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markdoubleyou

475 karma · joined October 3, 2016

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markdoubleyou··on When did Google get so weird?
Today I googled "emacs" to get the download link.

Top of the search result page: "Did you mean: vim"

Felt like I was being trolled.

markdoubleyou··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
Agreed, roommates were huge for me before I started a family. I have a strong tendency to become a hermit, and having another human in the vicinity is just enough healthy social pressure to snap me out of it. Forces me to wash the dishes and do normal human things.

Also very important for me: I always have some decent clothes hanging in my closet that are washed, prepped and ready to go for various situations. Not having something nice to wear for a last-minute social event is a massive source of friction, but if I can easily throw on some clothes that I feel good about then it really dials up my enthusiasm.

markdoubleyou··on When Mark Zuckerberg Moved Next Door
Surprised this article didn't mention his antics in Hawaii, where he tried using lawsuits to secure all of the parcels in his 700-acre Kauai property from native Hawaiians. (He dropped the lawsuits after the optics became terrible, but he's still reviled there.)
markdoubleyou··on Ask HN: What do you dislike about ChatGPT and what needs improving?
Zyruh, your individual comments & submissions are friendly, appreciative, and inquisitive... but they're a little uncanny when viewed as a whole. Are you a real person?
markdoubleyou··on The Fastest Mutexes
I'm the Mark who's referenced there. When I did that original benchmark I discovered that the underlying mutex used by MSVCRT did change between versions. For example, in Visual C++ 2013, they used the Windows Concurrency Runtime, which was awful under heavy contention. Newer MSVCRT versions use SRWLOCK.

(And I wouldn't characterize myself as being overly impressed... for my particular scenario I wrote, "if you have a poorly written app that's bottlenecked on a lock, then consider targeting Windows to make the best of a bad situation." A better approach, of course, would be to just improve your code!)

markdoubleyou··on NeVerMore: Exploiting RDMA Mistakes in NVMe-Of Storage Applications (2022)
It looks like RDMA is kind of like IP4, in the sense that it wasn't originally designed with security in mind. Was this vulnerability a big deal when the paper was submitted in 2022, or more a case of doing cool research on a protocol vulnerability? The attack scenario looks pretty limited:

"We consider an adversary that is on one of the endpoints of the victim connection (i.e., it is co-located with either the NVMe-oF target or client). The attacker is an unprivileged user and is assumed to have obtained access to the machines using legitimate means. We assume that the attacker shares the same physical RNIC as the NVMe-oF entity and both can use it for communication. We assume that the attacker and the NVMe-oF entity are not separated through RNIC virtualization. The TLU model is prevalent in private clusters that use RDMA and NVMe-oF to accelerate their workloads."

An attacker is pretty deep into your infrastructure if they can even get a whiff of your storage fabric like this.

markdoubleyou··on Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard
This was my first mechanical keyboard, and I had the same reaction. My fingers would feel fatigued after an hour of heavy use.
markdoubleyou··on Phones track everything but their role in car wrecks
I can kind of understand being temporarily distracted when a message comes in and your phone chirps, but wow... watching a video while you operate a 3000 pound machine is next-level idiocy.

I haven't been driving as much in recent years wasn't aware of this trend. (Except for Tesla drivers: 5 years ago, I remember looking over to see a Tesla on autopilot next to me, doing 60 on Seattle's 520 bridge with the driver totally checked out and watching a video.)

markdoubleyou··on I don't always use LaTeX, but when I do, I compile to HTML (2013)
You're getting close to making your own CHM format, which Sphinx could make for you.

I always thought CHM files were a nice self-contained option for multi-page HTML docs. (Though they'd happily execute whatever JavaScript the author embedded in there... Maybe that's why they fell out favor?)

markdoubleyou··on Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds
There's also the Audi RS6 Avant, a good option for anyone interested in spending $160K on a station wagon with 621 horsepower.
markdoubleyou··on 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
Looks great! Did you use QT Quick or the Widgets?
markdoubleyou··on Pixel 8 Pro
I "upgraded" from a Samsung Galaxy S9 to a Pixel 7 this year, only because Samsung stopped doing security updates. Big disappointment for me, too. The fingerprint scanner from that 2018 phone was 10x more reliable than the in-screen thing that the Pixel uses.

I don't miss the battling software ecosystems (Samsung vs Google) on that old phone, though.

markdoubleyou··on Square is down
My local coffee shop gave up and closed after the 4th hour of this outage. They tried accepting cash for a while, but apparently nobody in Seattle carries cash anymore.
markdoubleyou··on Casio G-Shock time sync radio
My Pro-Trek syncs most nights in Seattle, but only if I leave it on a window sill with 12 o'clock facing southeast.
markdoubleyou··on Gmail is showing ads in the middle of the inbox
Gmail supports IMAP, right? Would changing to a different desktop/mobile client make the ads go away?
markdoubleyou··on I fixed a parasitic drain on my car in 408 days
My last car, a 2007 Acura TSX, had the same problem--it wouldn't start after 4 or 5 days (maybe 2 or 3 during the winter). This model was from the first wave of touchscreens and bluetooth. Mechanics shrugged, pointed to the tiny, underpowered battery, and told me to drive it more.

