stevecrox
@stevecrox@kbin.social
- Comment on What's up with Epic Games? 10 months ago:
As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released ..
I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren't a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).
Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam' s DRM didn't do that.
The HL2 disc installer didn't require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.
You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.
Steam wasn't always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.
Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.
- Comment on What's up with Epic Games? 10 months ago:
Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.
They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).
The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.
For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.
The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.
As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.
- Comment on We Can’t Hire You. Developers’ Challenge 11 months ago:
I avoid any company that requires a software test before the interview.
I worked for a company that introduced them after I joined, I collected evidence all of the companies top performers wouldn't have joined since we all had multiple offers and having to do the test would put people off applying. The scores from it didn't correlate with interview results so it was being ignored by everyone. Still took 2 years to get rid of it.
The best place used STAR (Situation Task Action Result) based interviews. The goal was to ask questions until you got 2 stars.
I thought these were great because it was more varied and conversational but there was a comparable consistency accross interviewers.
You would inevitably get references to past work and you switch to asking a few questions about that. Since it was around a situation you would get more complete technical explanations (e.g. on that project I wrote an X and Y was really challenging because of Z).
I loved asking "Tell me about something your really proud off". Even a nervous junior would start opening up after that question.
After an hour interview you would end up with enough information you could compare them against the company gradings (junior, senior, etc..).
This was important because it changed the attitude of the interview. It wasn't a case of if the candidate would be a good senior dev for project X, but an assessment of the candidate. If they came out as a lead and we had a lead role, lets offer them that.
- Comment on A new Type of Mastodon Signup that gives people a sense of Agency 11 months ago:
If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.
Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.
The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).
Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.
Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.
It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.
- Comment on 10 months later bill revisits his spaghetti code. forgets absolutely everything and refuses to elaborate 11 months ago:
Basic rule if someone claims X magically solves a problem they don't follow X and are a huge generator of the problem.
For example people who claim they don't need to write comments because they write self documenting code are the people that use variable names x1,x2,y, etc..
Similarly anyone you meet claiming Test Driven Development means they have better tests will write code with appalling code coverage and epically bad tests.
- Comment on Do the people in Reniassance festivals pccurring in Brotain also speak with faked British accents, or do they ise faked French/Iralian accents? 1 year ago:
Thats two hundred years and would cover the end of Plantagenet reign and the Tudor era.
Henry VIII reign happened during that period, at the beginning of your time period everyone would be catholic and at the end Queen Mary of Scotts was executed because the idea of a Catholic on the throne was unthinkable.
The UK is littered with castles and estates, normally they focus on specific historic events which happened at that location.
- Comment on Teach primary pupils real-world maths - Labour 1 year ago:
Using real world applications is changing the problem (what are you trying to solve).
My issue is teaching how you solve the problem.
As an example the indian method to teach multiplication is to draw lines equal to the first number, then perpendicular lines equal to the second and then count the points they bisect (e.g. draw 3 horizontal and 3 vertical lines and they cross 9 times).
Lastly I coach people in Agile (its a way of delivering stuff). An Agile team is brought together because a Product Owner has a problem and a vision on how to solve it.
The biggest factor in motivating a team and getting high performance is the product owners passion for their vision. You can have the most interesting problem in the world, if the product owner doesn't care neither does the team.
I suspect the same is true of teaching
- Comment on Teach primary pupils real-world maths - Labour 1 year ago:
Not really.
There are multiple ways to approach and conceptualise multiplication, division, simultaneous equations, binomial distribution, probability, etc..
I have met a few maths geniuses and we teach Maths the way they think and conceptualise Maths.
In my last job I was viewed as a superstar because I could take the algorithms the data scientists produced and explain them to non data scientists.
I didn't change the underlying maths, I tailored what to explain and examples to use based on my audience. This tended to get people really excited at what the data scientists had done.
Its the same with teaching, people need to understand and conceptualise a problem in a way that makes sense to them.
- Comment on Teach primary pupils real-world maths - Labour 1 year ago:
The issue is we only teach one method for approaching Maths so if you don't get it, tough.
In primary and secondary school I always struggled with Maths. During university I spent most of my energy reverse engineering the maths lessons so I could understand them.
Years later my sister was struggling with her Maths GCSE, I spent one evening explaining how I solve each type of problem. She went from a projected D to getting an A.
