setpatchaddress

Greater than FDR? You sure about that?

Obama sucked at his job. Like, nearly Carter-level blindness to political reality, but with more personal arrogance. Obama was better than Shrub. Shrub was a war criminal, so you'd have to hope Obama was better.

The ACA was emblematic of Obama's unwillingness to lift a finger to help build the Democratic grassroots. The Democrats in Congress allowed the ACA to be loaded with poison pills due to Obama's insistence on a bipartisan vote. The result: no votes from the Gops, but it did cause the Democrats to lose the House since -- due to the Gop amendments -- the good parts didn't kick in until well after the midterm elections and the bad parts started immediately.

So popular was the ACA, in the end, that it only survived the Trump years because McCain lost his temper on the day of the Senate vote to repeal it.

BerkeleyDB was a key/value store. I'm not sure how much uptake it actually had vs other solutions. Prior to widespread availability of SQLite3, it was not unheard of to write your bespoke format if you needed something sophisticated.

NeXT and Apple open sourced more projects under Steve Jobs than they have since. A world where Jobs went for Google CEO is a world where Jobs has a different aesthetic worldview entirely, and you can’t know what would have happened.

This sort of thinking is corrosive to society at large. It’s not a zero-sum game.

But, if you must, take heart in the fact that the teenager will never make more than $minimum in that job, where presumably your income will continue to rise commensurate with experience.

The walled garden rant is anachronistic. HyperCard died because Apple stopped major work it. Circa 1987! There was no HyperCard team to put out a new version when Jobs returned in 1997, and a dying Apple couldn’t justify building one from scratch. It’s that simple.

(Yes, there were post-1987 updates, none of which added fundamental critical features like color support. Which was introduced to the Mac lineup with the Mac II, also in 1987.)

for posterity:

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And the png does not load.

Seconded. Both Dirk Gently series are good, both should have had additional seasons.

Unicode tables are gigantic. If it’s possible to build an abstraction layer, it should be done.

Yes, it depends in a very absolute sense, but for most cases, efficient use of memory is a hugely important factor in a large software system for performance. It’s worth doing an abstraction layer. ICU has a stable API, to the best of my knowledge.

More broadly: always set boundaries for yourself. You may not have a choice to ignore the bug in a corporate setting, but you need to be willing to kick issues back to the originator for lack of information and /or lack of willingness on their part to help isolate a way to reproduce the problem.

This suggests that a possible answer to TFA could be to find a trusted female peer to carry the message.

Not a chance, no. Here's something from 1985:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n8/36_The_Sider_1...

> Five years ago I drooled over the new 5Mb Winchester hard disk drives being introduced to the Apple II market. Although I knew how useful a hard disk could be, I also knew that I would never be able to justify the purchase of a $3000 mass storage device for a $2000 computer. I also knew that I would never be able to fill 5Mb of disk space.

> How times have changed. Today, a full fledged Apple IIc or IIe costs a little over $1000. And a 10Mb hard disk drive costs only $695. That's right. First Class Peripherals offers the Sider, a hard disk drive with 10Mb partitionable among four operating systems for $695.

The parties have changed since whenever you last read up on this (four years ago? ten years ago?).

Gop politicians (for Republicans call themselves this) don't care about deregulation anymore -- they just want to funnel money and power to the wealthy.

Dem politicians now seem very excited about breaking up Facebook and Google.

Both parties want to hurt Google and Facebook for perceived political bias. Gop politicians want this because Google and Facebook sometimes allow some left-of-center voices to occasionally penetrate their newsfeeds. Dem politicians want this because Facebook has been a vector for QAnon and other wingnut-terrorist radicalization.

You cannot generally trust that C primitive types are atomic.

> Sometimes we might also just choose the bear the cost. For systems with low risk profiles (eg internal software that is never exposed to hostile input) we might decide that debugging the occasional use-after-free is preferable to adding development friction.

Zig vs Rust vs C aside, this cannot be a serious position for a software developer to take in 2021 CE.

Song publishing seems like a bad example here — it’s insanely easy to make that arrangement in practice because there is an existing real world payment / licensing structure for exactly that transaction.

In games, you have the thing of value itself. It’s not an NFT just because it’s digital.

I can't get past this sentence:

> From these humble beginnings, and a quick move from Santa Clara to Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley in California)

Is the rest of the article better than this?

For those outside the Bay Area: Santa Clara and Sunnyvale are physically adjacent, and I'm guessing all of the sites where AMD's HQ has been historically located are probably within 0.5 miles of each other near that border.

I think that was intended as sarcasm

This is largely cherry-picking revisionism. I saw CGA on the displays of the time at the time with the games of the time, and can confirm it was mostly terrible. EGA couldn't come fast enough.

This is buzzword-laden gobbledygook, and I tend to think Greenwald is butthurt on “online censorship” because he got called on his shit.

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/glenn-greenwald-quits-inte...

Second this. Much easier to follow than the dragon book. And you’ll end up with a better implementation if you follow Wirth vs the YACC dudes.

This is getting into wooden volume knob territory, but MiniDisc did sound remarkably good compared to MP3 at the time.

IBM, maybe?

I'm surprised to read these recent anecdotes (going back to that New Jersey unemployment COVID programmer shortage) from various people that COBOL jobs are in high demand yet shockingly underpaid. That would seem to imply markets don't actually work the way we've been told.

You could use a Mac and avoid all of this nonsense entirely.

Genuine question: what's better about the Netflix app? Haven't used Roku. Seems decent on Apple TV.

What really sucks on Apple TV is the YouTube app. It may be Google's single least competent publicly available software engineering.

edited to clarify question

Could not disagree more about goto. Small programs always turn into larger ones. And what you have at the end if you're not from the beginning using practices appropriate for larger programs is spaghetti code.

I'm not criticizing it in context -- a lot of this code dates back to the mid 80's if I'm not mistaken. But always write new code using scalable idioms.

You can't shave if you commit a crime? Is this a New York colloquialism?

Yes. And just to be clear, this was a problem in SF well before the pandemic.

SF’s homeless problem is out of control in a way that it isn’t in most large cities. You can’t say “that’s just life”.