jclulow

Yeah it's an incredibly good tie off to a complex joke and I think about it a lot. Really the whole thing is just a masterpiece.

"Good grief, it's you!"

It's actually quite nice: people treat each other with respect, which includes listening to other people when they talk to you about the unintended impact your words are having on others.

Literally all of software is artificial? Being explicit and reasoned about how you choose to allow or deny a particular computation is, surely, at the heart of a lot of computer security?

I mean, says you? We live in a society and to some extent we decide what that means. I believe many countries outside the US have heavily subsidised loans or cost deferment mechanisms, or just outright government funding for school. Certainly in Australia you essentially don't have to pay back your HECS debt if you don't end up with a salary of sufficient magnitude, and then the rate at which you pay it back is scaled to what you earn.

No piece of compute capacity (in the form of equipment) I have bought this year has been in any way cheaper than last year.

I believe there were even more substantial issues in some terminal emulators, where escape sequences could write to arbitrary files or even execute programs. I think it's still very reasonable advice to avoid dumping arbitrary bytes into the terminal stream, even if only to avoid screwing up the state of the terminal.

I had some serious struggles with the delinquent landlord and property owners, and the dangerously incompetent builders that plagued our building in Alameda for years. While they were not always legally empowered to come and stop the skulduggery, the Alameda city council offices of planning and compliance were the only people who consistently and professionally responded to phone calls and emails and were available if you went to their offices. People complain about public servants, but at least in Alameda they were really good people doing their best.

You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.

Yeah, it really sucks when people have hobbies!

This is not an accurate assessment in the StarCraft II case. It was released in 2010, and LAN play was definitely still popular. I remember because I was part of a University club/society that was running ~200 person ~3 day LAN parties at the time, and I recall the intense loathing we had for how incredibly difficult Blizzard had decided to make it to actually play the game you had paid for, on your own network.

If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

One thing I internalised when speaking with a physiotherapist is that part of avoiding serious issues is making sure you don't stay in the _same_ position for too long. One good ergonomic position is an excellent start, but changing your position several times throughout the work day is even better. This apparently helps avoid building up strain and inflammation in pinch points, balancing out the fatiguing action more.

I have found that my Ergodox allows me to juggle my keyboard halves around the desk at different angles and spaced apart at different widths, and I can put my trackball either to the right of everything or between the halves. It's a single anecdote, obviously, but I have been able to make my ulnar and carpal entrapment issues mostly go away by finding better positions while working and by not staying stuck in one posture or position for too long at a time.

It does actually wrap up well enough I reckon. It's not really a cliffhanger or whatever.

> I don't want to have to ask AI to rewrite my train handling config files just to get some little motor to spin.

I reckon you could probably still figure out how to just edit the text file. And if it's not fun to do that, then, surely it's just not the right hobby?

Yeah that's just flat out not correct. If you're writing through a file system or the buffer cache and you don't fsync, there is no guarantee your data will still be there after, say, a power loss or a system panic. There's no guarantee it's even been passed to the device at all when an asynchronous write returns.

This is what I do! The API itself is not particularly amazing (the way it handles batch requests as a MIME multipart formatted POST body where each part is itself a HTTP request is particularly obscene).

The underlying data model is kind of OK though: messages are immutable, they get a long lived unique ID that survives changes to labels, etc. There is a history of changes you can grab incrementally. You can download the full message body that you can then parse as mail, and I save each one into a separate file and then index them in SQLite.

> Car usage is going to 2-10x.

What a bleak vision of the future.

Actually, you don't need to do anything of the sort! Nobody is owed an easy ride to other people's stuff.

Plus, if the magic technology is indeed so incredible, why would we need to do anything differently? Surely it will just be able to consume whatever a human could use themselves without issues.

> No non-embedded libc will actually return NULL

This is just a Linux ecosystem thing. Other full size operating systems do memory accounting differently, and are able to correctly communicate when more memory is not available.

I recently replaced my aging X1C7 with a T14s AMD and it has been quite nice!

As opposed to all the regular kinds of shitty behaviour landlords inflict on their tenants already? I feel like "because the money people will continue to misbehave" is absolutely not a reason to avoid doing something.

FWIW, some of us still do this in C programs today. Having a relatively unique prefix for struct members makes it extremely easy to find uses of those members with relatively simple tools like cscope.

If we assume this model is accurate, I sound to Americans like I'm South African!

I think basically everyone with ADHD discovers this eventually; e.g.,

> Sympathetic Procrastination Rotor: a technique for Time and Task Management.

> To aid in the fight against procrastination, arrange all of your tasks in a cycle, such that the natural opportunity for procrastination is always another task on the roadmap. In this essay I will

https://x.com/jmclulow/status/1390544792946237442

DNS & DHCP are generally short lived transactions that are very easy to restart and retry, so as long as it restarts very quickly that seems like a reasonable trade off in implementation complexity to be honest.

How is firing a bunch of people because you made a machine that you believe can do their jobs not textbook corporate greed? It seems like the worst impulses of Taylorism made manifest?

Where can I sign up for the post scarcity society? Asking for my artist friends.

"horny"

Certainly if they're like us, and travelling to new worlds, they'll be imperialistic and colonial. They'll plant a flag, because we obviously weren't really making use of the planet, not _really_, and attempt to civilise the natives through something between cultural erasure and genocide.

I would turn this on its head: it's not clear what the value in it being closed would be.

AMD make CPUs (and other silicon products). The more people who can take the software required to initialise those CPUs and put it to new and novel uses (some of which are going to be open source) the more CPUs they can sell. One imagines there would also be benefits in just getting your code and documentation out there in the open, with respect to having less NDAs and support legwork to have to slog through with customers who buy a lot of your silicon. If the code is open, they can probably just use it.