Notices by Rob Pike (robpike@hachyderm.io)

@ElleGray There's a small but growing shift for sales people to say as a meaningless departing nicety "stay hydrated" rather than "have a nice day". Yes, there is.

My body is amazing though. It has this superpower called "thirst" that lets me know when it wants "hydration", which we used to call a glass of tap water.

Enjoy your diet coke. I trust it will slake your thirst rather well.

Glad I could help.

https://inuh.net/@crawshaw/112804754484365317

@danderson Given my experience in the wilds of the internet, I believe the default is "troll".

That's where "cat -v considered harmful" was presented. Also those badges were a genius touch, by Mike Tilson I believe.

https://mastodon.social/@aka_pugs/112779570725532052

I handed out some unpunched punch cards at a class this week, as part of a talk about how things have changed. Not always for the better, but in this case much for the better. My least regretted piece of old tech I no longer use is the IBM 029 Key Punch.

https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112781371248636067

There are three hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and getting your video game character onto a ladder.

You say that but... We had a recurrent RP06 disk drive failure caused by smoke particles wedging under the head. The filters just weren't good enough. I think the famous "Winchester" drives made that problem go away by sitting much closer to the platter.

Also helped: smoking bans at work.

https://mastodon.social/@aka_pugs/112623049217851822

Also, today's good code is likely tomorrow's bad code.

https://mastodon.social/@dabeaz/112507379669620422

I don't understand what the fuss is all about. It said NON-TOXIC glue. Lighten up, people.

But also don't eat rocks, OK?

@czakka @todd

Assuming you meant this sincerely, I will answer. Three reasons.

1) I want to have fewer machines.
2) I don't need or want an assistant, automated or otherwise.
3) I engage with ML as little as possible.

You may feel differently.

Looking for ideas. Apple offered me $500 for my old laptop, but when I sent it in they say, "Oh, a scratch. We'll give you $100." There's no way a perfectly functioning and upgraded M1 MacBook Air is worth only $100. So I got it back.

Now I'm looking for a good home for it. I don't want money, I want it to have a good life. Two conditions:

1. It has to help make the world a better place.
2. I'm not shipping it, so the transfer has to be local to Sydney.

@mwichary The earliest I saw was the (Navy sourced?) Bodoni vector font, which we digitized at U of Toronto for nroff on the Versatec and later resurfaced in the falsely attributed "Berkeley typesetting software". That font, or possibly someone else's digitization of it, appeared on countless graphs in science papers all through the '80s and early '90s. It was only 100dpi but was free and available.

@dabeaz My experience working with programmers more adept at type hierarchies than I am leads me to feel they are achieving results despite the epistemology rather than because of it. Putting the type structure first in design leads to overly complex and brittle program structure. Let the program come to you, don't force the skill of your abstraction powers onto a problem that won't ultimately benefit from it.

I do wish people would stop using reCAPTCHA. It's frustrating, often difficult and repetitive (my latest annoyance was having one time out mid-form, requiring a redo), and not believably secure. Plus when I'm forced to use one all I can think about is that I am training some account-stealing machine.

I wonder who's invited.

@mattblaze I like to be the stupidest person at the table because that maximizes the opportunity to learn.

@darryl_ramm @mattblaze I guarantee I'll never be the stupidest person at a poker table because I know better than to sit down at one.

There's been a thread about dependencies lately and the challenge of convincing developers to look at the full dependency chain.

I once maintained a C++ binary that included a PostScript interpreter, a JPEG decoder, a JavaScript interpreter, and a number of other utterly irrelevant pieces causing a huge factor increase in the size of the binary.

The culprit: A single logging statement that invoked a general-purpose printer that could print web stuff. Switching to sprintf fixed it.

@mattblaze Yet so many people will tell me I'm the one doing it wrong.

Oh and probably time to remind everyone how I had a password rejected because it contained my username. My username was 'r'.