shortoncash

It took me 15+ years in the business to realize this. If someone gave you a time machine to go into the past and give me your exact comment AND punch me in the face, it still wouldn't have dawned on me because I was in pursuit of some weird perfection that doesn't exist.

Thanks for spreading sanity and insight -- I hope someone else digests your message sooner than I did.

I hope so. I used to crush whiteboards but I really dislike these modern quiz platforms. I suppose I just need practice, but I'm like this old guy now with less time to practice on modern quiz platforms.

Bring back pure whiteboard and I will be almost as good at this stuff as I was when I was 22. Little slower on the recall, but still good.

I worked at home for 9 years and then I had kids. (They are great kids but they make working at home hard.) That was enough for me to not want to work at home anymore. I then got a new job, and then covid-19 hit and I am working at home again. Argh!

I'm speaking strictly technical here, but there have been features that have been removed. Trigraphs (I think), and the register keyword. Moreover, there are objects that are very clearly marked deprecated, like auto_ptr. (Oh, and there is even talk of removing 'volatile' as a keyword.)

The register keyword issue crops up because legacy code included and linked to modern C++ will occasionally have the word "register" affixed to a loop variable. Generally speaking, once you change standards, there is room to drop the old stuff. It's just gradual. Static analyzers do a lot to modernize code now too, so the situation is not as painful as it used to be.

Calendars and to-do lists matter, but the unpleasant aspect of these things is that I become a human scheduler, similar to an operating system scheduler. The scheduling function consumes so much time on its own, and it's psychologically uncomfortable.

Dare I say it: I don't like context switches and would prefer first come first serve, until completion. The real world, however, is unforgiving on which scheduler I can choose.

Your design above with the private type being returned could possibly be useful. Perhaps outsiders to the class will be prevented from instantiating the nested-type without using the class itself to generate the nested type. This could be contextually useful and certain (interface) functionality could be grouped in a manner that is more convenient to use than by calling methods on the original class.

I like that C++ allows us to express this situation, even if it's a bit of an unusual design pattern.

I was able to get rid of multiple computers and convert from physical to virtual and save on power bills. Once your build is complete you will be incredibly happy. AMD is killing it with these processors. I've never been happier with a tech product line. It just blows me away how much I'm able to accomplish on a shoestring budget now.

Worker pool for compile jobs and simulations. The cost to run this locally and with local storage (over 10g) is cheaper than to do it in the cloud.

I bought a 3900X also. I, too, would like a 3950X, but the 3900X is so fantastic it's hard to be too upset. I also have 4 Threadripper systems and I just could not get work done without them. My build times for compiling software would be atrocious without them.

gcc

So true. The rent forces you to be on the hamster wheel.

I'm in the same boat (but vegan). I supplement B12 and iron out of caution, but I am not sure they are even necessary. Just copy what the Indians do; they get by without meat and their diets and classic recipes seem to have evolved recipes that compensate for lack of meat.

So true. Always takes a bit of a spark to free your mind from the way the educational system makes you do things. Once you get away from the comfort of routine and embrace the danger of thinking in ways that the machine likes to discourage, the sky's the limit.

I believe in the code dictator model also. However, the code dictator takes a lot of heat over style opinions. What I see is that, when the dictator emerges, he still has to build coalitions out of people with different skills and different backgrounds. If there's a pool of mediocre or average developers, that is very hard to work around. Only the new people being added can really come pre-loaded with the right code-culture attributes. With non-new people, everyone has to be convinced about the code dictator's approach. This is just not a frictionless process.

I work at a place where the culture is definitely "everybody should tidy this up" and it never changes, or it changes very slowly. What I'm finding though is that there's no real defense against this kind of culture other than to be really tight about hiring. So, to your point, if you came to my company asking to look at source, it'd be a good thing -- particularly since so few people actually do it.

I noticed years ago that I didn't have as much insight as other people who were much more close to the problems I was interested in. Even on non-technical topics, there was this realization I was just more noise in a sea of noise.

So, ultimately, write if you want to write. But, ... be comfortable with the fact that you might just be noise. :-) If you find an audience, they will tell you what they find valuable or make requests on their own.

I went to summer camp one year and another kid brought the TV tuner for the GameGear to camp. We were doing some wilderness survival thing where we had to sleep out in a makeshift structure. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, he brought out the game gear and everyone gathered around to see what we could watch. All we could get was Lambchop and Matlock reruns. No one cared, though, because, well, hey, we had TV in the woods. Pretty magical, I must admit.

These days many languages are so expressive you can establish a dominant paradigm in the part of the code you work on. We have a kind of micro-level choice that even the most authoritarian code-reviews can't largely stamp out (provided that the interface you provide is in harmony with the rest of your organization.)

A friend had one of these and his dad tried to convince my dad to buy one. I honestly don't know what my friend did with this thing other than play a few games. I wonder what kind of analysis of the stock market they could even do on this old computer.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the editor wars. I have been trying to convert vi users to emacs for years. They just go running right back into the arms of their abuser.

That doesn't make them a target worthy of a lawsuit. You have to peel back the finances. Many times the cash flow from a rental is just there to minimize the monthly damage of having an asset do nothing useful for its owner at all.

You could argue this is true for hotels as well, but the larger operators are likely to be more diversified and in better shape.

The larger operators can also be sued. How does it work with AirBnB hosts? How do you even know if they have the assets to be worth suing?

People are hedging their answers. I'd go with the Bloomberg terminal and a lot of books.

I don't think the mass media is any better. I remember the hard pushes for things like low fat diets, ignoring the dangers of sugar and sugary drinks, etc. I don't recall the pre-internet magazine covers being any better or worse than the sorts of things Youtubers push today.

Agreed. A lot of those people got to veganism through some kind of eating disorder or some other social problem. They started out looking at the world with a different lens than your typical western adolescent or young adult. Some of them thrive on attention and drama.

The usual vegan dietary issues can be solved with a few supplements and a lot less drama.

I agree with you in principle. I'll add that we've been in a post-truth world since mass media, long before internet use became mainstream. We shouldn't act like this is a new problem just because people got comfortable with the way the previous information-overlords managed to do things.

Yeah, I always wondered why I couldn't just get my MacBook at the Apple store unboxed and then let them keep the packaging and re-use it for transport. It's not like their box has any utility to me after; I just put my laptop and its pieces in a bag and never look back at that box.

The worst part is -- I keep a lot of boxes around for years thinking the little plastic doodads and little accessories might become useful for me someday. What actually happens is that they never get used and then get tossed after the product is no longer useful to me.

Most ML jobs are sitting around scrubbing data. The fun math part is like 5% of the job, and usually there's some guy (or a small handful of guys) that's a PhD who is hired to do all of that because he was in the research area before he left academia.

I could be wrong, but this is my experience.

I love posts like this because it makes me feel like we're all robots that came off the same factory line. Other people have given good advice, but I'll throw a random one out there:

I noticed I feel like you do basically every December through March, so much so that my git commits and activity even look to be seasonal. If this is some seasonal thing by chance, then get outside for at least 30min a day and/or get one of those lamps. Don't work in dark places or rooms either.

I think the market gave too much weight to crypto with regard to Nvidia. The growth story for the company is still there.

The article is talking about other companies designing for their own custom needs, but I think the mindshare has largely already been captured by Nvidia. Why? Because their software stack, even with its quirks, is still better than a lot of what else is out there. In the current marketplace, deploying custom GPU solutions without Nvidia products is really painful and something only someone who enjoys pain would undertake.