emh68

I've been thinking about running a "mystery retro LAN party". Dig into a big cardboard box and pull out an old gaming laptop. You get what you get. Then go try to get top frag!

The first computer I bought with my own money was an Athlon XP. Probably got the motherboard and CPU from Comp USA or Office Max or something. I bought it specifically to play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind! It felt like it was obsolete in a week, the way Moore's Law was rocking at that time.

And yeah, when I opened the box and saw that the CPU had a fragile ceramic/glass top like that, I had a mini panic attack.

These days, of course I have a few in my retro collection, but I'll never remove the heatsinks. The CPU and motherboards might as well be one unit, never to be separated again.

I have this graph I like to show with "risk to company posed by changes" and "benefit to company posed by changes" on the y axis and "company entrenchment" on the x axis. The "benefit" graph starts out nearly vertical but quickly levels off. The "risk" is the inverse, starts off horizontal but quickly ramps up to infinity.

So I think that ZIRP has little effect on the "just say no" phenomenon, that's more about company size.

Okay I'll add mine too. I recently vibe-coded a Ruby interpreter, as a single-header C file, meant to be embedded (like Lua or mruby). I call it Luby: https://halferty.dev/index.php/luby-single-header-embeddable...

Sometimes I think about the bizarre path computer technology took.

For instance, long-term storage. It would stand to reason that we'd invent some kind of big electrical array, and that's the best we could hope for. But hard drive technology (which relies on crazy materials technology for the platter and magnets, crazy high-precision encoders, and crazy physics like floating a tiny spring over the air bubble created by the spinning platter) came in and blew all other technology away.

And, likewise, we had liquid crystal technology since the 70s, and probably could have invented it sooner, but no need, because Cathode Ray Tube technology appeared (a mini particle accelerator in your home! Plus the advanced materials science to bore the precision electron beam holes in the screen grid, the phosphor coating, the unusual deflection coil winding topology, and leaded glass to reduce x-ray expose for the viewers) and made all other forms of display unattractive by comparison.

It's amazing how far CRT technology got, given its disconnect from other technologies. The sophistication of the factories that created late-model "flat-screen" CRTs is truly impressive.

The switch to LCDs/LEDs was in a lot of ways a step back. Sure, we don't have huge 40lb boxes on our desks, but we lost the ultra-fast refresh rate enabled by the electron beam, not to mention the internal glow that made computers magical (maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, like people in the 80s who swore that vinyl records "sounded better").

Someday, maybe given advances in robotics and automation, I hope to start a retro CRT manufacturing company. The problems, such as the unavailability of the entire supply chain (can't even buy an electron gun, it would have to be made from scratch) and environmental restrictions (lead glass probably makes the EPA perk up and notice).

> defense of the rich against the poor

Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.

1. Build a house for each homeless person

2. Remove them from the homeless count, because they now have a house.

3. Reach zero homelessness!

4. There are still people living on the streets... But we don't call them homeless!

Wow! It really works. The missing bean "pops" out at you. The hardest part is getting your brain to focus on the cross-eyed virtual center image.

How are other companies handling this?

Ask an LLM to output precise instructions to control a 1 meter 3 axis triple- articulated robot arm to pet a cat, and you'll see the answer is "no".

Much like Facebook and Twitter spy on American citizens for the Federal government.

My introduction to Pascal and Assembly Language were after finding one of those huge paperbacks on the shelves of a Salvation Army in North Huntington, Pennsylvania. This was long after the book had lost all relevance. But before that I was stuck thinking about programming in terms of Java and C++ OOP. Small things that changed the course of my programming career.

Laravel is never going to be competitive with Django/Rails simply because PHP as a language is just not as easy to master as Python/Ruby. There, I said it. Lots of PHP fans write these articles about how PHP is catching up in terms of usability, but nobody is choosing PHP in 2024 (other than truly uninformed people who are just picking their project language at random).

