coldcode

I once worked for a company during Dotcom that failed to pay rent for 7 months, was then forced into Chap 7 at 4:30 PM on a Thursday (we were given 30 mins to vacate the office). The building management then padlocked the doors leaving everything inside for the next 7 months while the they and the major creditor fought over rent and the contents. Turned out the building and the creditor were in fact parts of the same company - Merrill Lynch. They locked themselves out.

You can go quite long without paying rent.

I bought a C compiler at my job in 1984 because I thought it was the future, then spent nearly a decade writing MacOS apps in C. I even added object extensions to it (for our use) in 1989 because C++ was not an option yet.

I worked with Objective-C in the late 90s and again in the 2010s, which is basically C with funky object stuff.

I don't miss it at all. C is very low level and so easy to write bad code in if you don't have solid discipline, the language doesn't help at all, which was not really a design decision back then. The first C compiler we used didn't even support prototypes.

I exclusively use Swift now.

SABRE is ancient technology, but very reliable and at the same time extremely inflexible. Last time I saw it upclose in the early 2000's much of the core was still coded in IBM assembler, although over the decades more pieces were slowly being modernized so I have no idea where it is now. Sabre is a horrifically un- imaginative company where projects are measured in years and not much every changes.

I think though Southwest's issues are more on their side.

Yeah building a new GDS today is an exercise in insanity, it's a huge complexity nightmare and switching probably impossible. I always wondered if AI could eventually improve things, but the existing GDSs are unlikely to care much to try. It's basically a (tri)monopoly you can never break.

I always loved APL when I was a student around 1980, I had access to the little IBM "transportable" that supported APL and Basic, I think it was the 5100 or 5110. I remember writing a little table tennis game in APL, which was likely unreadable to me a day later.

Real work is more than making snippets of things. At my last employer, changes were requested every single day, in large and small ways, requiring insane amounts of reworking previous ideas in the codebase on a continuous basis without breaking everything. I wonder how well this AI would do on an entire application that wasn't predetermined. That might take much longer to achieve than solving small problems.

I imagine an AI in that kind of environment inventing Skynet and doing us all in.

It's not about hosting, it's about discovery. If no one knows your content exists, no one will read it. At least on Medium you have an opportunity to be seen. Sure, if you already have a huge online presence, then you don't need that. But starting from zero you need some way for people to find you.

You can for example use Ghost to host your content, then syndicate it to Medium. But just sticking a website on the internet is pointless if no one will see it.

My first exposure was in the 6th grade, around 1969 or so, we took a field trip to a local university with a computer. They set up a terminal to run the fox-chicken-corn puzzle, so each student got to try to solve it once. I kept wondering how a machine understood things about animals and vegatables. I retired in 2021 after 40 years as a programmer. Never underestimate a good introduction to a subject for a kid.

At my last (non tech, extremely large) employer we joked that every product (supporting our business, not standalone) was Maximum Viable Product, as every user story was required for launch, including endless change requests. Sometimes we even shipped something when they ran out of ideas...

The main issue to me seems to be sideloading apps, playstore apps seem to be protected. Sideloaded apps could be anything since its the app key that is compromised.

I finally retired in 2021 as I was working too many hours. At least the last year was at home, so I could avoid the hour commute. Most of the people I needed to meet with were 3000 mi away from me anyway, my immediate team sat around me, but we still talked on slack all day anyway. There was little reason to be in the office. WFH saved me a lot of wasted time, although I missed having lunch with people every day, and teaching new team members what we were doing on a white board was handy; otherwise nothing else helped.

In my long career I saw every kind of environment, cubes, open office, bullpens, private offices, and shared offices. I could cope with any environment and still get work done, sometimes having everyone you needed within spitting distance was useful for quick questions, but not everyone is good at task switching, so it's not always helpful. I found my best productivity was quiet + instant comms (such as Slack). When the people you need to talk with are spread out over multiple time zones, being in an office, especially and open one, is terrible, especially if people insist on having calls on a phone or computer with a mike. Hearing 10 meetings going on at the same time is a killer.

Offices are nice if you can close the door, but who gives you offices any more? Companies seem to prefer cramming people into sardine cans these days.

As an artist I love when when other artists push the edge of art and do something different. These are amazingly inventive.

Having done some XSLT coding I agree; it's a language that was both unreadable and unwritable.

I worked as an engineer for a very large non tech company (but used a lot of tech, both bought and in-house). We had 100s of teams supporting services, internal apps (web and mobile), external apps (web and mobile), and connections to vendors plus a huge infrastructure in the real world that interconnected to all of this. One time someone changed something in a single data center (I vaguely remember some kind of DNS or routing update) and every single system worldwide failed in a short time. Even after the issue was resolved, it took most of a day and hundreds of people to successfully restart everything, all while our actual business had to continue without pissing off all of our customers. The triage was brutal as to what mattered most.

You can't do this without a lot of people. Sure you could pare it down, maybe improve some architecture, but without a ton of people involved who understand the systems and how they connect, when things might go south they may never return.

