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. There was a big basket by the computer hall where they’d deposit your card deck and a massive printout on fanfold paper of the job status and (if it went tits up) the stack dump.

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 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 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.

Is the US government now a “Russia-aligned threat actor” too? Just wondering.

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.

It’s the endarkenment.

Stopping pollution at the source is much more thermodynamically efficient.

I made sure to replace all my comments and posts with obscene lorem ipsum before leaving.

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.

It’ll be deeply satisfying if spez ends up with nothing. His mismanagement and tolerance for fascism are why I quit using the site.

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.

It works, but not all that well. The hair that comes back tends to be really thin.

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.

But it’s very much luck of the draw.

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.

It’s down to poor product quality, safety issues, emerging competitors, and Musk swanning around acting like a bell-end.

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.”

“BYD is my co-pilot.”

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.

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.

That sounds like conclusive proof that sound quality is determined by the shittiest component in the signal chain.

A family member is an audio engineer (now also a producer) who owns a good recording studio, and we’ve A/B tested lossy vs lossless on good equipment. He hears things that I don’t, my ear is somewhat untrained. But at mp3 bitrates below 320, I can hear compression artifacts, especially in percussion instruments and acoustic guitar. But if you’re listening in your car or while wearing Bluetooth earbuds while you’re out walking, you probably won’t notice unless the mp3 bitrate is really dismal.