Grammatik ran in 64K of RAM on a Z80 running CP/M. (The binary included a Forth interpreter so there was a lot of straight up code compaction.) So yeah, you could catch a lot of common English-language infelicities in a startlingly resource constrained environment... in 1983. Certainly a lot more than typos.
(The reason I remember this bright and shiny data point is I spent a week or three reverse engineering it and getting access to the inner interpreter; the office staff actually used it, though.)
As far as I can tell, the reason for the lack of companies is that they've made it impossible to monetize "software for other people" and apparently vast swathes of what used to need management are now "I can just build the parts of that I care about, it doesn't have to be good enough to ship to anyone else." (This horrifies me, though there is a silver lining: the value of the "idea guys" has also gone to zero :-)
So negative that the first I heard about this was with the title "New York Times adds glue to its Cooking App. Users aren't thrilled" (presumably from someone who read the niemanlab article before I did)
At first glance I almost misread this as a different C crime, since the declarations aren't in scope... uint8_t dhm_p[2048]; and uint8_t *dhm_p = (...)malloc(2048); both make dhm_p a reasonable pointer to 2k bytes of storage and are totally suitable for that argument, but sizeof the first one is 2048 and sizeof the second one is 4 (or more likely 8 these days, but this is specifically code from an embedded web server so I can say 4 :-)
But no, the actual problem was so much less subtle.
The first sizeof(dhm_g) should have been sizeof(dhm_p). So, do you attribute this to a simple typo (hard to catch at a glance due to similar letter shapes), "single letter variable names are bad" but the wikipedia page on DH also calls them p and g - it takes a little digging to get that "root" and "modulus" would have been better names, but maybe having them directly match the most common form of the equation would have made them easier to review...
Or do you just add it to the list of C crimes, that "passing storage length and pointer" is maybe the worst possible way to return written-to storage from a function :-)
https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/the-magic-of-merlin/ for background, but I've always been floored by how well "make spectrogram plots and then use image recognition techniques on them" works, it feels like something you'd invent as a technobabble special effect in a scifi movie :-)
Same - it gets the ludicrous reach by having a small sensor (and OK but not miraculous lenses) but it turns out that most birdwatching is done in bright sunlight, which makes up for the optical limitations. (I also find it's easier to look for birds naked-eye first - even with mild corrective lenses, vastly more field of view and more effective motion-detecting reflexes - rather than trying to scan with the tiny field of view of the camera. But part of that was noticing the feeling of "levelling up" when I first started bird watching specifically :-)
There were a bunch of high performance computing efforts from the 1990s and on where, if you could work out that you'd need 5 years of "today's" compute, you should obviously hang on to the money for 4 years, then spend it on the correspondingly improved hardware and finish the job in a under a year. I've been considering building a box to run OLMO (one of the only models with training data "that you wouldn't have to defend in court" as far as I can tell?) and even with Sam Altman's supply chain attack, stalling for bigger hardware still seems like the right path...
Also, that particular product was disappointing compared to everything else they made - there was a full split keyboard, a half keyboard (about the size of the iGesture pad but had at least 5-finger multi touch as well as being combined keyboards and touchpads - the same "win" as the thinkpad or j-mouse, you can do gestural stuff without your hands leaving the keyboard.) Still had a lot of learning curve but they had broad sweeping gestures for open/close file and the like - though the one really odd one that I remember was "touch all four corners simultaneously" which would cause the keyboard to "type" about 80 characters of product and firmware version and "mode" information. (At the time all of the gestural mapping was in the keyboard itself, no drivers needed - and you could toggle some of the general "editing" gestures among windows/mac/emacs/vi presets.)
If you want that, Terrafugia has been around for a while - but you still need to drive it to an airport to deply the wings and take off. (Flies for rather more than 3.5 seconds, too :-)
Didn't F1 cars briefly have downforce fans (basically suction fans underneath the car) until it was ruled out of spec? Basically a "reverse hovercraft" trick, normally used for handling, but "turned up to 11" here.
The page talks about a bunch of weight reduction tech, but I didn't see an actual final weight for the Rocket model? Given that it can support itself with "downforce" (and no thrusters, and apparently not much momentum?) at the top of the loop it's got to be pretty light...
Heh, I used that TRS-80 (microsoft!) Fortran in high school - wrote a library for propagating error bounds and significant figures through calculations, for chemistry lab reports. (Could probably have done it in BASIC too, but I suspect I was looking for an excuse to use fortran for something :-)
One of the educational parts of this is that the phrase "supply chain attack" evokes image of Mission Impossible nonsense, whereas this was "just buy the reseller"...
One of the british car youtubers had some episodes on a place doing EV-converted 2CVs (with other upgrades so it wasn't purely minimal) - would be interesting to see it benchmarked against this, if it ever makes it out of concept phase...
Yeah, we had "always use long options in scripts as self-documentation" in a style guide at my last place. (Sure they were often less familiar - "we don't expect you to know, we expect you to learn" was also developer guidance. Though I think we had one or two exceptions listed, I don't remember them off the top of my head...)
mmm, I don't know if you'd call it clean but I have a late-1990s ceiling fan with a feature they called "fan flick" - turn it on, it comes on at the last selected speed. Want to change the speed? flick the power switch (toggle it quickly) and it changes by one notch. It's tedious, and you only get to change it one direction until it wraps around - but no wireless, no additional wiring, just "short power interruption" as a signal...
mmm, in my circles commenting (at a higher level than the code, I think obviously? and yeah, comment maintenance is non-trivial) was valuable, but also "if the comments and the code disagree, treat both as wrong".
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAMA_Calculator - a calculator that won't reveal the precise answer until you supply an estimate (physical hardware in 2014, I think the current version is an app.) The website makes claims about the pedagogic value, but I didn't see any actual citations at https://qama.world/the-science/ just "everyone knows" kind of things... but if they had research supporting it that would probably inform your approach?
Back when the SR-71 was active, this magazine was nicknamed "Aviation Leak and Space Mythology" - them doing an article after the other rumours and Isaacman quotes reduces the credibility of the story, at least among Old Folk :-)
Maybe he wants his own version of Nathan's estate in Ex Machina (redditor calculations from in-movie clues put it at 7 million hectares, though, so this isn't even close :-)
The point is that you get the (inevitable) bikeshedding done once, everyone feels "involved", and then you have a style guide that is both a style guide and a "crystallized argument" - so when someone wants to change something, they know that dozens of people already signed off on it and do they really want to push against that. (So covering new things is still lower friction...)
Yeah, the 1999 diesel truck I had did the entirely opposite thing: it had a 120v electric block heater, so you'd plug it in when it was cold. (In New England, I used it once to see how it worked, but never actually needed it in practice.) At the time I saw stories (I never confirmed in any depth though) that Minnesota had 120v outlets on parking meters, giving some sort of weather-encouraged compliance :-)
They're writing for a newsletter called "Animation Obsessive" - given that, I think they're 100% correct, you're a random driveby :-) That said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJI_gygXsfs has the first three minutes if you want to get the gist (I don't know where to find a full version, but that's an official-looking Warner Bros. channel, not a bootleg.)
Glacier, and I think a couple of Iron Mountain products, exist for "cheap backups, really expensive restores" because the restore is going to be paid for by insurance (or by a counterparty when it's explicitly used for escrow.) So there is an explicit market for this (in the backup-of-things, rather than backup-of-capabilities, space.)