futatorius
@futatorius@lemm.ee
- Comment on What 5 Megabytes of Computer Data Looked Like in 1966 ~ Vintage Everyday 16 hours ago:
When I started in software, my first employer was just phasing out punched cards for programming. One of my jobs was to work out how programming would be done using terminals instead of the old workflow of submitting coding sheets to card-punch operators who would then pass the jobs on to operations. Typically you’d find out if your code compiled the next morning.
By that time (late 1970s), cards had sequence numbers (usually numbered 10, 20, 30 so you could interpolate a few cards if need be). If you dropped a deck on the floor, you just had to carefully gather them back up (so they wouldn’t get bent or torn), feed them into a card sort machine, and wait until the deck was sorted. You could also run a special batch job to clone a card deck, for example if you wanted to box it up and ship it to another location.
The big challenge with cardless programming was that computer reliability wasn’t great in those days, so you needed highly reliable persistent storage of some kind. That was generally magnetic tape. Disk drives were way too expensive, and optical disks hadn’t been widely adopted yet. So to save your work, you used tar or some non-/Unix-OS equivalent. There was version-control software, but it was primitive (rcs, which later had svn built over it).
On the positive side, you could compile and build without an overnight wait.
- Comment on Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS? 4 days ago:
When I got into the business in the late 1970s, there was strong selective pressure in favor of people being capable and smart. Back then, software didn’t offer a lucrative career path for people with good memories, conformist instincts and a superficial command of MBA jargon. The people who had coding jobs and who didn’t wash out had it in their blood. There were lots of bullshitters, just as there are now, but they failed rapidly and were driven out.
I’m a bit younger than the OG greybeards (and a lot younger than people like Don Knuth). I’ve been in the business for longer than most coders have been alive. During that time, I’ve reskilled more times than I can count, and I still write code, though it’s mainly prototype and proof-of-concept stuff at this stage in my career, when the development team gets stuck.
And that’s the thing: I’m not there to block new people from submitting pull requests. I’m there to help get the job done. If you find the whole process opaque and need mentoring, just ask.
- Comment on Apple Maps now shows the Gulf of America 5 days ago:
It’s the endarkenment.
- Comment on Solar-powered device captures carbon dioxide from air to make sustainable fuel 6 days ago:
Stopping pollution at the source is much more thermodynamically efficient.
- Comment on Reddit Blames Google Algorithm Changes For Not Hitting User Growth. 1 week ago:
I made sure to replace all my comments and posts with obscene lorem ipsum before leaving.
- Comment on Reddit Blames Google Algorithm Changes For Not Hitting User Growth. 1 week ago:
That’s been happening for a while, even before AI came in. Fascist mods pretending to be on the spectrum had the same result: bizarre, contorted interpretations of rules, selectively applied with zero-tolerance. Always in subs with a population of fascist mods, and always applied against people making anti-fascist comments. What a fucking coincidence.
- Comment on Reddit Blames Google Algorithm Changes For Not Hitting User Growth. 1 week ago:
It’ll be deeply satisfying if spez ends up with nothing. His mismanagement and tolerance for fascism are why I quit using the site.
- Comment on First Trump DOJ Assembled “Tiger Team” To Rewrite Key Law Protecting Online Speech. 1 week ago:
If platforms are protected from the speech of their users, they shouldn’t be allowed to censor the speech of their users (unless that speech is actually criminal, as in defamation or specific, actionable death threats). The big platforms shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.
- Comment on Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness? 1 week ago:
It works, but not all that well. The hair that comes back tends to be really thin.
- Comment on Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness? 1 week ago:
I had postcard white-guy Jesus hair, hanging to the middle of my back, straight and reddish blond. A beard too. I went bald in my mid-40s and now what’s left around the fringes is white. People who see pictures of me from back in the day don’t recognize me.
- Comment on Man who lost $780 million in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump before city closes the site 1 week ago:
But it’s very much luck of the draw.
- Comment on Is Tesla’s sales slump down to Elon Musk? 1 week ago:
Yeah, to give the devil his due, Ford really was a genius engineer, both of the car itself (it was made to be maintainable by someone with almost no special tools or expertise) and even more, of the manufacturing process. Too bad he was also a Nazi even before there were Nazis.
- Comment on Is Tesla’s sales slump down to Elon Musk? 1 week ago:
It’s down to poor product quality, safety issues, emerging competitors, and Musk swanning around acting like a bell-end.
