism in Australia. Should be in yours and the countries you raise trouble in.

As a result of all this AI "find a zero-day" business, when I boot to windows I open the task manager and order by pid. I kill anything I didn't start or don't recognise.

The only process that scared me was windowgrid. It kept finding a way back when I killed all the "start with boot" locations I know. Run, runonce, start up apps, etc. Surely it's not in autoexec.bat :)

I bought bootleg CDs of nirvana when I was at uni in the 1990s. Always disappointed. At their most wasted.

Sorry, didn't make it clear. If a company does not publicly respond to a privately made security breach allegation, they are in breach of their responsibility to maintain business. If the breach is rubbish, the alleger looks bad.

The best to you.

In spite of how the pollies sell it, regulation is the friend of anyone earning less than one million dollars per year. Regulation would fix this. Get on it.

I am laughing. I'm not even near the end of this thread.

I think what many people don't realise is that there will be a glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch of data centres get pulled down.

This is a nice idea, because it physically limits the place the child can call from. Even a very under-powered phone sets them free.

However, a new severely under-powered phone with no graphics or apps would probably meet the requirements of not being sucked into the grown-up world too early, and the kids can maintain their own contact lists.

And they'll grow super-fast thumbs like we had to in order to text :)

They cost about $50 but are still 4G.

Amen. An extreme example.

But what if you tasked with writing business-critical software and forced by your employer to use their AI code generation tool?

https://ai.plainenglish.io/amazons-ai-ultimatum-why-80-of-de...

Or using it with full access to your data and not knowing how it works? :)

https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-alignment-director-o...

I predict humans will take over most AI jobs in about ten years :)

"These look really random" - I hope I missed your sarcasm.

That is so far from random.

Think of tossing a coin and getting ten heads in a row.

The probability of not repeating numbers in 10 numbers out of 10 is huge, and not random.

Randomness is why there is about a 50% chance of 2 people in a class of about thirty having a birthday on the same day.

Apple had to nerf their random play in iPod because songs repeated a lot.

Randomness clusters, it doesn't evenly distribute across its range, or it's not random.

This is what I hate about people trusting it. If you rely on AI to operate in a domain you don't man-handle, you will be tricked, and hackers will take advantage.

"AI! Write me gambling software with true randomness, but a 20% return on average over 1000 games"

Who will this hurt? The players, the hackers or the company.

When you write gambling software, you must know the house wins, and it is unhackable.

I am not strictly entitled to answer this but I will just in case. (Language is a bit different in Australia.)

I completed a Bachelor CS degree in 1995. I think that's a "CS major program".

It was very theoretical, in that the languages we learnt were too old, too new, and not industry-led. So, Eiffel for OO, Cobol(!), and some proper maths thrown in.

It got me a solid 25 years of work.

After about a five year gap in software development as a job, I am now doing a Masters of Computer Science at the same place (by name alone, maybe) and the tech they teach is ten years old.

I'm not averse to this so far. I finish in a year, and I'll know if it was a waste of time to get back into the industry then.

However, I have done six of the twelve subjects and they ALL filled gaps in my understanding from both my original Bachelor and my work experience. I am a better programmer now.

I am currently in an interview process where I surprised myself with my own knowledge. YMMV of course.