I was explaining this to an ex maths teacher who started asking how I approached things. Apparently I used the Indian method for one type of problem, the asian for anouther, etc..
The idea a student was struggling with one way of solving the problem and teaching them alternative methods never occurred because it was "outside the curriculum".
These days I quite like Maths puzzles.
- Comment on Ten Forward Shenanigans 1 year ago:
This has to be THE dad joke meme format
- Comment on They Need To Stop Doing This 1 year ago:
This advice isn't grounded in reality.
Management normally defines ways to track and judge itself, these are typically called Key Performance Indicators.
KPI's are normally things like contract value growth, new contracts signed, profit margin, etc..
So if the project manager is meeting or exceeding their KPI's and you walk up to their boss telling them the PM is failing as basic job functions, the boss won't care.
The boss will only care if there is a KPI you can demonstrate the PM failing to meet.
Every person/group will have various incentives and motivations. To affect change you have to understand what they are.
- Comment on UK small nuclear competition: Rolls Royce in, Bill Gates snubbed 1 year ago:
Wikipedia lists all 12 subs as having Rolls Royce Pressured Water Reactors.
Your PWR reuse idea is is kind of where Rolls Royce is looking to go with Small Modular Reactors (https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx).
I suspect refurbishing decades old PWR reactors would be far more expensive than just building new ones, for example a SpaceX Merlin engine costs $1 million and a Blue Origin BE-4 costs $15 million. Nasa argued it would be 'cheaper' to reuse Shuttle components for the Space Launch System (SLS). Refurbishing Shuttle RS-25 engines has cost Nasa $50 million dollars per engine, restarting a production line is costing $100 million for each new RS-25 engine.
- Comment on They Need To Stop Doing This 1 year ago:
A project manager has responsibility for delivery of a project but they typically lack domain specific knowledge. As a result they can't directly deliver something, merely ask subject matter experts for advice and facilitate a team to deliver.
Most PM's cope with the stress of this position poorly.
This cartoon is an example of micro management (a common coping mechanisim), the manager has involved themselves in the low level decisions because that gives a sense of control. If a technical team then tell them its a bad decison the team are effectively attacking their coping mechanisim.
The solution isn't to tell them their technical idea is terrible, when you've fallen down this rabbit hole you have to treat the PM as a stakeholder. They are someone you have to manage, so a common solution is to give them confidence there is a path to delivery, a way to track and understand it.
- Comment on Wolf 359: The Massacre (part 1) 1 year ago:
I have always had 1 question.
In voyager we see the Borg have thousands of ships of varying sizes and control a vast area of space. Voyager is able to take down spheres and small cubes.
Yet in Wolf 359 a single cube attacks and destroys hundreds of star fleet vessels. If a single cube is able to have that level of effect why didn't the borg commit a larger fleet?
You have the same issue in First Contact, they only commit 1 cube.
- Comment on Brexit: Labour will seek re-write of deal, Starmer says 1 year ago:
Because the Tories have upset everyone internationally, so it isn't really an option. If you've been paying attention the EU has been playing a bunch of jobsworth type games with the UK.
Notice how he will do this in 2025, when the current agreement is up for renewel rather than immediately.
You also have the fact rejoin isn't winding the clock back to 2016, firstly we would loose all of our opt outs, things like the rebate, the euro, etc.. I don't think the reality would actually be popular.
Secondly the UK blocked a number of things like the EU Army (personally I think its a terrible idea, countries that don't spend enough looking to conbine to "save" money) so it isn't the same EU.
Lastly see above mentioned jobsworth behaviour, I would not be surprised if the EU demanded the UK to complete all the paperwork and drag the process out as long as possible (it takes 10 years for most countries).
- Comment on What else do you think they do during those long haul warps? 1 year ago:
Similar to most navies.
Engineering's workload won't really change, they'll do certain types of maintenance.
Most other departments would do training and maintenance so they are ready for various expected scenarios at the destination.
Senior officers will use the time to micro manage, worry and catch up on all the paperwork (personal reviews, intelligence briefs, ship reports, etc..)
- Comment on Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com 1 year ago:
Parameter declarations, array initialisation and lambda alignment is the most common.
Java Lambda expressions can be hundreds of characters long so wrap on to the next line. A lot of code formatters will auto wrap with a single identation.
