[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 101 points 1 week ago

Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 18 points 1 week ago

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 29 points 2 weeks ago

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 34 points 2 weeks ago

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 26 points 3 weeks ago

God that sounds awful in headline form.

Pride month is absolutely not an excuse to say “current homophobes will never get better, so they all need to blah blah”. Their current behavior is intolerable, but through continued exposure and humanizing influences, the people can be reached. It’ll go from hatred to extreme discomfort to mild discomfort to … something more normal.

Unfortunately I’m a crappy communicator and I can’t figure out a way to reduce that to a headline without making it some kind of division-promoting reductionist garbage. Sigh.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 24 points 1 month ago

I think crucially it has the potential to show moderate voters that President Biden is not one to abuse the legal system for his own personal gain. If the outcome is supported by evidence and precedent, obviously some won’t be convinced by even that. But some will be.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 27 points 1 month ago

Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 16 points 4 months ago

As a professional C# developer since 2012, I’d say a programmer needs four kinds of knowledge. As an organizational user of Github Copilot for a couple months, I’d say AI tools can help with one, maybe two of those.

Understanding language and syntax, so you can communicate the ideas in your head to the machine accurately: AI is fairly good at this, will certainly get a lot better.

Understanding algorithms and data structures, well enough to compare and contrast, and choose the most appropriate ones for each circumstance: AI can randomly select something, unless it’s a frequently solved problem. I don’t expect this to get better except for the most repetitive of coding tasks.

Understanding your execution environment and adapting your solutions to use it well: I don’t see the current generation of AI tools ever approaching this. I don’t think they have context for how a piece of code is used, when trying to learn from it. One size fits all is not a great approach.

Understanding your customer’s needs and specific problems, and creating products, not code. Problem domains and solutions are a business’s entire reason for existence. This is all kept confidential (and outside the reach of an AI training data set) for competitive reasons. As a human employee, you get to peek behind the curtain and learn these things yourself.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 17 points 5 months ago

Friend Computer is best comrade!

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 45 points 6 months ago

Wait don’t do that. They garnish wages for student debt. They’re happy to do it, too, as they get to keep a big chunk of extra fees that way.

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 22 points 7 months ago

Ok now I’m curious what I’m missing out on. Can anyone recommend a good PCIe token ring adapter and concentrator?

[-] mspencer712@programming.dev 32 points 8 months ago

A 20 lb (or so) sealed lead acid battery and an inverter, at U Nebraska at Omaha around 2003-2004. I had imported a Sharp SL-C700 and it was very power hungry. Smart phones were barely a thing (blackberries) at the time.

I think I was vaguely aware of the possibility of some unexpected metal shorting the battery and getting hot enough to start fires, so I bought a green rubber bath mat (which I remember had little sucker feet on one side) and wrapped it around the battery.

I finished my undergrad in 2004 with no incidents.

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mspencer712

joined 1 year ago