If I were inexperienced and clueless I might, but I am neither. I have worked at places where I was tasked with supporting something no on there knew anything about and made it work. But they were apps used internally or for a limited customer base, not a giant system processing millions of things per minute. I have worked at places with hundreds of teams building services that interoperated in many ways and the thought of jumping into that with no one having internal knowledge is insane. I have also worked for CEOs that were terrible and that's generally no fun either. Combine that with unsustainable 70 hour weeks for months on end, and the sum of that is not worth it.

Is there a $ figure where these things are acceptable? I guess there could be, but unlikely to be found at a company with so much debt and losing income left and right. Of course if work yourself to death no amount of money is spendable...

It will until it stops. Then no one will be available to make it go again. Inertia eventually fails.

It's not universal, my iPhone 14 pro with 16.1 does not crash for any letters I can type, spaces or not. Suggestions work fine for me. Clearly there is another factor not obvious causing the crash. In any case Apple would see a whole influx of crash reports (assuming they are as anal about them as I used to be).

Given how much engineers make at Google after a long interview process to supposedly only get the best people, how significant the login system is to security, how "industry standard" the Google process is, it's not a bug that should have ever made it live. The bug fix show that the issue was clearly a case of a set of people not communicating well, code reviews being lax, and a general lack of understanding of how Android works.

It's also possible that the code is too complex to understand fully which is a requirement for a correct operation. Bugs happen, but I've seen way too many cases where complexity and lack of understanding led to surprisingly bad outcomes.

The login process should have the highest amount of scrutiny.

It's interesting, but still a small sample size in a single country with potentially similar gut microbiomes. It would be much more meaningful to do the same study across different parts of the world and with a larger number of people. I think in some parts of the world it might be difficult to find enough people who don't consume any artificial sweeteners. If you never consume any and now take the test amounts, is that different than consuming it for many years? Could the effect of the test in people not continuously exposed to the sweeteners be different than those who use it routinely?

I would rather be at ground zero for any missile that works (assuming most of them won't even get out of their silo due to corruption). While much of the world will survive initially, the disruption to economies world wide will likely kill a ton of people conventionally due to hunger, lack of water, healthcare, and violence. That's not likely to be very pleasant anywhere. Humanity would survive, but for a lot of people it might be a short miserable life. Even today there are many places suffering a terrible existence; imagine that on a global scale where no one can afford to help other countries.

Hmm if your money is in Charles Schwab, and NY is turned into atoms, do they have backups in non-attacked countries, along with infrastructure to run their code on, and there is a functional internet connection from there to you, maybe. I highly doubt all that will work. Meanwhile you have no money.

At my last employer before retiring (not tech but used a lot) has a very unique (and way larger than Twitter) complex set of businesses. They change at an insane pace and often involve things that in the end don't ship, resulting in crazy complex code base networks. We also had 100's of teams building every kind of software imaginable (server api's, web apps, mobile apps, internal apps, hardware with embedded code, etc). Anyone from the outside coming in cold to examine the code would have no idea where to even start, much less be able to evaluate anything. It's not that any individual thing was necessarily complex, but there were so many interconnected business practices and related businesses that understanding how they relate is very hard for anyone who has been there for years much less someone from an unrelated industry.

For example you could look at my team's mobile codebases and probably figure out what was going on, but understanding all the services we consumed, and what they consumed, etc. (given the deep mix of micro services and macroservices) would make understanding the why of the entire system impossible.

Mentor Pilot's videos are top notch. Watching this one made me dizzy I can't imagine debugging a system while enduring 4+ Gs.

I am not normally claustrophobic, but being tall and some of these shafts are very low, I would be unlikely to make it very far before abandoning the attempt. I am glad I saw this though, I can at least do it remotely.

How anyone did this originally and to rob the place, is amazing.

I must resist asking if it used Java. I would love to see the Vasa but have not made it to Stockholm yet. I did see the Mary Rose in Portsmouth which was incredibly fascinating to see (large portions of the ship remain so you can see the layout). Mary Rose is from the century prior to Vasa and Äpplet.

My first interview for my first job in 1981 consisted of the manager asking me general programming questions ending in a description of an errant program which I had to explain how I would figure out what was wrong, and what it was likely to be. No whiteboards, no coding, nothing. That was the only interview, and I was hired on the spot, despite having 0 work programming experience and 0 college education in programming (was chemistry major, programmed for fun on an Apple ][). Highly unlikely to happen so easy today. I retired recently after nearly 40 years as a working programmer.

Losing your house and possibly family members is a poor investment strategy. When you community is wiped up it can take years to rebuild it and it might not recovered entirely at all. You might have no good place to live since everyone is in the same boat in your area; your job might vanish if you were not remotely working (like retail or manufacturing); you might lose your savings before you eventually get some of it back, or might be unable to last that long.

It might be profitable to buy up property from people who are financially destitute and willing to sell at any price and then sell once everything is rebuilt, but that a long term investment. Also if you get multiple disasters at once (Florida was lucky to only be hit by 1 hurricane) you might wind up at the tail end of rebuilding like Puerto Rico and never be able to sell.

Driving off road works too! One thing I wish it had was a look around function so you could admire the scenery when not driving.

My browser is not supported. Maybe they should tell me why.

If they were at all time highs the stock market would not be done so much.

Here in FL there is a Publix on every corner.