A lot of developers instead like to align each lambda call with the one above. They feel its more readable, personally I agree.
Normally in DevSecOps I offer a standard code format to a team, I highlight the contentious choices (like spaces or tabs) and ask the team if they have strong feelings about it and then sit back and let them decide.
My only thing is ensuring you don't mix tabs and spaces.
- Comment on Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com 1 year ago:
Parameter declarations, array initialisation and lambda alignment is the most common.
Java Lambda expressions can be hundreds of characters long so wrap on to the next line. A lot of code formatters will auto wrap with a single identation.
A lot of developers instead like to align each lambda call with the one above. They feel its more readable, personally I agree.
Normally in DevSecOps I offer a standard code format to a team, I highlight the contentious choices (like spaces or tabs) and ask the team if they have strong feelings about it and then sit back and let them decide.
- Comment on Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com 1 year ago:
Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.
You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.
This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.
It doesn't matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.
Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.
IDE's support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.
Honestly 99% of people don't care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn't enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis.
- Comment on Linux file system developer: we're severely under-resourced 1 year ago:
I am actually arguing for a stable ABI.
The few times I have had to compile out of tree drivers for the linux kernel its usually failed because the ABI has changed.
Each time I have looked into it, I found code churn, e.g. changing an enum to a char (or the other way) or messing with the parameter order.
If I was empire of the world, the linux kernel would be built using conan.io, with device trees pulling down drivers as dependencies.
The Linux ABI Headers would move out into their own seperately managed project. Which is released and managed at its own rate. Subsystem maintainers would have to raise pull requests to change the ABI and changing a parameter from enum to char because you prefer chars wouldn't be good enough.
Each subsystem would be its own "project" and with a logical repository structure (e.g. intel and amd gpu drivers don't share code so why would they be in the same repo?) And built against the appropriate ABI version with each repository released at its own rate.
Unsupported drivers would then be forked into their own repositories. This simplifies depreciation since its external to the supported drivers and doesn't need to be refactored or maintained. If distributions can build them and want to include the driver they can.
Linus job would be to maintain the core kernel, device trees and ABI projects and provide a bill of materials for a selection of linux kernel/abi/drivers version which are supported.
Lastly since every driver is a descrete buildable component, it would make it far easier for distributions to check if the driver is compatible (e.g. change a dependency version and build) with the kernel ABI they are using and provide new drivers with the build.
None of this will ever happen. C/C++ developers loath dependency management and people can ve stringly attached to mono repos for some reason.
- Comment on Linux file system developer: we're severely under-resourced 1 year ago:
The linux kernel is very old school in how it is run and originally a big part of the DevSecOps movement was removing a lot of manual overhead.
Moving on to something like Gitea (codeberg) so you have a decent pull request view is quicker/easier than posting a patch to a mailing list.
The branching model of the kernel is something people write up on paper that looks great (much like Gitflow) but is really time consuming to manage. Moving to feature branch workflow and creating a release branches as part of the release process allows a ton of things to be automated and simplified.
Similarly file systems aren't really device specific, so you could build system tests for them for benchmarking and standard use cases.
Setting up a CI to perform smoke testing and linting, is fairly standard.
The previous two points are really each to trigger when a new branch is created/updated, this means review becomes reduced to checking business logic which makes reviews really quick and easy.
Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira's support for Epic's/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.
You can do things like define OKR's and then attach Epics to them and Stories/tasks to epics which lets you track progress to goals.
You can use issues the way the linux community currently uses mailing lists.
Combined with a Kanban board for tracking, progress of tickets. You remove a ton of pain.
The issue here is open source issue trackers are missing the key productivity enablers of Jira.
The issue is people, the linux kernel maintainers have been working one way for decades. Getting them to adopt new tools will be heavily resisted, same with changing how they work.
Its like everyone outside, knows a breaking the ABI definition from the sub system implementation would create a far more stable ABI which would solve a bunch of issues and allow change when needed, except no one in the kernel will entertain the idea.
- Comment on This one goes out to the sysadmins in the crowd. 1 year ago:
During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.
Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc..).
I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn't find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).
SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.
2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.
The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc..) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.
I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.
Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.
I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP's)
Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.
