dcminter

If you're thinking of the 5th Element remote-controlled cockroach attack vector ... I think you're over-estimating what's feasible at the moment (even in a mouse sized package). Probabl…

Bear in mind that it's of Georgian construction and Grade 1 listed (so not just a façade), so there is presumably plenty of wood and plaster in its construction with corresponding voids. With hum…

(Self-reply as I'm outside the edit-window) I think Amos's title here is a little tongue-in-cheek by the way - it's more like a half-hour to skim through it, but with this at hand you&#…

Despite its age I still think that "A Half-Hour to Learn Rust" is an excellent starting point: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust …

Oh that's gooood. Got a cite or is it yours?

Better PEM handling in the jdk libraries is a nice smoothing over of a rough patch; I'll enjoy having that by default instead of build-time conversions or fiddly little utility methods.

I rather like the snark of: there's two hard problems in computer science: we only have one joke and it's not funny. Apparently⁰ by Philip Scott Bowden¹ ⁰ https://martinfowler.c…

Yeah, seems I was misremembering - looks like he just doesn't do talks any more.

I'm a bit too lazy to check, but didn't he leave thoughtworks? Apropos of nothing I saw him speak once at a corporate shindig and I didn't get the impression that he enjoyed it very m…

Oh, well that's super interesting, thanks; I guess some side effect of the high degree of parallelism? Anyway, I guess I need to do a bit more than dabble. > I think if you're a programme…

Hmm, I'm barely even a dabbler, but I'd assumed that the seed in question drove the (pseudo)randomness inherent in "temperature" - if not, what seed(s) do they use and why could on…

Surely given an identical prompt with a clean context and the same seed the outputs will not vary?

There's definitely a zone of despair on most projects I've been on - particularly greenfield projects - the whole thing seems misguided, the codebase is no longer pristine, often I come up w…

Landing and re-using their Falcon first stages was pretty radical though.

They're good on tech of course (technology quarterly in particular) but yes, I don't off hand remember them having a programming-language specific article!

Even in the UK it's not necessarily true. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it used that way, but I don't think my peer group in the UK would ever refer to NSAIDs as anything other than…

Epidural is surely just the method of administration (into the spinal fluid) where the actual painkiller administered is opioids, though, right? Meanwhile my understanding of Non-Steroidal Anti-Infla…

I too thought of it (in a good way) when "and an iron will" raised a chuckle from me. I second the recommendation and often nudge colleagues towards that article.

Yep, and they got very overexcited about "VisualAge" for this, that, and the other at one point. "VisualAge for C++ for OS/2" being one of the more coherent examples I guess…

Ah yes, I call this "brandfucking." IBM used to be a repeat offender. I recall trying to buy the WebSphere (Java) application server for a client and then finding out that IBM had slapped &q…

I'm wary of a lot of AI stuff, but here: > What used to be lone wolves or small groups of humans working on bounties will become truckloads of AI generated “stuff” trying to maximize revenue.…

Yes I know, I read it. I was responding to the parent "of course" insinuation that it was motivated by jealousy of the credit for the Mac. His established promotion of the identity of the co…

It's also, I think, worth bearing in mind the extraordinary growth that the computer industry has had. To be CEO of a major computer company in the mid 80s versus the late 90s was a very differen…

You know I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, but I do think he was a lot more complicated than the pantomime villain he sometimes gets characterised as. On this particular topic he was, on the contrary, …

Ah, I guess I see his point; I can't see the discussion being about use of metaphor in political fiction rather than whose team is worst. Still, I'm glad I now know the reference.

Extreme eagerness to disavow accusations of cultishness ... doth the lady protest too much perhaps? My hobby is occasionally compared to a cult. The typical reaction of an adherent to this accusation …

I (no expert, hopefully one will be along in a minute) have heard that in Swedish the letters äöå all evolved from corresponding diphthongs - so ae oe and ao respectively. Because the pronounciation c…

It's fairly clear that v2 has some problems and that SpaceX have not got to the bottom of them. It's not clear whether that's a series of small things of which this is (perhaps) the las…