smingo

Google's code of conduct used to be Don't be evil. It was there in Google's IPO prospectus, but dropped subsequently. pparently there have been lawsuits by former employees against Google over thie mott.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

https://www.anquotes.com/charles-bukowski-quotes/ has some similar themes.

“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”

I got on very well with Van der Linden's Deep C Secrets. It's from 1994, so misses out on the newer versions, but aside from that it's aged well, IMHO.

And good news: it's been open sourced: https://freecomputerbooks.com/Expert-C-Programming-Deep-C-Se... and its well regarded on Hacker News https://hackernewsbooks.com/book/expert-c-programming-deep-c... .

The entire device is tiny: 20mm x 5mm x 5mm approx. It looks to work using a small laser and a lens which focuses the beam about 5mm above the device. The sensor unit contains a photodiode(s), and algorithms count the particulates. It looks to need a heat sink.

There are quite a few examples of very misguided educational strategies.

Whole Language[1] failed so many students, but had significant funding and guru-level support for decades. Brain Gym[2] is regarded as pseudoscience. Even Discovery Learning has had serious detractors.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Gym_International

Commodore release a new variant of their C64 computer, with a '99%' faithful recreation of the original hardware on an AMD Artix 7 FPGA, along with some more up-to-date specifications. Suitable for retro gaming.

Chinese New Year falls between 21 January and 20 February. This would be somewhere between week 3 and week 8.

Some ISO 8601 week numbers for CNY:

2022 CNY fell on Feb 1 , which is Week 5

2023 CNY fell on Jan 22, which is Week 3

2024 CNY fell on Feb 10, which is Week 6

2025 CNY fell on Jan 29, which is Week 5

Skirrow was significant in the Nobel-winning discovery of H. Pylori, has an Agar gel named after him, and championed public health.

USA has increased its export controls on advanced process node chips, with an act that comes in to effect today, and will get published in a few days' time. The preview is available at https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2024-28270... .

I had a similar experience making a Turing machine out of my own umbilical cord while in the womb. Of course, I didn't know the name of it at the time - just that it seemed like a simple way to effect some sort of deterministic behaviour.

Always a challenge to do recursive algorithms like Tower of Hanoi but without a stack, and cramming that in to the surprisingly limited space. There's not much tooling available in the womb.

All those achievements were to be lost when I got delivered.

Barber's Adagio for strings, although it gets referenced enough; Khachaturian's Spartacus and Phrygia, especially the brass version; Holst's planets, esp Uranus; Beethoven's 7th; Gorecki's 3rd.

indeed, with an incoming Teams meeting invite, it should be determinable from the sender's context which account should work on the meeting. Instead there is 2 minutes of waiting, and what seems like pot luck with the account.

Not so sure that's fair. There are papers cited from 2016 that are from other authors.

The dystopia in the film version of Ready Player One clearly borrows from this.

Putting the WiFi SSID and password on the side of the energy monitor sensor box allowed for this:

> The whole thing was quite dissapointing. However, I do have a few Raspberry Pico microcontrollers lying around at home. If I could connect to the WiFi network of the energy manager directly and get the data from the server, I could just extract kW consumption from the API, multiply it by a correct rate and then display it on some Grafana instance.

Love it!

Regulating here is necessary, but the challenge is steep! IoT devices may include a complex bill of materials (BoM) including software (SBoM). Vulnerabilities can appear in any of those components.

On the one hand, CVE and vulnerability databases are excellent, and with some automation of vulnerability and patch availability the's the possibility of automated re-build.

But the manifests can be huge. And some component could be vulnerable, but was never anticipated to be so, and perhaps doesn't even have the means to be patched. Update processes for sub-sub-components may not have been exercised, and could lead to bricked products.

So labelling and guarantees are welcomed. But the challenge is practically insurmountable, and until the entire industry steps up to meet it, labelling and guarantees are going to be 'best effort'.

Totally valid point. Escrow then open sourced, or perhaps even some insurance policy so that the future patching and vulnerability remediation is guaranteed.

There's a bunch of stuff consequential to EO 14028 which could allow for some automation of library vulnerability.

As a tool for quantifying the number of civilisations, agree, the Drake Equation is not so useful given the known unknowables.

But as a tool for stimulating discussion, creating engagement for SETI, or as an exemplar for Fermi Estimation, it's excellent.

Someone must have felt very clever when they concluded Erlang would be dimensionless.

  Calls per second X seconds per call = no unit.

But that's wrong. Clearly the number of calls ongoing maps on to lines being used for a circuit-switched network, or datagrams in flight, or whatever. Far from dimensionless.

  Call_starts per second X call.seconds per call_start = calls as the unit

Much more plausible, IMHO.

Do you have an opinion on Carbon?

Not for big arrays.

Radix sort is O[n] . (or [n * number of bytes in Int] or whatever is being compared).

It's omitted from the comparisons, I see. Radix sort can also have predictable memory overhead.

Philosophers may consider this a "performative utterance".

Do we have an opinion on Threema ?

Link without Google amp: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...

Likely a reference to the sit-com Silicon Valley.

Elegant.

> there's little coherence to the way the language has grown in the last decade.

IMHO it's been incoherent from the earliest times.

The lame exceptions without 'finally', and no consistency in exception types. Then the desperate attempts to make all resources into objects, except that practically no OS calls bothered with this.

The overloading of the shift operators in the standard library. Indeed, operator overloading itself is just a recipe for abuse. You read 'a=b+c' and you literally have no clue what that means.

Multiple inheritance with the brittle semantics.

The awful STL, with its multi-kB error messages (the allocator of the trait of the string of the tree of map of king Caractacus doesn't match ...)

There's no wonder the 'obfuscated C competition' never happened with C++ given the fact it's unreadable, right out of the box.