fortyrod

lol. No, seriously. I thought it was about a band. sigh.

This title needs to be disambiguated. I had assumed that most musicians, and especially prog metal bands, were non-profit by default. I was curious why that had to be made explicit!

I'm a big fan of capturing the toolchain(s) with the repo. I have had to hack this for embedded toolchains out of necessity for years (decades?) using VirtualBox on a Mac. I still have a Windows 95 VM sitting around containing a copy of Keil or something that is the only known way to rebuild the code for a certain weird-ass micro from some consulting gig in the late 90's. I wonder if it still boots? Hopefully, that customer forgot about me...

Copilot is going to really rock the numbers on lucrative unhose-your-sucky-codebase consulting gigs. I'd feel gleeful about that but those gigs are the definition of soul-sucking so I guess still no free lunch.

This seems to broadly conflate CS and Software Engineering. The differences have been covered elsewhere. Stuff like cognitive vs. physical science, (mostly) thinking about thinking instead of thinking about things, or quotes like "A computer is to computer science as a telescope is too astronomy." To be fair, the fact that a lot of us got CS degrees, but really ended up doing software development probably doesn't help clarify matters. The university I went to had a separate degree for Software Engineering and, frankly, it looked pretty boring to me. Even though I was a full-on coder before I got there. Perhaps there is no hope?

Not really on topic, but it has been "interesting" to watch the cheating progression unfold in fitness games (Zwift, etc.) where it essentially IS digital steroids. Although often done in a very analog way, like attaching drill motors to $10k carbon bike frames to get that pro-level rush of achieving 5w/Kg for hours at a time. A Movistar contract, no doubt, arriving shortly...

I think you are on to something here. Make all elevators in hi-rises down-only and all stairwells up-only. Convert falling excess desk-jockey blubber into usable electricity while lowering rate of CV disease and generally improving fitness. Downside is probably a lot of BO that didn't exist before.

Seems reasonable. March/April is the end of the Concept2 indoor rowing annual "season" and I noticed that I had put essentially the same distance on my rower last year as my truck.

I told a fairly obnoxious and (in my mind) idiotic customer to "take a chill pill" on a conference call. This did not work out well. I did call them back and apologized before my management told me too, but I'm claiming no credit there, that was just pure self-preservation kicking in. On the plus side, after that day, I (slowly!) started to understand how salespeople can be really, really good at a really, really hard job. I very much enjoy sales now and I think I have a lot more empathy for where my customers are coming from thanks to that very dark day.

I wrote about my trip bringing up the iPod software development board. Now if I could only remember what that first song was...

Maybe not for general-purpose computing. I've used it for on-the-fly code generation (hacking display rotation into the Windows 3x BitBlt engine) and programming special-purpose media accelerators. In both cases you end up creating a bunch of convenience #defines or macros that generate the bits, which immediately takes you back into tiny language territory rather than pure machine code. The relative ease of creating new programmable hardware in FPGAs is another place this might occur.

The university I went to had used Xerox Sigma 6/7/9s. One of them is now in the living computer museum. Yeah! After programming 6502 assembler in high school, having multiple blocks of 16 32-bit registers was breath-taking. My brain was wired to the 6502 X/Y/A thing so I doubt I ever used more than 5-6 of them at a time. After doing a lot of 8-bit micro and X86 assembly, doing ARM assembly for the first time felt similarly freeing.

It's a tough one. I'm annoyed that Amazon forked Android and now I have to build for their store.

Ya, have a cat who took on 2 copperheads at once with great delight. I won't say I rescued him but I did get him out of there with some blood loss (mine). Maybe a study on the cat - mongoose correlation?

Cat owners are used to being used.

Indeed. The thing that caused me to actually move stuff off AWS to GCP was that you could deploy generic Node Express apps as Firebase Cloud Functions (and then Cloud Run). I knew I could move those anywhere if I needed to.

Probably would have been better for the author to have taken the "don't sell out to a single cloud vendor API" angle. But I guess no clicky-baits for that approach. I've been screwed over by both AWS and Azure, and never by GCloud, but that doesn't mean I trust any of them.

"Move slow and make things" is no joke. I mumble that every morning as I fall out of bed.

Or pretend you're in the southeastern US, where "Sam" and "Sue" are both non-gendered, and probably ageless, according to Mr. Cash, at least. You could also go with Courtney, Tracy, Billie, Casey, Drew...

Occam called, he wants his razor back :)

A group of high-performers draws non-maker hangers-on like moths to a flame. I would tell them that "Around here, the squeaky wheel greases itself." You have to be careful about using this on the A-listers though. They'll divert from whatever they were doing and de-squeak the wheel PDQ, which may not have been what you were hoping for.

In the late 80s my side-project college consulting company was almost 100% FoxPro. I still have the 5 1/4" floppies laying about. They also had a version that ran on the Mac so I ended up getting my first "real" job writing FoxPro sales management apps for the original Apple stores. Also they gave me a sweet Mac II to code on :)

Thanks for the encouragement, I will do just that.

Once upon a time, I smashed my kneecap into about 5 pieces. I wish I could say it was playing rugby or football or mining or something but it was disc golf (?!?!?!). Was on hydro for weeks, I think. I don't remember much about it. I do remember that stuff making me feel way better than any human really should.

I also remember the day I sat in the surgeon's office and we had the weekly "what's your pain level?" conversation. And I knew good and well that the pain was basically gone. And he knew I knew it. And he knew I really, really wanted more of those pills. And he asked if it might be time to switch to Tylenol and sort of gave me a certain, probably well-practiced, look. The one where an eyebrow does that thing.

I remember taking stock of the situation, looking longingly into the abyss, and turning back. That doctor fixed my knee, but, more importantly, probably saved my life with a 2-minute conversation.

Thanks doc!

Humans seem to have become quite dull.

The startups I have worked at went out of their way to get top-end equipment for everyone, and especially developers or engineers. They knew they had to move fast.

Nordic has some great parts and their tools and stack are first-rate. No WiFi though, last I looked anyhow.

I think you can still extract a small amount of useful input from todays media. I usually go with the "inverted axe-grind" metric that upvotes info that goes against an outlet's normal bias. So, anything good CNN says about Trump or anything positive that Fox says about Obama. Those are bad examples as you would wait a while for anything to leak through. Someone needs to point their magic NLP / sentiment thingy at this and automate it. That will give the SEO optimizers something else to work on, anyhow.