williamaadams
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
I love this library, and have made a C++ friendly version of the same.
What you get for a few hundred lines of code far outweighs any of the shortcomings it might have. It's a great starting point. If someone wants to make a full on format, they'll probably be better off just using the new JPEG XL, rather than trying to shape this thing.
It's a good exploration of what can be done with run-length encoding.
Not too long ago 10 mbits was ‘broadband’, so, maybe various forms of wireless will be just fine. Certainly more flexible in terms of long term options
Currently using it to create a tiny Postscript interpreter: https://github.com/wiladams/lj2ps
But really, it's something easily judged over time. Everyone will be able to judge how our open source attitude is in coming years.
And hay, look, there's more absorption of Linux into Windows... Is that embrace extend, or recognize reality? Or hold on for dear life? From my perspective, it's evolution, and nothing but good.
Times have changed. I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of someone that's trying to destroy from the inside. If it were, we would have immediately just slow rolled it, but we're actually making improvements.
I don't think we're collectively smart enough (nor are most orgs) to pull off grand conspiracies. Just a bunch of humans trying to do what's right for the company and customers.
So, I agree with your assessment. Lots of good, still bad actors, modern times have changed.
To me, this implies that our engineering organizations, and entire company, need to have an appropriate amount of empathy across a broad spectrum of geographies, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and the like. You only get that by having a diversity of talent, and more importantly, inclusion in your engineering practices.
When I talk about diversity, I usually say; "There are two forms of diversity, DNA diversity, the stuff we usually talk about in terms of color, sex, etc, things you can see, and then there's diversity of perspectives and experiences. You need the diversity of experiences and perspectives. In some cases that's conveniently wrapped in some forms of DNA diversity, but is not exclusive to that".
I don't think the question is at all controversial, and we should not be afraid to openly talk about it.
Looking at it, I can imagine redoing it as LuaJIT and using ljsyscall to deal with the system calls on all platforms. Might be even more snappy.
He release something that turned into a fire storm. Google no doubt did a law suit calculation and figured firing him was cheaper than the inevitable "hostile work environment" lawsuits they figured would be filed if they didn't take such action.
If the goal was to not get fired, but still have the dialog, he probably could have found a forum to do it. Instead, he blasted into their internal interweb, and here's the outcome.
Most large companies would probably end up doing the same thing, regardless of what they might believe about what was actually written.
I work at Microsoft. The back of my ID badge has our mission statement: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
To me, that mission is a blueprint for how I can easily approach issues of diversity and inclusion. It says "everyone". To me it's a simple matter of gaining empathy for a wider set of customers so that I can more effectively create software for them.
As an engineering manager, I need to somehow be able to include the views, perspectives, and experiences of a wheat farmer in rural Kenya. Same goes for the high speed day trader in Iceland (I've been to neither place, so how do I know what they really need).
I want more women in engineering precisely because they're not me. Nothing about them makes them less capable of writing code, and several of their attributes (grossly generalizing) makes them far better collaborators than most men I know.
So, I'm just shaking my head, and continuing to do my bit to improve things in ways that I believe are useful: http://aka.ms/leapit
If you can truly embrace that perspective, you'll discover a profound truth.
The transition might cause some discomfort for those who've been on the privileged side of things for a while.
It's a journey.