Thankfully there are a lot of car enthusiast forums out there that have been plugging away on vBulletin for years. Someone on an Acura forum had figured out that the bluetooth module was always on and looking for a connection. I tried disconnecting it, and the problem was fixed.

markdoubleyou··on Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage
Fair enough, it's filed.
markdoubleyou··on Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage
The problem is that they don't blatantly violate any of the policy bullets in that FTC press release... all the terms are spelled out in the interstitial. The issue is that the design goes out of its way to give it a very mandatory vibe. I don't log in very often, but I always have to catch myself ("...wait, what is this? Do I have to do this?"), and then remember to go hunting for the NoThanks button. It has a very opt-out feel.
markdoubleyou··on Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage
I have a free Experian account that I look at every few months.

Every time I log in, a big, disorienting interstitial appears and pitches me on Experian CreditWorks Premium ($25/month), with fields asking for my credit card info. It's designed like it's part of a normal registration/login process that you're supposed to fill in. You have to scroll down past all of it to the bottom of the page and click the washed-out, kind-of-disabled-looking button that says "No, keep my current membership", at which point they reluctantly take you to your normal account overview page.

markdoubleyou··on Modern Mono
This describes me. Every couple of years I read an article like this, download a handful of monospaced fonts, and try to use each one for at least an hour. Inevitably, every one of them has some little problem that rubs me the wrong way, and I go back to my old standby: Consolas, the dad jeans of programming fonts. I've been using it for 15 years, and I think I'm doomed to use it for the rest of my career.
markdoubleyou··on My coffee maker just makes coffee
Many years ago my father-in-law gave us a commercial vacuum (Windsor Sensor) that's typically used in hotels and hospitals. The thing's built like a tank and is easily serviced. It's a good choice if you don't mind a heavy vacuum, and it's only incrementally more expensive than a Dyson.
markdoubleyou··on Introductory-level educational COBOL materials with modern tooling
COBOL is used in industries that view IT and software development as cost centers. As such, these departments have been subject to decades of ruthless cuts and offshoring.

So now the chickens have come home to roost, and there's a skill shortage. You'd probably end up at Fiserv, or maybe at a big bank or some gov't agency that'll drop you at the first opportunity. You'd get a decent salary, but not a massive one.

You'd be better off working at a place that views your development effort as something that generates revenue. Rewards tend to be higher. And wherever that ends up being, they almost certainly won't be using COBOL.

markdoubleyou··on My return to desktop applications
Same here! Hard to match WinForms productivity for small apps, especially if you cut your teeth in the 90's VB era. And you can push WinForms really far with the fancy controls in the Syncfusion Community License.
markdoubleyou··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone
You can get a little smaller. Asus Zenfone 8 has a 5.9" screen.
markdoubleyou··on Is the madness ever going to end?
Fair. Just realize that it'll happen to you (in 15 years you'll be raging, "goddammit, why does every UI require a 2 GB Roblox runtime") and go easy on the poor boomers. Circle of life.
markdoubleyou··on The High Cost of Men's Loneliness
Australia has "Men's Sheds" that (try to) address this problem. The idea is slowly making its way into other countries but probably won't take off until there's better funding.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_shed

markdoubleyou··on TFTC (TIE Fighter Total Conversion) v1.0
Freespace 2 (available on gog) has a big community behind it that's rewritten the engine, modernized assets, and created new missions/campaigns.
markdoubleyou··on Obfuscating Complexity Considered Harmful
The Arch Linux philosophy summarizes this concisely: "If you try to hide the complexity of the system, you'll end up with a more complex system"
markdoubleyou··on On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
For Microsoft it depends on when the docs were written.

The MS docs from the late '90s through about 2015 were stellar. For example, look at the Windows Sockets docs[1], which came out of that era. Here you see information architects working at the height of their power: Content is broken up into conceptual ("About Winsock"), task-based ("Using Winsock"), and reference ("Winsock Reference") topics. They were doing this kind of structured documentation before DITA was a thing. It's a pain in the ass to produce content this way, but the results are wonderful.

Then came .NET Core: a fast-moving, community-driven effort, where the philosophy seems to be to get it working and then scribble down some docs later. The result tends to be a huge wall of text with conceptual and sample topics jammed together ([2]), and you're lucky if the API reference gives you anything beyond parameter names.

Azure docs suffer from a different problem. It seems they've tried to apply some kind of rough information architecture, but the quality isn't great. I've looked at the GitHub history of some of the shoddier topics, and they're often written by junior Product Managers who are fresh out of college. I encounter a lot of imprecise, colloquial English describing out-of-date screenshots.

I don't mean to belittle the people who work on .NET Core and Azure. There's a ton of content that needs to be written for these products, and it's a thankless task for the devs & PMs who do the heavy lifting now. I'd really like to see some dedicated technical writers come in and bring the quality back up to their old standards.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winsock/windo... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/ro...

markdoubleyou··on Students Left Behind by Remote Learning
I'm genuinely curious what "excellent online classes" look like, especially for early elementary school. My second grader in Seattle Public Schools isn't learning a thing (except for how to troubleshoot MS Teams).
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