Notices by Chris [list of emoji] (suetanvil@freeradical.zone)

@mcc

The few times I've done assembly language programming, it's usually been either the C preprocessor or the compiler's inline assembly capabilities.

The most involved of these was actually just written in straight C. I'd compile it, look at the output and then fiddle with the C code until the output was optimal.

(This was not gcc though; it was my employer's embedded compiler, and it let me pin variables to specific machine registers. This let me bypass the register allocator.)

@wim_v12e @cwebber @kingu

"Zuck off" is right there!

@tek

Oh, I knew who Steve Martin is. It's just that because I was looking at pictures of his breakfast on Twitter, my brain had reclassified him as "Internet friend", so seeing him on TV was kind of a jolt.

Thinking back to the time that I was watching TV and I saw some guy I knew from the Internet on a show. And I was like, I *know* that guy.

That guy was Steve Martin. I knew him from the Internet because I'd followed him on Twitter.

@foone

If you run a game off a flash drive with a physical write-protect switch that has been glued into the read-only position, you would still be running it off of a ROM.

@jwildeboer

How does that work?!?!? Does the mesh subsystem have its own processor with access to the keyboard and screen?

(Yes, *this* is the part I'm fixating on.)

@solidsanek

Aha, thanks. I'm totally not disappointed that it isn't a NUC.

@tek @grueproof @ozoned

I'll second Ubuntu (at least up to 22.04LTS; I haven't tried the most recent version.) It's boring and widely-used and has support for a lot of hardware.

One piece of advice: avoid Snap as much as possible. I went so far as to uninstall the it completely (and that was *way* satisfying) but the company seems to be doing a pivot-to-video on it and it's *terrible*.

Also: I've had much less aggravation with AMD video cards than NVIDIA, if you have a choice.

@tek @bitartbot @benoitmandelbot

Unfortunately, certain people's actions has made it ineligible for my "only silly cryptocurrencies" rule.

@tek @bitartbot @benoitmandelbot

Thanks for understanding.

It was small, unmarked, circulated bills, right?

My employer is currently looking for a senior dev doing really complex stuff in and on C++ code. This is in Ottawa (Canada) and not remote.

The product is a niche dev tool. It's not a compiler, but it's that kind of problem space.

If you're interested, please DM me and I'll provide more details. I'm being vague because I don't want to link my work and personal online presences.

FWIW, I genuinely like my co-workers and enjoy this kind of work.

Boosts are okay.

@tek

Wasn't this also the origin of Jenkins? (I.e. the owners of Hudson failed to understand the implications of the GPL.)

The reason Microsoft is so heavily invested in LLMs (i.e. "AI") is that they are trying to bring about a world where computing is by and large something that you rent from them instead of doing yourself at home. Hence the whole push to clown-based services.

LLMs are great for that because in practice, nobody can DIY it; the hardware requirements are just too high. It will only ever be a billable service.

@evan

Also: Not to be confused with anti-BSD laws.

@craigmaloney

❤🐢

@hacks4pancakes

I will point out that Heinlein *did* intend Starship Troopers to be pro-military and *did* write essays in favour of stuff like the fight-bugs-to-vote thing.

Heinlein was a bad influence on young me. Fortunately, I got better.

@Tipa @pluralistic

My theory: LLMs, like cloud services, are (widely believed to be) things that can't be done on inexpensive desktop computers and so will make us dependent on large service provider. Thus, Microsoft et. al. will be able to forevermore charge us rent.

@craigmaloney

Tumblr is currently looking to hire entire Twitter teams, FWIW.

@technomancy @SpindleyQ

Oh, um, never mind then. I find the concepts cool in principal but IRL, mature and robust will always beat new and cool so I stick with apt-based distros.

So my opinion on this is *really* shallow.

@SpindleyQ @technomancy

I'm pretty much Team Guix right now because they at least use a language that also gets used for other things.

(The one time I used Nix, it was to solve a specific work problem. It went okay because there were a couple of plain-English posts that addressed the extremely rare and uncommon task I was trying to accomplish (install a specific version of a tool) but had I not found them, it would have been faster to just build it by hand.)