dajt

Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society.

It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value.

The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.

I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.

I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.

This is a massive pain at my work, same as I'm sure most other comments are saying.

I use Platform.IO for firmware development and can't build my firmware unless I hotspot my phone. I would say that's a PIO bug unless there is a flag I don't know about, but it's exposed by this nuisance of a firewall.

The devs where I am spend much of our time hotspotted to our phones with the corporate network never connected so IP goes out over the mobile network.

Whenever possible we use 'do not verify server certs' flags in libs and commands which is not ideal.

You won't. I tried uv the other day. But I'm too old to want to run a child process just to draw a prompt.

I should know what git branch I'm in, and if I don't it's a simple command away.

That does look pretty good. I wouldn't bother with the time but I like the rest of it.

For most of my nearly 40 years in work I had PS1='$ ' and PS2='> '.

A few years ago I progressed to having the current directory in there.

The thought of running a child process to create my prompt every time I hit enter doesn't feel right.

I used Scintilla as the editing component for a JavaScript IDE about 20 years ago, was good.

Proper nerd chic, that site. Love it!

I really doubt that. Java is complicated enough that it's not beginner friendly even if you don't have to write the class to put main into.

Given these are still methods of classes this JEP seems pointless to me. Not having to write class x {} isn't a great time saver.

LOL.

I have been programming for over 30 years on all sorts of systems and the Pandas DataFrame API is completely beyond me. Just trying to get a cell value seems way more difficult than it should be.

Same with xarray datasets.

I just loaded the same CSV into Pandas and Polars and Polars did a much better job of it.

Exactly! I've been around long enough to experience that series of events from top to bottom.

That's the weird thing about this business. There's always a new generation saying 'this is dumb, we should do it differently' and things bounce back and forth.

As you say, smart terminals are one reason why an old mainframe could support so many users with so few resources - all that display and input processing offloaded in a very distributed fashion.

Web and Electron apps make me weep for what was.

And web rings to proudly be part of :)

I hate making tools rather than models but I know tools is the hobby for many people and enjoy watching other people make them on YouTube.

I agree, being able to harden steel or anneal copper or cut threads is awesome :)

I love having the machines & tools. It's nice to know I can make something, and it's even come in handy for work a few times despite the fact I'm a software developer - brackets or adapters that must be metal and not 3D printed.

You will have saved money at some point... perhaps 40 years from now!

I'll never recoup what I spent on the machines, but other people spend that much on travel and hobbies (like motorcycles) every couple of years so it's not an outlandishly expensive hobby.

It's about 1/11 scale of the real one, so the next size up from what Blondiehacks is building, and a bit more complicated and detailed. But essentially the same thing, a steam loco that runs on coal & water and works just like the real thing in every respect. See https://i.imgur.com/GuHR2j6.jpg

It can haul me and about 8 or 10 other people. It's a pretty popular hobby - look for live steam on YouTube.

I do 'model engineering' which is mostly metalwork, and it's about the same.

You end up with something tangible but it really hurts when you make a mistake many hours into a part and have to scrap it and start again. Especially if it's not plain old steel, so just cost a lot. You do learn to save a part from some types of mistakes but it's not always possible.

I think it's great that software lets you build castles in the air and mistakes generally only cost time, and fixes or improvements can be incremental but it does get old when many projects are scrapped before being used so you feel like you're just wasting time.

I find the 'no undo' and a perfectionistic streak add immeasureably to the stress of my 'hobby' but now I have finally finished my steam loco after 10 years I do like looking at it and driving it.

Well, we are on HN. We have to make allowances.

That was it. You had to organise amongst yourselves who was editing which program, and there was no version code control other than anything you could come up with using manual copies. It was primitive.

I was using an Amiga at home and had been using Xenix and honest to god AT&T UNIX in my previous job so had some idea of what I was missing. I also used IBM S36s and weird Burroughs things so had a pretty wide education on different types of systems in a short time.

In the early 90s we ported our COBOL software from the Wang VS to various typs of UNIX by purchasing and extending a Wang VS runtime emulator.

Then I wrote a terminal emulator for Windows 3.1 that would parse the forms sent down by the runtime and display them as something that looked like a Windows app. This wasn't too difficult because mini & mainframe systems present data entry pages a whole screen at a time, like a windows form.

My first jobs in the late 80s/early 90s were COBOL programming. At my second one I finally convinced the management to put me onto the tools team who wrote the code generators for the '4GL'.

