It’s extremely easy to fuck up cryptography code; you require both extraordinary mathematical insight and the programming skills to defend against every known and future side-channel attack. I would suggest instead trusting software where you can read the source yourself, and which has been openly reviewed by a selection of experts in the field.
“Also, be sure not to hallucinate and don’t make any mistakes.”
Our forever-DM is all-in on AI generation of stuff. Which I understand; it’s a role that requires a lot of thankless prep, and he wants all of the in-game maps and character artwork to look fancy. But on the other hand, I play D+D for the human interaction of it, and actually prefer the ‘theatre of the mind’ way of playing it. Dry-wipe pens on a whiteboard, there’s your adventure map. Now get roleplaying. If I wanted to play a computer game, then I’d play a computer game.
My wife used to work for a company that manufactured the glass for solar panels in the UK, but there was just no way that they could compete with Chinese prices. They would have had to have sold it below cost to match, let alone make any profit. It’s not the most labour-intensive of industries, but the energy costs are massive to melt all the glass. China has made massive investments in hydro and has a lot of cheap power for industry, which ironically means that making solar panels for green power is easier too.
An interesting assertion. A full install of 3.11 was about 8 MB or so, and all of the 8086 / -186 / -286 / -386 code will have been thrown away a long time ago. I doubt there’s much of PROGMAN left, and all the fonts and art assets are long superseded. So in terms of total code, it can’t be much. But on the other hand, the code that you write for an event loop or to handle driver interrupts hasn’t changed conceptually very much in that time. Most programmers would reimplement the basics in a very similar way, so there’s not much point in redoing it.
When I used to work in the water industry, we still had programmable logic controllers (PLCs) controlling pumpsets from the 1950s. The last person that could have modified them had retired and since died more than 30 years before. But deciding which pumps to run in order to best fill a reservoir is not logic that needs updating every day, not even every decade. Still working fine, don’t touch it. So I still laugh at my colleagues that can’t touch code that was written a few years ago in an unfashionable library. That’s not tech debt. Try, written by your grandparents for CPUs that had stopped being made before you were born.
And I remember 3.11 being perfectly good enough at the time, anyway. Wasn’t any Linux at that point.
Plain old Vim, with YouCompleteMe, NERDTree and TagBar installed; plus a few bindings to the leader key, is a much better IDE than anything else I’ve found. Sometimes it would be nice to a couple of the buttons that Eclipse or IDEA provide, but for pure text editing it’s unbeatable.
I’ve also found that “fancy Git dialogs” just get in the way, and learning how to use it properly from the command line stomps them all hands down. Plus, you can still use all your skills in a remote terminal.
I just don’t see the thinking here.
I could spend a fucking fortune, enough to live on for months, to cook my steak upright in a toaster for 90 seconds instead, for a worse end result, and it would save me zero time, because cooking the steak is not the time-critical step here.
Would only save you time if you’re buying the kind of steak that can be cooked in 90 seconds, and taking it straight from the fridge, cooking it, and then putting it in sandwich, and anyone who thinks that sounds a good idea frankly doesn’t deserve to have a decent steak.
They’re quite versatile computers for general purposes, but their i/o performance is dreadful. Mine all max out at about ten megabytes per second. That will not do, for server purposes.
Fortunately, there’s businesses all over that are chucking out all their old mini PCs since they won’t run Win11. I got an extremely decent one for £20 and it’s my new home server. Absolutely storms it, while just sipping at electricity.
Been a while since I’ve had to use that piece-of-shit in anger; but doesn’t the “save as” options give you the possibility of saving it as HTML but with all of those changes baked in? It’s easier to copy-paste HTML.
My Ryzen 9 had a default boost limit of 90 °C, which caused a lot of stress to the rest of the cooling system in my PC but it didn’t seem to have any problem running like that for a few hours. (Fortunately you can crank it down to something a bit more sensible in the BIOS.) My laptop will spike briefly over 100 °C, but only for a second or two. I can see the ‘failure’ temperature being a bit higher, but 200 °C seems unreasonably hot.
Ah, but no-one would question Mac support when you’re developing new software. If you can support Mac, which is certified UNIX, then the jump to supporting Linux isn’t all that much extra, and we can prove there’s a growing install base.
Started the ball rolling, and it just keeps going faster.
We can only hope so.
I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.
Yep. Arch on my personal multi-use laptop, Arch on my work Java-development laptop, Arch on my gaming PC, Arch on my home Forgejo / DNS / NAS server. Just easier to not have to remember how to do things in different ways, plus my home server can efficiently act as a repo cache.
Did have ALARM installed on the home server back when I used a raspberry pi, and while that’s an amazing project, a pi is just a bit underpowered for some uses. Got a mini PC extremely cheap since it wouldn’t support Win11, but it runs Linux like a champ.
Awesome page, thanks. Have bookmarked.
Harfbuzz though? That’s going to take some replacing. Hopefully someone will fork an earlier version. The thing that it does (accurate multi-script font shaping) is difficult to do; requires a lot of rule-of-thumb knowledge that’s unlikely to be possessed by a single person, needs a lot of collaboration.
I’ve installed both Arch (systemd) and Void (runit) on the same laptop as an experiment to see whether you could have them both coexisting on the same filesystem. (Which you can - main difficulty is keeping their kernel names separate in /boot.) There was very little difference between them in time-to-desktop. Arch was faster, if anything. And I run more services on a desktop than I would on a server.
Choosing init scripts over systemd is fine for philosophical reasons or if you prefer it for maintenance, but speed isn’t an issue. Init scripts are simpler, but systemd goes to great efforts to start things in parallel. Critical servers should be load-balanced and redundant anyway so that you can restart them for updates; whether they take a second longer to start-up doesn’t matter.
That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.
There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.
Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!
A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.
I’d like to think that the bag is step 1. Step 2 is to balance an old car tire on top, and set it on fire.