- Comment on This one goes out to the sysadmins in the crowd. 1 year ago:
This is why Java rocks with ETL, the language is built to access files via input/output streams.
It means you don't need to download a local copy of a file, you can drop it into a data lake (S3, HDFS, etc..) and pass around a URI reference.
Considering the size of Large Language Models I really am surprised at how poor streaming is handled within Python.
- Comment on Baby boomers are sitting pretty – as millennials foot the bill for high inflation 1 year ago:
The issue is the state pension was raided in the 1980's to allow for reduced taxes and so now an increasingly large chunk of the national budget goes on state pensions.
If you factor in the majority of the NHS budget goes on geriatric care or elder social care you end up with more than 50% of the annual budget is to support the elderly.
Its not sustainable.
I think the easiest approach would be to means test the state pension by using tax thresholds. If your household income (excluding state pension) exceeds the free tax threshold (£12,500) then you don't qualify for a state pension.
Ideally we would increase minimum wage, the tax thresholds and state pension to align with the living wage foundation recommendations.
- Comment on Why US tech giants are threatening to quit the UK 1 year ago:
From a business perspective, you need to assess the impact of the regulation on your profitabiity and then consider if investing business funds elsewhere would lead to greater profitability.
WhatsApp have a single product and have market dominance due to first mover advantage (e.g. everyone is on WhatsApp, so everyone uses WhatsApp). Due to the nature of the business pulling out doesn't make sense unless they only have a limited development team and having them work on UK legal requirements prevents them working on EU requirements, however they are largely similar...
Many 'BigTech' products were developed by small teams, the biggest barrier for entering the market isn't technology but user adoption (KBin, Mastodon, PeerTube & Lemmy demonstrate this, all were developed by 1-2 people in their spare time).
So a 'BigTech' company exiting would be giving up the market in that country and any profit and creating an opportunity for a new small company to grow and eventually compete with them. For example is Facebook pulled out, I'm guessing people would switch to NextDoor.
The US Technology sector is filled with Libretarians who get upset at the idea of regulation. I'm not sure Shareholders/Venture Capitalists would react well to them being irrational.
- Comment on Wilko collapses into administration putting 12,000 jobs at risk 1 year ago:
I think they mean Woolworths.
Fun story...
Plymouth's Woolworths was the largest in the country with the largest revenue (and profit). For 5 years it had no regional manager because no one from head office wanted to trek that far. As a result it was completely ignored and not refitted or supported.
During that period head office made us all do an employee survey. One of the questions was "Do you think Woolworths will still be here in 5 years". The store manager got shouted at because our store of 100 all said "no".
After much consideration we were all made to redo the questionaire, this time without the question.
Just as I left a regional manager was appointed who dictated floor layout changes. Being months from finishing university I told him his changes defied how shoppers acted and would cost the store thousands. He told me I was just a shop worker and knew nothing.
A week later on daily revenue of £10k-£20k (Saturday was £100k) the store was down £50k for the week. Apparently he forced more changes and it got worse.
Everyone I talk to in retail has similar stories, all of it is terribly managed.
- Comment on Star Trek: Discovery | Fifth and Final Season - Extended Clip | SDCC 2023 1 year ago:
It never quite finds its grove.
Season 1, 2 & 3 all had fantastic premises I would have loved 7 seasons of but were all unrelated and concluded within a season.
Season 4 actually demonstrates the missed opportunity, they deal with the fall out of season 3
For example if you think of the scene set in "A Vulkan Hello", you would have ended up with an Action focussed version of DS9.
You didn't need a spore drive, Jason Isaacs could have stayed the same and we could still have watched scientists struggle to become soliders with the war causing the type of fall out we see in Season 4.
- Comment on UK battles to reverse EU endorsement of ‘Islas Malvinas’ name 1 year ago:
The EU keeps attacking the UK through petty vindictive actions like this.
The EU spokesperson clearly knew using Las Malvinas would be perceived as support of Argentina's claim to the island which would upset the UK.
He justified it as the UK isn't a member any longer, so no one was there to object. However in Geopolitics you send messages like that to send a message to the world stage and they knew it would upset the UK.
Considering none of the Islanders want to to be Argentinian and "winning" would be subjugation and possibly genocide of its people. Someone really should point out to Germans and East European's that in their zeal to pubish the UK, EU officials have directly endorsed such actions