Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
Lol, not compared to what they paid us :-)
Comment · 3 months ago
If you were already an IRIX shop, the servers were performant for a lot of uses. SGI did networking and disk I/O at least as well as Sun, IBM, and HP. We ran NFS and Perforce for hundreds of developers on SGI servers.
Comment · 3 months ago
or The Andromeda Strain. I was on the edge of my seat for the last half of the movie as a 10 year old when it came out. The book still holds up as a medical mystery - thriller and warning of unintended consequences.
Comment · 5 months ago
Traveling internationally with hundreds of pounds of gold wouldn't be that hard for a CIA senior official on "official" business. A diplomatic passport and access to the State Department or War Department's fleet of aircraft would get you pretty far.
Comment · 7 months ago
You will no longer be scare when either you do not enjoy work enough at the current comfort level, or you have something better to go to. Since the first seems unlikely, explore the second. Start side projects, unrelated hobbies, volunteering - anything that makes you excited for work to end.

If work is just so-so, find something that isn't, inside or outside your daily 9-5.

Comment · 7 months ago
/hogs reminds me of the earlier (mid Eighties) /nightowl and nightowl group. Davie Curry and others were taking up precious disk space on utilities of dubious necessity. One example was dog, a version of cat that displayed the file to screen using curses to randomly paint the letters in the correct location. Students found them, and began hogging too much cpu cycles using them, so George migrated them to /nightowl, and only members of nightowl group could execute.
Comment · 7 months ago
Sounds like I met George only a little later - Fall 1980. By then, EE's had two Vaxes to abuse - EE and ED. The ADMs were supplemented with ADDS Regent-20s. Students had strong opinions about which was better. LSi purists looked down on the "Reject-20s".
Comment · 8 months ago
No, the bottom of the page says they subcontract production. So it's an infomercial for a company that markets sweaters they may or may not design. And they disclose that in the article, if very subtly.
Comment · 8 months ago
Not at these prices :-) $150 - $200 for a sweater is not cheap. I think of fast fashion in terms of "how many times do I have to wear it to get my money's worth?" If the answer is less than the number of times I'd wear it in a year, it's fast fashion. Of course, if you're a thrift shop shopper, most fashion is fast fashion.
Comment · 8 months ago
What a thoroughly modern world we live in. My first reaction was to check if this was an April Fool's blog post.
Comment · 9 months ago
Nice idea, but "small composable programs" includes R scripts? That's great if you're already using R, a bit much to install if you're not.

You could simplify things by cribbing from the Hacker's Diet (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and using an exponentially weighted moving average as your filter. 10% of today's weight + 90% yesterday's EWMA. That's almost a one-liner in awk or perl, or a simple function in bash.

Copilot suggests: awk 'BEGIN{alpha=0.1} NF>=2 { date=$1; w=$2; if (NR==1) ewma=w; else ewma=alpha*w + (1-alpha)*ewma; printf "%s\t%g\t%.6f\n", date, w, ewma }' input.txt

Comment · 10 months ago
Off the top of my head:

Chair

Standing Desk

Redundant Network Connection / VPN / Better Home Network

Noise cancelling headphones / earbuds

Cheap laser printer

Power protection

Thunderbolt dock.

Enough charger ports so everything can charge at the same time overnight.

UPS if needed. Sized to cover your network gear also, unless you're going to tether to your phone during an outage. Personally, if my neighborhood lost power and I had to work, I'd head to a cowork spot or coffee shop.

Sound deadening if you have roommates, young children, or loud pets. It's not just for telemeetings if you are easily distracted.

PC-related:

Mouse, Keyboard, Dual Monitors.

Comment · 1 year ago
It's unfortunate election insecurity is only an issue when the other side wins. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) were quick to label the claims about Biden's anomalous win in 2020 including irregularities in Georgia, Arizona, and Colorado as "conspiracy theories"; Red State Republicans only investigate voting irregularities in Blue cities. Take Texas - It's possible cheating only occurs in the counties around Houston, Austin, and Dallas, but if that's the only place you look, it's the only place you'll find it.
Comment · 2 years ago
My wife was a great example of this. She was an undergraduate math major, then went on to get her master's and PhD in engineering. The first year of the master's was largely remedial engineering courses - statics and dynamics, thermodynamics, controls, simple electrical circuits, etc.

I asked if she found them difficult. She quipped, "If you already know the math, it's just nomenclature."

Comment · 2 years ago
No, I had the same strategy in computer science, foreign language, and elective courses. CS? The first week of the class, I'd read the entire language manual. I wouldn't understand everything, but when a concept was explained in detail, I had a context and baseline familiarity to orient myself.

In foreign language and elective courses (such as history) doing the reading before the lecture meant I could focus on what the lecturer thought was important rather than absorbing new information.

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