arclight

I feel like my best plan for the future is to learn enough civil engineering to build ad hoc water treatment plants and maybe learn to speak Korean, Estonian, or Finnish. Definitely work on lockpicking. Maybe very basic chemical engineering or learning to draw wire. Dressing game for sure. Basically I need to plan for being a successful NPC in a poorly run game of The Morrow Project.

Nobody who has programmed a website or phone app within rhe past 5 years should be allowed near a computer for the next 50. Every last one of them is an affront to God.

@RickiTarr@beige.party I'm still waiting for a Biblically-accurate Spiderman.

@bitsavers@oldbytes.space @norootcause@hachyderm.io "Human Resources", as if people were bauxite and potash.

@norootcause@hachyderm.io Sixty, but yeah. I didn't go into engineering to manage time, money, or people. The only times I've taken on project management are when I was trapped in a painful stagnant project and local management refused or failed to manage. It was very much like a wolf chewing off its own leg to escape a trap. I can do it but it's excruciating so it only happens when there is no other option. "Individual contributor" is such a lousy term. As opposed to what, an individual consumer? A parasite? As if I as an individual don't work as part of or in support of a team? Who comes up with this garbage terminology?

Donut has gone back to sleep in the middle of my side of the bed. #CatsOfMastodon

RE: https://dice.camp/@kyonshi/116760141947074250 Difficult to argue with this...

@foone@digipres.club My favorite legalism has to be "Treat AND as OR" (keeps people from weaseling out of discovery, subpoena, ...)

@DM_Ronin@mstdn.social "Yo dawg, I heard you liked attack surfaces so I put an attack surface on your attack surface..."

Once upon a time I might have had respect for software development as a profession. There may still be small pockets of professionalism hidden away but for the most part it's a deeply and dangerously unserious field.

@janbeta@chaos.social (human fist-bump)

I threw clay tonight. 2/5 success rate as defined by "did not have to scrape the wheel clean and toss the remains in a bucket". I improved a little by the end of the night, developing a sort of feel for what's going on. Arthritis-mangled hands don't help (I could be a hand model for those hand-crushed-by-gear safety placards). Did I have fun? I don't know. It was interesting. I sucked about as bad as I expected. I got two pieces for working on next week. I learned a lot. A lot just leaked out of my head as soon as I started the wheel. I sucked during my first improv class. I sucked during my first welding class. That's what's supposed to happen. Relax, lower your expectations, try again next week. #HealthyRelationshipWithFailure

@foone@digipres.club We have a Fortran code wrapped in a VB6 GUI. We need to run cases in bulk with it. It would be dead simple to do this with a CLI but we suspect the vendor has lost their dev environment and doesn't have anyone on staff capable of recreating it (also considering VB6 is very EOL). We were stuck until I fiddled around with AutoIT, sorted out window names, workflow and timing (because checking for windows opening/closing on process completion was unreliable) and created a simple hideous and brittle script to drive the GUI. Not proud of the script - it's garbage and it solves a problem that shouldn't exist - but I saved the wrists and sanity of a bunch of engineers. Writing GUIs sucks, automating GUIs sucks, I can do both but like having admin experience with Oracle, I don't advertise that I can do either.

I am without words or at least words safe to use at work.

@vonxylofon@witter.cz @cR0w@infosec.exchange Just possibly. We have our top scientists working on it. Probably.

@hal_pomeranz@infosec.exchange You've been watching me struggle with Rust, haven't you? It helps to remember that nobody starts out an expert, everyone's starts at the beginning. Celebrate your early failures - it means you're trying and learning and moving out of your comfort zone.

@jrdepriest@infosec.exchange @whbboyd@infosec.exchange @ifixcoinops@retro.social For small stuff I'm going the Markdown -> Pandoc -> [whatever] route. For anything complex and/or that I care about, it gets built in LaTeX because I have brain problems. After 4 years here I still have no idea how our multiple Confluence sites are organized or how they are supposed to be used. LaTeX is the only way I can include subdocuments and instantly update hundreds of images without needing to point and click each one; these are critical for building the incredibly tedious and marginally useful software QA docs we need that demonstrate our engineering analysis codes aren't complete unjustifiable crap. Unlike Word which regularly eats its own tail then throws up all over the nice sofa. LaTeX takes the place of WordPerfect allowing you to see what's going on in all its deranged glory, leaving you with the sanity of a senior librarian at Miskatonic University. But at least your documents don't have stray tentacles erupting from every crevice tearing at the bounds of space and time like Word. Making websites was interesting in 1995, became a vicious fight with broke-ass Javascript in 1997, and was completely miserable by 1998 when every potatohead Stanford MBA wanted a dungeon full of wizards to turn Photoshop comps into fast-loading dynamic scalable applications yesterday so they could achieve humanity's dream of having toothpaste delivered overnight to your home. CSS was an undelivered promise that eventually turned into systemd for web chrome and nothing anywhere was fun anymore.