The one area where PHP is useful in 2024 is for prototyping a website quickly. As a one-person team, PHP without a framework (and without OOP) is the fastest way to build a fully-functioning complex site. I built a massively complicated site this way, in very little time. This is great because if it ever becomes popular, I can simply hire developers to rewrite it in the latest framework du jour (probably Next/Nuxt/whatever)

"It's not about luck. It's about managing risk - so that in the end it looks like luck" - Ben Brown

Nope, it's different this time.

1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now.

2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.

Senior full-stack web developer, 10 years of experience Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Rails, Django, Java, Scala, React, Angular, Ember, TypeScript, PHP, ElasticSearch, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS/Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Git, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Big Pipelines, Big Data, Linux kernel, driver development, C/C++

Résumé/CV:

Email: aGVsbG9obkBlZHdhcmRoYWxmZXJ0eS5jb20=

Senior full-stack web developer, 10 years of experience

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Rails, Django, Java, Scala, React, Angular, Ember, TypeScript, PHP, ElasticSearch, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS/Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Git, Kafka, Airflow, Snowflake, Big Pipelines, Big Data, Linux kernel, driver development, C/C++

Résumé/CV:

Email: aGVsbG9obkBlZHdhcmRoYWxmZXJ0eS5jb20=

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, to list a few.

Résumé/CV:

Email: aGVsbG9obkBlZHdhcmRoYWxmZXJ0eS5jb20=

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, to list a few.

Résumé/CV:

Email: aGVsbG9obkBlZHdhcmRoYWxmZXJ0eS5jb20=

Libraries and publishers have always had a love/hate relationship. I'm sure book publishers are no happier that their products are being loaned out for free than the MPAA is that movies are being loaned out for free, or the RIAA is that music CDs are being loaned out for free (all of these are currently done by physical libraries in the USA).

This has never been a real problem in the past, because libraries were limited by how much they could loan out, due to having a limited number of library staff, and a limited amount of shelf space.

The Internet Archive is also similarly limited, due to having a limited budget to hire engineers to scale up the platform to support more users, and a limited budget for digital storage space.

But it's enough that it really changes the equation, and I think that if the IA wins, we'll see less physical books printed, and the ones that are will have an increased price tag. I expect that the government will adjust the laws to keep the balance, somehow, however.

Cool, something like this is definitely needed. Now it just needs vbulletin and xenforo.

After publication of this article, a Department of Defense official said, “These comments are not representative of the department’s view on China.”

This is awesome. How did you find a list of forums to search?

I think that's very true. However many forums die due to the owner not being able to pay the bills or stop spam. Xenforo + anti-spam addons ain't cheap, google ads won't take just anyone and the payout is very low. Or they just get bored with running a final fantasy fansite. This is where reddit becomes more appealing because if someone deletes a subreddit you don't have to find an entirely new site to join, someone will just recreate it. Of course Reddit is busy trying to make it's VC owners back all of their billions, so its vision has become heavily compromised.

I haven't been laid off, but due to the economy I've been trying to come up with something I can do to become self-reliant. I've built a forum platform, and I've been buying up ___forum.com domains and pointing them at it. So far it has been costing me lots of money, and no users are showing up, but it's my vision and I'm not going to give up so easily.

I'm pretty sure my current project is my worst. I've been making a web forum platform from scratch, and I've paid for a bunch of 3rd party integrations (like cloudflare, mailgun, etc.), and have bought a dozen or so domain names. It's futile because forums are incredibly out of vogue right now. But it's a fun diversion.

Here let me try:

What's important to understand is, Docker exists because Oracle made Java too scary to touch, thanks to big ongoing lawsuits against Google, and demanding royalties just for running a JVM server. Also the JVM is fast, but it's slow enough that it's within striking distance of a full cgroup, running a full Linux kernel.

So it made sense to just create Docker, and allow people to abandon things like jruby, and just run normal Ruby in a Docker container.

WASM is what people would have wanted when Docker was created. A bytecode format like JVM, but faster, and not encumbered by big bad Oracle's coffer-rattling.

So in other words, if WASM had existed when Docker was created, people would have just recompiled their apps for WASM bytecode, and would have also recompiled things like MongoDB and MariaDB for WASM. Things like network syscalls would be replaced by traps to the webassembly runtime.