bnferguson

Absolutely love this little thing. Picked a couple up back when it was still a kickstarter and was super surprised at the build quality (shockingly heavy for its size) and how smooth everything went.

It's not a thing I use everyday but sooo much nicer than having to unplug and lug my proxmox server up from the meter closet anytime there's an issue.

The book "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity" has a large thread exploring this among both historical and contemporary mathematicians. How people who seem to have an almost supernatural gift for math are often just able to "see" more clearly. Not in equations or words, but images.

Also discussing the development of the ability/discipline and the difficulties in transcribing what you now intuitively know but need to describe to other mathematicians so they can understand (notation/equations).

It's a book that's stuck in my head since reading it and wondering how to apply some of this to other problem spaces.

I think you remember correctly! A lot of the BBS software would just show what the current user was doing as if it was their screen. I believe from there you could start a chat as the sysop and interact with them, else you kinda just watched.

The few times I ran one (was a sysop on a few, but remotely), I was always a little creeped out that I could see people typing messages, etc. Felt like invading their privacy.

Feels like Zig is starting to fill that role in some ways. Fewer sharp edges and a bit more safety than C, more modern approach, and even interops really well with C (even being possible to mix the two). Know a couple Rust devs that have said it seems to scratch that C itch while being more modern.

Of course it's still really nice to just have C itself being updated into something that's nicer to work with and easier to write safely, but Zig seems to be a decent other option.

Love this write up (and one's like it - there's so much good stuff in their archives). The stuff GloriousCow is doing with MartyPC is just so impressive.

Quite. I had a great Christmas break a couple years back going through all the missions. It has some edges to it but people have also implemented things like RISC-V in it so it's also quite complete. The game portion is enough for fun and exploration.

I got all the way to the final missions where you're writing your own assembly (that you created) to solve various programming puzzles. Only stopped because I got busy with something else and break was over. I def recommend it. Reminded me at the time of Code by Charles Petzold but applied.

(Last I checked the Author was rewriting much of it for performance reasons and to fix up a few gotchas that should be possible with circuits but aren't here - no idea if they still are but that was my understanding before)

That's the nice thing! You don't need to optimise the language and build a JIT as a smaller company, Shopify already did that for you. Just like Google did for Javascript, which lead to Javascript having any performance at all (which lead to node being a thing).

Also remember that Shopify didn't start out making billions. They started as a small side project on a far, far slower version of Ruby and Rails.

Same with GitHub, same with many others that are either still on Rails or started there.

You can optimise things later once you actually have customers, know the shape of your problem and where the actual pain points are/what needs to be scaled.

To me, I care a ton about performance (it's an area I work in), but there's not a lot of sense in sacrificing development agility for request speed on things that may not matter or be things people will pay for. Especially when you're small.

I've somewhat regularly seen around 1400 show up. Which is just.... wow.

I think of that whenever someone is angry about cookie banners. Like, that was just happening before without me knowing.

Now when I see that, often I just leave as this site is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed article is written here... nothing valued is here.

This question comes up a lot with synths and especially hardware and Eurorack gear.

For me not being focused on finishing anything is what got me back into playing music (and eventually performing live sets).

Previously there was so much pressure to produce end results I couldn't even get started and lost all joy in the process. At some point I got some hardware to just play with and never really looked up how to save anything (was a Drumbrute, Meeblip and I borrowed a Beatstep). Was making odd acid tracks and silly sketches on my kitchen table every night that I'd lose as soon as I turned it all off. It was oddly freeing, and really fun.

A year later I was playing out gigs ranging from 20 mins to 3 hours. And one could even argue that I've still not finished any songs despite hours of recordings and performance as it's mostly improvisational.

Now I'm happily back in the noodling around and having fun stage again and loving it (though about to switch gears again).

Anyway - just figured I'd weigh in as there's often a lot of pressure to finish or record things when just playing around or building weird synths is in and of itself a really really fun (if expensive) hobby and maybe someone needs to hear that. :)

(also perfectly fine if your focus is on complete songs, of course)

I've heard that before from contractor friends, especially in London. Another option is working for a US company from Europe which I've done twice now. Wages can be quite a bit higher than working for a local company. Often both the US company and the employee feels like they're getting a great deal as you meet in the middle on wages.

Also the rights point you bring up is pretty key, the amount of protections, safety net, and rights you get as an employee in Europe makes it so that needing to save copious amount of money in case things go sideways is not a thing.

Depends where you're comparing them to in the US but in general most European tech wages are lower than the US. If comparing to SF perhaps even shockingly lower.

It can be hard to swallow at first, but when you account for lower rent, much cheaper health insurance, and far more vacation days (~20-24 by law - and no one actually expects you to be available) along with safer cities with generally higher quality of life, in my opinion it ends up being a very, very good trade off.

I moved to Amsterdam some years back (and have worked for a Berlin based company) and don't know if I could ever move back to the states.

Found an old CDR from probably 98 or so a while back and it had my Eudora folder backed up on it. On a whim I clicked the exe and much to my surprise it started right up with all my mail intact. I'm so used to software just stopping working after a time that I was completely impressed.

Not to mention, that was certainly a trip down memory lane reading those emails (and cringing at many). Worth tracking down if you have one laying about.

You're getting voted down (likely for only saying the article is wrong but not why), but I'm curious your reasoning. I've tended to write in POSIX sh (for maximum compatibility - and because it was just the way I learned) - but am happy to use bash too when the project allows and it makes sense so not sure I get the hard line stance. Wondering what I might be missing to evoke such a response.

But you still have to file, which is not only a pain, rather expensive. My tax prep bill last year was around 1200 EUR in the Netherlands on top of my Dutch tax prep.