@tml@mementomori.social @quixoticgeek@social.v.st @qwazix@bananachips.club @sebwilken@mastodon.social @jon@gruene.social Increasing the cost of flying doesn't make alternatives appear, it disproportionately hurts those who can least afford it. You start with taxing billionaires, financial firms, and corporations and then build or recover infrastructure. If that means renationalizing the rail operators, so be it. They can provide effective transit or the investors can put their money elsewhere. Then discourage transit emissions by whatever means you see fit. Because we don't care about flying per se, we care about the environmental impact of flying, right? Or do we just hate air travel?

@thatKomputerKat@oldbytes.space @LilahTovMoon@tech.lgbt You're supposed to make a lot of little ones. There's so much more surface area exposed for cream cheese this way.

@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk @bodil@social.treehouse.systems I saw them headline in Athens, GA supported by 30 nF Bodge on a rare US tour. https://oldbytes.space/@arclight/116974945305998311

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange @gudenau@hachyderm.io It's like any passive defense - it's not perfect or guaranteed, it's deterrence, like a fire door or a safe. Fire doors have a resistance rating - they'll hold back a fire for 15 minutes, an hour, etc. You install what provides adequate protection however "adequate" is defined.

Add a static "please stop" AGENTS.md file, have the build system restore it if it's deleted or refuse to build or test or whatever. The goal is to delay the sloplifting attack enough that the wasted tokens and manual bypass effort make AI processing expensive enough to not be viable. Token prices are only going to increase. Like thieves, agent users+ are driven by speed and low cost - increase the difficulty of the target and there's a point where it's not worth their effort.

• "But what about all the coders forced to use agents?" The thief role in this case is played by whatever layer of management is choosing to use agents against projects that expressly forbid them. The poor developer is caught in the middle as a "reverse centaur"; they're already screwed no matter what we do.

@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space Once upon a time thete was a comic book called Scurvy Dogs about weird modern-day pirates. They occasionally printed fake ads and one of them was for the first and last computer you'll ever need. There was an extensive list of software titles and two have stuck in my mind over the years: "Spreadsheet Spreadsheet Revolution" and "Corolla Rampage". I still think about "Corolla Rampage" a lot. Can't explain it - it's stuck in my head like a lawn dart.

@grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place I am employed For Entertainment Purposes Only...

@kyoku57@diaspodon.fr @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io Yeah - I was surprised and delighted to see Look Mum No Computer's entry make it in, but yeah. No PR for genocide.

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @spaf@mstdn.social Historically, radiation protection standards and data were based on the effects on adult white men. There are myriad examples of this kind of invisible bias.

@TheJen@beige.party @nxskok@cupoftea.social @Guillotine_Jones@beige.party OMG, that sounds like a disaster! Not the FORTRAN part - it's a small low-magic language, easy to reason about. It's absolutely the wrong language for accounting because it has no currency or fixed-point data types. Floats are notoriously bad for the very specific currency rounding rules. At the time it probably made sense. COBOL's mathematical notation is hideous so if you're doing weird things with interest or depreciation, it's much easier verifying the code matches the specification. Plus it's a convenient excuse to teach people FORTRAN. So much code got written in FORTRAN that really should've been done in a different language but you could tell it was the best language the authors had access to or familiarity with. A few years ago I modernized a late-70s adventure game from F66 to F2018 and while Modern Fortran has a workable OO model, it's still pretty bad at text processing and still has no standard library. At least now the structure of the game is apparent and it's in a better position to be ported to a more appropriate language. https://gitlab.com/apthorpe/Castlequest

@siblingsofthevoid@void.lgbt PMs are the worst. It got better when I moved from dotcom to academic staff in 2001 but still. With so many companies run for vibes and VC/PE payout not for sustainability and profit, something's got to give. People can't continuously work on a 9-24 month basis in this monthly layoff environment. Companies are disposable, workers doubly so. That has to change.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@TechCrunch/116977777858837473 In 3000 years it will be interpreted as a ritual or religious object. #MotelOfTheMysteries

@icosacade@dice.camp @awoodland@fosstodon.org @anon_opin@mastodon.social We will soon have Biblically-accurate phones...

@mrs_malice@mastodon.world What a coincidence - Donut likes his new couch too!

@lina@vt.social @ahltorp@mastodon.nu OT but I really miss .map files that told you the type and name of every variable in a routine. I work with a lot of legacy scientific codes (you'd probably be appalled at the amount of F66 still out there) and just having that inventory of variables helps immensely for documenting the code and understanding it. I work with accident analysis codes and we have enough trouble benchmarking them against experiment that we don't need unforced errors like LLM slop making things worse. But we shouldn't accept errors by cheap stochastic automation when thoughtful dependable deterministic techniques are available regardless of what kind of code we build. I wish more devs were in my position with a work culture and regulatory framework that puts safety first, encourages problem reporting, and has actual consequences for people subverting the process to ship garbage. Not perfect but it's nice being able to point to federal cases where people have literally been banned from doing this work because they cannot be trusted. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/enforcement/actions/individuals/index

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place I am extremely impressed. I mean the graphics are very nice - don't get me wrong - but getting all that to run on a potato really puts it in perspective. Like WOW.

