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You’re quite clearly wrong.

You write code to fit the immediate business need and that shifts rapidly over a year or two.

If you do otherwise, you’re wasting your time and the money of the enterprise you work for.

You cannot see the future however smart you might be.

All code is legacy. Business needs shift.

The likes of Copilot are ok at boiler-plate if it has an example or two to follow. It’s utterly useless at solving problems though.

OnlyMortalon Mathematician solves algebra's oldest problem using intriguing number sequences

Lagrange? I see your point.

I’ll get my coat.

OnlyMortalon Bloom Filters

Such as deduplication.

OnlyMortalon Chimpanzees act as 'engineers', choosing materials to make tools

throws faeces

Nonsense!

Source: Engineer

OnlyMortalon Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover

I heard that, in the Netherlands after WW2, the descendants of people who starved were shorter in height even though they were born after the war.

Admittedly this was from a Dr Karl podcast.

OnlyMortalon IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

Heh. I worked on the Mac version of ViaVoice. I joined as I was already an expert in AppKit and Obj-C.

We were given old Macs running Classic to run Notes so we had two computers. One being MacOSX. Notes was the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had to use. With one exception…

On the OSX box we were happily running svn until we were forced to use some IBM command-line system for source control. To add insult to injury, the server was in Texas and we were in Boca Raton (old PC factory as it happens). The network was slow.

It had so many command-line options a guy wrote a TCL for it.

Adding to that was the local IBM lan was token ring and we were Ethernet. That was fun.

OnlyMortalon Hyperspace

That’s very interesting. Typically a Rabin fingerprint is used to identify identical chunks of data.

Identifying similar blocks and, maybe sub-rechunking isn’t something I’ve ever considered.

OnlyMortalon Cannonball: An enhanced OutRun engine

I assume he’s clipping hidden surfaces?

OnlyMortalon Sombrero Galaxy dazzles in new James Webb image

I see what you did there :-)

OnlyMortalon How I ship projects at big tech companies

:-) I worked in the first OSX version. I did the AppKit UI being one of the few on the planet who had a NeXT background.

It came with a UK language model as the US model didn’t recognise my accent.

OnlyMortalon Show HN: We built the simplest Online Unit Converter for everyday use

My personal favourite unit converter is here: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

OnlyMortalon How I ship projects at big tech companies

Heh. I can relate to seeing your product on a shelf.

I recall seeing IBM ViaVoice X on shelves a Circuit City. It was rather an ego trip.

OnlyMortalon Kernel optimization with BOLT (binary optimization and layout tool)

Back in the day on the Mac, the order of source files in your project would determine locality in the binary.

If memory serves, this was with MPW C or maybe CodeWarrior.

You could see the jump (jmp) instructions use short jumps rather than long ones.

OnlyMortalon Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back

In a car they’re a distraction from driving. You have to look at the iPad stuck to the dash and not on the road - where the driver’s focus must be.

With knobs and buttons, you can feel for them whilst still having your vision in the road.

This must make it safer to drive.

As a MX5 (ND) driver, even having a knob to scroll around the screen is a poor design choice. Touch would have been better (you can hack that) whilst driving but, frankly, this kind of car shouldn’t have a screen at all. It’s a driving car, not a home entertainment system.

OnlyMortalon New iMac with M4

People also don’t get the idea of an appliance.

OnlyMortalon How to do distributed locking (2016)

Interesting. We went through a similar process and ended up with Yugabyte to deal with the locks (cluster).

It’s based on Postgres but performance was not good enough.

We’re now moving to RDMA.

OnlyMortalon Show HN: Coros – A Modern C++ Library for Task Parallelism

Have you had a look at SeaStar and how it works with coroutines?

OnlyMortalon Nintendo Files Suit for Infringement of Patent Rights Against Pocketpair, Inc

Here’s a link to a video about loading games on the C64: https://youtu.be/YUigiY53YCs

OnlyMortalon Graphics Tricks from Boomers

I miss 68k assembler. Doing Amiga demos or Polytechnic work on a ST.

I ended up doing Mac 68k and C after Poly in the early 90s.

OnlyMortalon PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok

I used to crack C64 disk games. They were mostly trivial because I wrote a disk sector editor that would disassemble blocks on demand.

One that comes to mind were Ocean’s copy protection that was hacked by a load of 1 into the accumulator and a return. They had a “bool IsValidDisk()” type of routine.

After cracking one of their games I could crack others in less than 2 minutes directly on a copied floppy.

OnlyMortalon How many attempts (businesses) did you make until you reach $5000/month profit?

I’m inclined to agree with you.

Having a great product is meaningless if you can’t get people to buy it.

If you’re a one person shop, you need to learn the skills needed.

OnlyMortalon NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles per Hour

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

OnlyMortalon Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?

Pascal was a first class citizen. Indeed, quite alot of the original Mac was Pascal and 68k assembler. For example, strings were prefixed with a length byte as is popular in the Pascal world.

Apple even shipped a Pascal compiler with their MPW Shell - a development environment.

Personally, I used MPW C and 68k.

OnlyMortalon The Curse of Knowledge

Users don’t understand your app as it’s not been built using workflows an end user follows.

As for code not being understandable, that’s just poor coding in a team.

OnlyMortalon What purpose did the lower-right Enter key serve on original Mac 128k keyboard?

I recall it was used to execute a command line of text in MPW Shell.

You could triple click a line or select a range of text containing shell commands and hit the key to run.

I do miss that as I had a scrapbook page of useful scripts.

OnlyMortalon Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found

You might check capacitors and it’s possible the power supply is bad.

OnlyMortalon Pascal65: A compiler and IDE that runs natively on Commodore's 8-bit computers

For those who will work on a modern machine and cross-compile, Turbo Rascsal will give you a Turbo Pascal-like IDE.

https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu...

OnlyMortalon Pascal65: A compiler and IDE that runs natively on Commodore's 8-bit computers

16, 48 or 128k

OnlyMortalon 1991 WWW-NeXT Implementation

Which, initially, was a reskinned OpenStep and a PowerPlant Finder.