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joelwilliamson

252 karma · joined April 3, 2013

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joelwilliamson··on What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers
In Canada, members of the Royal Canadian Engineers have just as much right to the title of engineer as professional engineers do, and the operators of locomotives are also referred to as engineers.
joelwilliamson··on What async promised and what it delivered
Function colouring, deadlocks, silent exception swallowing, &c aren’t introduced by the higher levels, they are present in the earlier techniques too.
joelwilliamson··on 72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes
Who calls WWI, stagflation or Covid good old times? Only the post-WWII boom was really a good time.
joelwilliamson··on Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode
When did that happen? Did they admit guilt in the big settlement, or was there a different case?
joelwilliamson··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
I think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power.
joelwilliamson··on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
GitHub is a poor example of Chinese internet restrictions, since access to it is usually fine from China.
joelwilliamson··on Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions
They could open source it and not even have a Github project associated. Just provide a read-only git repo on anthropic.com or drop a source tarball every release.
joelwilliamson··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
Give 10 years of copyright for free, then a $1000 fee for the next decade, and make every subsequent decade 100x more expensive.
joelwilliamson··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
Even Amazon Prime’s catalogue is only a third the size of what Netflix had 15 years ago.
joelwilliamson··on GHC now runs in the browser
Have you tried Real World Haskell?
joelwilliamson··on Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
He’d be dead either way, the question is if having those three years were a net improvement to his life
joelwilliamson··on Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates
The “board” in a boarding house is food. There can be other services as well, but food is definitely required to be a boarding house.
joelwilliamson··on KDE launches its own distribution
He probably typed BSD, and it got autocorrected to BAD.
joelwilliamson··on Calling your boss a dickhead is not a sackable offence, UK tribunal rules
She said she wouldn’t care if the hotels were set on fire.

“Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.”

That “for all I care” changes the whole meaning of the sentence.

joelwilliamson··on Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins
That’s a 2000x increase. 2000% is 21x, so $210,000/a.
joelwilliamson··on The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015)
My daughter’s school had a race day to wrap up their swimming lessons, and one of the events involved rolling from front to back every second stroke. It was funny to watch but not very practical.
joelwilliamson··on Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket
> SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital

This is not true. Say what you will about the Shuttle, but they definitely recovered and reused rocket parts from both the boosters and the orbiter.

joelwilliamson··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”
joelwilliamson··on Should more of us be moving to live near friends?
It’s a trend that’s a few centuries old at least. The French and Indian War was partly caused by Americans who didn’t have enough land to farm to support a family moving west, and the British trying to stop that was one cause of the Revolution, and then the whole of 19th century American history is a combination of farmers moving west because the east was full and immigration from Europe largely driven by the farmland of Europe being full. Before that almost everywhere was stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium and if you couldn’t support a family in your home, moving away would just make it harder.
joelwilliamson··on Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987
I grew up in Ontario in the 90s, and addresses were in the phonebook.
joelwilliamson··on Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?
A month of programming can save an hour of planning.
joelwilliamson··on What Happened to Perl 7? (2022)
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.12.html#removed

Here's a list of things that were removed from Python in 3.12, most of were deprecated after the 3.0 release.

joelwilliamson··on Quicksort with Jenkins for fun and no profit
Groovy is a far better scripting language than YAML, which seems to be the choice of many other NYPD systems.
joelwilliamson··on The New York Times Launches a Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI
Privately controlled companies need to do what their controllers think is most important. If the Sulzbergers think taking a stand on AI is more important than profit, they can go a long time without increasing profits.
joelwilliamson··on Underage workers are training AI
After the Korean War, North Korea had significantly more industry, more natural resources and more agricultural land, as well as a larger population.
joelwilliamson··on The US government is taking a step toward space-based nuclear propulsion
There is another rocket that has had a few successful landings: Falcon Heavy.
joelwilliamson··on Google tries internet air-gap for some staff PCs
How do you remote access an air-gapped workstation? Seems like you'd need to be constantly switching whether your laptop is on the internet-connected network or the isolated network. If the laptop can switch between them automatically, wouldn't that make it possible for an attacker to jump the gap?

Even just having hosts that are sometimes internet connected and sometimes on the airgap network will greatly weaken the isolation. Stuxnet could cross an airgap with just static media, allowing thousands of computers that sometimes connect to the internet across the airgap seems like a fatal weakness.

joelwilliamson··on NPM won't publish packages containing the word keygen
Why is it a misuse to use "crypto" to refer to a currency whose design relies on secrets, but it's fine to use "crypto" to refer to keeping communications private using some secret information?
joelwilliamson··on HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals
Can you give an example of a time when a CEO or board of directors lost a suit for taking the morally upright option instead of trying to maximize share value? I often hear people talking about this, but it's always generalities rather than specific occurrences.
joelwilliamson··on Imgur to Ban Nudity or Sexually Explicit Content Next Month
They disabled i.reddit.com a few weeks ago.
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