One of the things I did was write a COBOL pre-processor (in C) to allow re-use of code and variables so the variables looked like locals rather than globals.

Someone has to do those jobs, but what offends people is the extent to which that class keep giving themselves more all the time, and exponentially more than what happens to the rest of us. All jobs are important, not just the C suite.

They get paid appalling amounts of money when they're just treading water - it's not fair they also get good payouts when they stuff up so monumentally.

Most people don't get paid out to the end of their contract if they're let go early, or not that I've seen and if you're let go for ineptitude why should they?

This is just different rules for the rich. I'm sure he'd survive much better even without that money than any other employee being let go with their much less generous package.

Only until they figure out how to make Severance a reality. I'm sure the C suite would love that to bits.

How did you inject the machine code into a running program on anything near a modern architecture? Unless you had your own OS, wouldn't code segments be RO and data segments not executable?

I don't know enough about any processor created in the last 30 years to know if running bare metal without a commercial OS would allow you to not have those constraints.

I agree. I've managed 14 letters but it's not enough fun - every letter takes too much effort and there's no sense of dominos falling yet. I assume there is some tipping point but it feels too far off.

Maybe this is why I can't get one of those ludicrously paid FAANG jobs :)

This drove me mad when I had to do introductory maths at uni. Maths as written did seem pretty sloppy and not at all like a programming language whose expressions I could parse as I expected. Obv most simple algebra looks about as you'd expect but I clearly recall feeling exactly what you describe in some cases, and commented upon it to the lecturer about it asking why it was that way during a tutorial. He humoured me, was a good guy.

But I think mathematicians probably have a point - it did evolve that way over a long time and anyone practicing it daily just knows how to do it and they're not going to do a thorough review and change now.

It's us tourists that get thrown for a loop, but so it goes. It's not meant for us.

Yep, this stuff is maddening.

We always think that will be the outcome, but it never is. Except for one particularly bad small system I managed to replace with a slightly less bad one!

Prefacing this with the fact my office is essentially a farm, so quite nice surroundings, and also only a 10 minute drive away from home in a regional town, so there's no awful commute involved.

It's still not the same - I was part of a team for 5 or 6 years and never met them in person. Apparently I wasn't important enough to fly to the US even once to meet everyone.

We had very little rapport, didn't know each other at all, it was a very poor experience of being in a team and extremely demoralising and inefficient.

I took my current job because I wanted to go back to the office and get to know my team mates properly. It's much better.

I do like the hybrid approach, I can basically work from home whenever I want, but I go to the office most working days. I probably work from home less than 3 weeks of the year all up, and usually when I need to do something here I can't do at work like making some brackets or similar.

The incidental conversations you have, short brainstorming sessions over breaks and lunch, just being socially closer, makes a massive difference.

I used to go for smoke breaks with a different project leader, even though I don't smoke, because we could spend that time talking about stuff related to our projects and bounce ideas off each other. That job was also in an awesome startup complex that used to be a railway workshop - way cooler than sitting around in my spare bedroom on my own.

I admit I'm no fan of too dense an open plan or hot desking - both dehumanising efforts - and eating at your desk should be banned.

Slack/teams/whatever isn't on the same planet.

In addition to how many distractions there are now - youtube & stream services, and much better games than in the 80s, the barrier to entry is so much higher.

I had a C64 and only the docs that came with it, until I eventually found a couple of books on assembly, one not even for the C64. But even with that scarcity of info I was just desperate to know how it worked and how to make it do things.

But look at how complex a computer is today! Even though there is endless info for free, it's just too difficult to get something fun going.

Early PCs were still understandable, but todays GPUs etc are just a different world, and expectations are sky high when you see the current gen games. Even an 'indy pixel game' is no laughing matter to create.

30+ years ago I was programming for companies doing business software - ERP etc, and there were very few 'hackers' in the ranks. These guys and gals must have enjoyed programming at some point but I guess the software was so boring it just leached the joy out of it.

Certainly by the mid-late 80s there were far more day job programmers around than hackers.

In one company I managed to find a few fellow hackers, but the next one I worked at - nothing. It was awful.

Luckily after that I managed to get more interesting work for a while, but then I spent too long in the wrong part of Oracle and again, I just couldn't find fun in the coding we were doing and no-one else could either.

I think true hackers or enthusiasts have always been in the minority, at least since the late 70s I'd guess.