@minego@pdx.social That is a nice shirt and you wear it well.

@wesdym@mastodon.social @Kensan@mastodon.social It'd have to be Diogenes - the guy lived in a pot.

@stevewetherill@oldbytes.space Tungsten is incredibly dense and incredibly hard which makes it very useful for machine tools, radiation shielding, and ammunition though depleted uranium has mostly replaced tungsten for ammunition use.

@EvenRouault@mastodon.social Following the discussion, I found this part very encouraging: "Why is velocity so important ? Are there so many missing features in GDAL that they need to be rushed ? Code added is more a long-term liability than an asset. If velocity of development is so important then people can contribute to Oxigdal, and it is written in Rust. Or create their forked GDAL with agents reviewing & automatically merging code." Velocity is not an unalloyed good nor should it be the only or primary goal in defining work practice, especially in an open-source project. No open source project needs to be first to market - that's a business concern not a software development concern.

@bridgeenjoyer@gamepad.club @dfs_comedy@mastodon.social Or build yourself an RC2014 and get the full 1980 experience. It's modular solder-it-yourself hardware (maybe not a beginner project but it's mostly thru-hole components) and runs CP/M on an actual Z80. I don't have a ton of nostalgia for CP/M (getting Linux in 1994 was a godsend - so many good tools) but it's a great exercise in working with small machines and learning the limitations (and benefits) of PCs in the pre-DOS era. So the way CP/M seems like an operating system instead of a normal program is that it gets loaded in at the top of memory with the rest of memory filled with no-op instructions. On boot, the hardware sets the program counter at the bottom of memory, and all those no-ops are executed before CP/M runs. You put your program below CP/M in memory so when it terminates, the program counter runs through all the remaining no-ops until it hits CP/M - no need to keep track of CP/M's location in memory and know where to jump back to when your program terminates. It's a clever hack that makes the system feel more interactive than it really is. Learning this low-level stuff takes some of the mystery out of the machine without losing its magic.

@millihertz@oldbytes.space How do you tell global options from "arguments" just by looking at them? Seems like a UI problem, not a user problem. Also, expecting option flags to be specified in a particular order is a misfeature. This is one of the reasons linkers are such a pain in the ass. I understand the rationale for having such a broken interface but it doesn't make it any less broken

@kkremitzki@mastodon.social Did they sample Clare Tory from "Great Gig in the Sky" from "Dark Side of the Moon"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Torry She was paid a flat £30 for her vocals; Alan Parsons said it was the best £30 Pink Floyd ever spent.

@simonzerafa@infosec.exchange @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer The last thing you want is to sheepishly beg a professional to reattach them all. No shame in seeking help but damn, those geneticists know how to give a stern lecture on not playing God at home. Just stick them back on with whatever genetic Crazy Glue you have and we'll never speak of this again. Boffins, amirite?

I needed a timeline cleanse: https://youtu.be/p9FRnsfsOkQ

@samzvr@tech.lgbt @ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club @pluralistic@mamot.fr Well, that's depressing. Willful misreading is an extremely bad sign.

@cwebber@social.coop One of the comments began "LLMs can and have found real bugs, including security vulnerabilities." and my brain replaced "LLMs" with "chickens" and asked if the statement could still be plausibly true. Going forward I think I'm going to keep substituting "chicken" for "LLM".

@VileLasagna@mastodon.gamedev.place @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io It needs to be touched often enough to verify the build environment still works. We're dealing with a safety code (F77) wrapped in a VB6 GUI. We suspect the vendor has lost the ability to build the code since VB6 was EOL'd ages ago. Bugs are generally dealt with by documentation changes but there's only so long you can do that, especially if you sell the code with a QA certification that revolves around software lifecycle management. The irony is, this code would easier to maintain and be more useful to us if it was just the dumb F77 executable. We need to run uncertainty cases involving 90+ runs - automating the VB6 GUI has involved some extremely awful and brittle scripting. We're really screwed because the vendor lost their build environment and the staff to recreate it.

@redhero@famichiki.jp Well at least we now have an explanation for all the tentacles.

@weirdestate@eigenmagic.net Ooh, they have Skee-Ball!

Outdoor (Backup) Bob is an absolute potato. Just the most friendly and appreciative cat, utterly starved for attention. We've got a m9bile vet coming out to weigh him and run some tests with the intent of adopting him (it depends on communicable diseases, Gracie, and whether hr knows how to use a cat box) #CatsOfMastodon

@maxl@hachyderm.io @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io @jacqueline@chaos.social It is a very good cheese.