- Comment on Google's AI made up a fake cheese fact that wound up in an ad for Google's AI, perfectly highlighting why relying on AI is a bad idea 1 week ago:
It’s an obsolete usage of “beg”
It’s a misuse of the cliche “begs the question” (which goes back to medieval Latin petitio principii) which is used to call out a form of fallacious reasoning where the desired answer is smuggled into the assumptions. And yeah, that use of “beg” is obsolete, but even worse, the whole phrase is now misused to mean “prompts the question.”
- Comment on Chinese EV leader BYD to offer ‘God’s Eye’ self-driving system on all models 1 week ago:
“BYD is my co-pilot.”
- Comment on Elon Musk just offered to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion 1 week ago:
OpenAI is not a public company and thus doesn’t have a fiduciary duty
Public companies only have fiduciary duty to their sharehoders to the extent that their corporate charters say that they do. It’s entirely possible to launch a corporation that promises nothing to its shareholders, though it might be difficult to find investors.
- Comment on Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3? 1 week ago:
The abstraction away of the idea of files and folders is a deliberate user disempowerment strategy by app and mobile OS creators. The underlying concept is that the app owns the data, you don’t. It also conceals the fact that use of standard file formats and directory structure conventions were developed to facilitate interoperability: apps come and go, but the data was meant to live on regardless. Of course, vendors want to break interoperability since doing so enables lock-in. Even when the format of the underlying content is standarized, they’ll still try to fuck you over by imposing a proprietary metadata standard.
Just another example of enshittification at work.
- Comment on How JavaScript Overuse Ruined the Web 2 weeks ago:
conservatives think someone who talks a lot with convictions is right
- Comment on Give permission. Don't give permission. They know where you are anyway 2 weeks ago:
Multiple middlemen are better than just one. Also, you can test its effectiveness.
- Comment on Trump signs order establishing a sovereign wealth fund that he says could buy TikTok 2 weeks ago:
He’s off the leash. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court will stop him.
- Comment on Trump signs order establishing a sovereign wealth fund that he says could buy TikTok 2 weeks ago:
That’s not socialism. It’s state capitalism. Socialism would mean the workers owned (and controlled, not just nominally owned) the means of production.
- Comment on AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications 2 weeks ago:
They can use their AI to check if I’m using AI in my job application.
- Comment on Study of 8k Posts Suggests 40+% of Facebook Posts are AI-Generated 2 weeks ago:
Well, there’s also 0.1% who are relatives of old people who are tring to keep in touch with the batty old meme-forwarders. I was one of those until the ones who mattered most to me shuffled off this mortal coil.
- Comment on Study of 8k Posts Suggests 40+% of Facebook Posts are AI-Generated 2 weeks ago:
They should bring back chain shot.
- Comment on Two decades after Enron’s bankruptcy, the company is back as a crypto firm? 1 month ago:
Crypto is one of the only businesses where use of the Enron name could conceivably improve their reputation.
- Comment on San Francisco tech company Forward, once worth $1B, abruptly shuts down 2 months ago:
Why would they use real doctors at all?
- Comment on Kroger’s plans to roll out facial recognition at its grocery stores is attracting criticism from lawmakers, who warn it could lead to surge pricing and put customers’ personal data at risk 3 months ago:
This is a privacy intrusion that should be banned nationally.
- Comment on Reddit says it is not covered by new Online Safety Code as it has moved its jurisdiction to the Netherlands 3 months ago:
And some subreddits have fascist mods who arbitrarily ban anyone who’s not a alt-right or worse.
- Comment on [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse 4 months ago:
Interoperability is a big job, but the extent to which it matters varies widely according to the use case. There are layers of standards atop other standards, some new, some near deprecation. There are some extremely large and complex datasets that need a shit-ton of metadata to decipher or even extract. Some more modern dataset standards have that metadata baked into the file, but even then there are corner cases. And the standards for zero-trust security enclaves, discoverability, non-repudiation, attribution, multidimensional queries, notification and alerting, pub/sub are all relatively new, so we occasionally encounter operational situations that the standards authors didn’t anticipate.
- Comment on [Cory Doctorow] With An Audacious Plan To Halt The Internet’s Enshittification And Throw It Into Reverse 4 months ago:
TripAdvisor has better content. Too many Google reviews give a business 1 star because the review author was too stupid to check working hours, or has some incredibly rare digestive condition that they didn’t bother to communicate to the eatery before ordering. Or they expect their Basque waiter to speak fluent Latvian, or to accommodate a walk-in party of 20.