Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
You’re quite clearly wrong.

You write code to fit the immediate business need and that shifts rapidly over a year or two.

If you do otherwise, you’re wasting your time and the money of the enterprise you work for.

You cannot see the future however smart you might be.

Comment · 1 year ago
All code is legacy. Business needs shift.

The likes of Copilot are ok at boiler-plate if it has an example or two to follow. It’s utterly useless at solving problems though.

Comment · 1 year ago
Lagrange? I see your point.

I’ll get my coat.

Comment · 1 year ago
Such as deduplication.
Comment · 1 year ago
throws faeces

Nonsense!

Source: Engineer

Comment · 1 year ago
I heard that, in the Netherlands after WW2, the descendants of people who starved were shorter in height even though they were born after the war.

Admittedly this was from a Dr Karl podcast.

Comment · 1 year ago
Heh. I worked on the Mac version of ViaVoice. I joined as I was already an expert in AppKit and Obj-C.

We were given old Macs running Classic to run Notes so we had two computers. One being MacOSX. Notes was the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had to use. With one exception…

On the OSX box we were happily running svn until we were forced to use some IBM command-line system for source control. To add insult to injury, the server was in Texas and we were in Boca Raton (old PC factory as it happens). The network was slow.

It had so many command-line options a guy wrote a TCL for it.

Adding to that was the local IBM lan was token ring and we were Ethernet. That was fun.

Comment · 1 year ago
That’s very interesting. Typically a Rabin fingerprint is used to identify identical chunks of data.

Identifying similar blocks and, maybe sub-rechunking isn’t something I’ve ever considered.

Comment · 1 year ago
I assume he’s clipping hidden surfaces?
Comment · 1 year ago
I see what you did there :-)
Comment · 2 years ago
:-) I worked in the first OSX version. I did the AppKit UI being one of the few on the planet who had a NeXT background.

It came with a UK language model as the US model didn’t recognise my accent.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Heh. I can relate to seeing your product on a shelf.

I recall seeing IBM ViaVoice X on shelves a Circuit City. It was rather an ego trip.

Comment · 2 years ago
Back in the day on the Mac, the order of source files in your project would determine locality in the binary.

If memory serves, this was with MPW C or maybe CodeWarrior.

You could see the jump (jmp) instructions use short jumps rather than long ones.

Comment · 2 years ago
In a car they’re a distraction from driving. You have to look at the iPad stuck to the dash and not on the road - where the driver’s focus must be.

With knobs and buttons, you can feel for them whilst still having your vision in the road.

This must make it safer to drive.

As a MX5 (ND) driver, even having a knob to scroll around the screen is a poor design choice. Touch would have been better (you can hack that) whilst driving but, frankly, this kind of car shouldn’t have a screen at all. It’s a driving car, not a home entertainment system.

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