Case Study: How many colors are too many colors for Windows Terminal?

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-05T19:25:00+00:00

I think Casey Muratori's overarching point is that terminal emulators are slow for no good reason. There may actually be a good reason - it's possible there's a bunch of legacy stuff that assumes throughput is a certain speed similar to the way games on old platforms assume clock ticks take a specific amount of time - but those aren't the reason Microsoft people gave, and the reason they did give turn out to boil down to bad decisions made previously. There was no reason given why they couldn't just change those decisions except inertia and not-invented-here.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-05T11:03:49+00:00

I am a hobbyist writing code for fun, if compromise of my account registers in your threat model, buddy, that's on you.

It's really insidious. This is a way for big companies to not only not pay people for open source packages they depend on, but to actually thrust the cost of their threat mitigation onto the volunteer maintainers whose work they depend on. Not to mention, SMS is not secure and therefore as unsuitable for 2FA as email (arguably less so).

(For the record, I generally take a dim view of people who release code with a permissive license and then complain about not getting paid if it becomes popular with companies, but expecting them to take extra steps and potentially pay money so those companies can be more secure from attacks is another thing entirely.)

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-05T06:10:47+00:00

Randy Pausch, the “last lecture” guy, said he went into academia because he was a natural salesman and would rather sell ideas to students than BS for the private sector.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-02T19:01:54+00:00

Got hacked by themselves, another rug pull.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-02T18:59:55+00:00

Obviously it's because banksters' legacy payment systems take days to clear, instead of (checks notes) possibly never like with blockchain!

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-02T11:39:41+00:00

Yeah. I was like, "Shit, have I been using light duty mayo all this time?"

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-02T09:49:51+00:00

Cue the old joke: "Second place was even more free load testing!"

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-02T09:46:49+00:00

In Vegas you know your odds. Everything is labeled, and you get free drinks and sometimes other perks while you play. With crypto you don't know your odds and it doesn't matter because you get scammed out of your money anyway.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-02T07:49:58+00:00

Prime numbers is better because you get everyone on the call/in the meeting factoring numbers in their head to figure out the next prime. “Okay, next is… 19? 17? 19 is definitely prime. Are you sure 17 is too? They’re right next to each other…”

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-05-01T12:55:29+00:00

Honestly I don't know why it's so hard to write a good build tool

Short answer: it needs to be simple enough to handle basic, purely declarative workflows easily while also being able to allow pretty much arbitrarily complex control flow, safely, and without any unexpected surprises. It’s hard enough striking that balance with normal programming languages but people are at least willing tolerate a steep learning curve for that, whereas if it’s a steep learning curve just to start compiling code you will have a problem.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T19:11:17+00:00

I wrote about this in another discussion. In theory, maybe, but the problem, shared with Google's search results and Facebook's feed algorithm, is that bad actors - with fleets of bots and automated A/B tests - have already figured out how the algorithm works, at least to a first-order approximation, so they can game it. They already know about how many favorites, RTs, and replies a tweet needs for Twitter to start promoting it as "organic interest", what the optimal length and number of hashtags is, etc. Democratizing that knowledge could mean that everybody would at least be on an equal footing when trying to game the system, instead of leaving the advantage solely in the hands of people who have financial or political motivation to put the work in to figure it out. I'm not sure it would actually pan out that way, but I see why it might be considered.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T19:01:36+00:00

It's not really unique to Go, though - the same thing can happen in for example Java if the class being deserialized declares a value to be int instead of Integer because the latter can be null while the former can't.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T12:16:08+00:00

If half the buildings have been condemned, that's because they haven't been maintained. Investing in property isn't just signing up to cash checks for life, you also have to put time and money into taking care of your investment.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T12:14:02+00:00

ACH transactions take an insane amount of time because the US financial infrastructure is geographically dispersed and very diverse, so an instant payment scheme that's fair to everyone requires a lot of thought to work out. FedNow is planned to launch next year. Meanwhile the Eurozone and a number of other countries have had instant payments for a while now, all without any of the intrinsic risks or problems of blockchain transactions.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T12:08:24+00:00

There's nothing trustless about Bitcoin. I give you BTC, I have to trust that you'll give me whatever it is you said you would. If you don't, there's no way I can get that BTC back. With a credit card I can dispute the charges. With BTC I can post on Twitter complaining about you (and probably get banned because you flagged the post as harrassment).

There's nothing useful about digital scarcity. The whole point of digitalization is that stuff ceases to be scarce.

Digital property rights already exist, they are called IP law.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T09:44:25+00:00

The expert is on Stack Overflow. The pseudo-expert is on Quora.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T09:16:22+00:00

It's terrible code in general. You basically never need code like this:

if cond:
 do_thing()
else:
  break

You can always simplify it to:

if not cond:
 break
do_thing()

In any event, the fact that Kotlin allows if-else without braces is not a feature, IMO. Many, many bugs have been caused by this little syntax quirk that has followed us since the C days.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T08:34:51+00:00

Those negative opinions mostly come from 1) Edsger Dijkstra, who is a known crank, and 2) "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal", which is a joke.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-29T07:45:03+00:00

Source? We had a breach on a Hetzner-hosted test server and they cut it off from the internet within an hour.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-28T11:57:38+00:00

A lot of people made a lot of money with Bernie Madoff, too. I'm not posting this to argue whether Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC is a scam or not, I just want to hear your story on the investment side of things.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-28T11:20:49+00:00

I'm not sure this is really all that altruistic, though. Game companies want to be the ones making money by selling skins/premium content/etc directly to whales, NFTs just mean other people have the potential to profit from transactions, which they don't really want. If somebody is willing to pay $100k for a Bored Ape avatar, they want to be the ones to get it, not the previous owner.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-28T10:24:29+00:00

Cuz there's a couple of videos of guys driving around in lambos getting women to get in the car with them just by revving the engine, and they assume that those videos are a) real and b) representative of all women (or a least all hot women, which is all they care about).

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-28T08:35:13+00:00

In Google’s case (and also probably Twitter, Facebook, though I don’t use them much) it backfired. Full-time SEO farms can make numerous small tweaks across dozens to hundreds of sites to see what affects ranking and what doesn’t, so they always have a current if imperfect understanding of what the page ranking algorithm prioritizes. It’s normal people who don’t have enough time or energy to figure all this shit out that are consistently disadvantaged by changes, and get swamped by garbage that jukes the system.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-28T08:26:44+00:00

That’s broad to the point of meaningless, though. If you pay enough you can get the source for a lot of software products, including IIRC Oracle, but that doesn’t make them open source even by popular understanding.

AnalogOfDwarves · 2022-04-28T08:22:18+00:00

Powerful, when talking about data files, is worse. XML is far more powerful than JSON, but you have to disable several features just to be able to parse it safely.

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