palordrolap

OK, yeah, you can’t control a third party’s promises (or hallucinations), but the boss isn’t going to fire someone from sales and/or marketing. They’ll fire the developer for failing to deliver.

TBH, this is barely any different from marketing promising that a product will have a feature that the development team only find out about later purely by accident when upper management asks about it.

It’s the machine language monitor on the 40-column screen of the Commodore 128 (or, more likely, an emulator of the same). I had a whole part about that, BASIC DATA statements full of numbers, and about how anyone with any sense actually used an assembler even back then in an original draft of my comment, but decided to keep it brief.

It looks like they’re going for “machine code” being directly putting numbers in memory, but if you know what you’re doing that’s pretty much just assembly in an obscure op-code dialect.

That this happened around April Fools’ makes me think that someone forgot to instruct it not to partake in any activities associated with that date. The fact it chose The Simpsons’ address in its (feigned?) confusion is a dead giveaway (to me) that it was trying to be funny.

Or rather, imitating people being funny without any understanding of how to do that properly.

Its explanation afterwards reads like a poor imitation of someone pretending to not know that there was a joke going on.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

I’m one of those people with a low tolerance for depressing reality. I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, for what good they do me. Wires and chips in the brain is a step too far.

The reason I’m in the state I’m in is that I suffered a work-stress related breakdown, but the cracks have always been there. As you might imagine I am not ready to be forced back into work which I will find unbearable. Combine that with body horror and you might be able to understand my reaction and stance to this.

How about cultivating a world that is less depressing before jamming wires into people’s skulls to “fix” a problem that might not originate there?

Oh no, that won’t do, the people who have low tolerance for depressing reality have to be turned into drones for the corporate machine just like everyone else. If we can turn off the emotions that derive from a sense of self-preservation, they’ll be more willing workers for the constant grind.

In before employers require that their applicants must have one of these implants. People without will not be hired.

By the 24th century we won’t be Star Trek’s Federation, we’ll be an unholy hybrid of the Ferengi and the Borg.

And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.

Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen. These are the people who when faced with the “pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap” will never pick the first one.

Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet’s A-Z, you’re out of luck. They’ll give you an approximation you don’t want and you’ll like it. Lower case? What’s that? You’re Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that’s in the bin, you’re OBRIEN now.

I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it’s 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.

When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.

This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.

Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.

You don’t know how to do something in raw JavaScript. You’re not even sure you should. You find a library / module / package / whatever-the-name-is-this-week on the Internet. You paste it into your code. Your code now works. Your code is now 1MB larger. This web app is heavy, man.

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I’d like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that’s happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

Wait until you learn that postfix conditionals are syntactic sugar and the compiler* turns that line into the equivalent of $debug and print(debug message), putting the conditional in first place, a lot like the ternary operator.

* Perl compiles to bytecode before running.

The ternary operator itself isn’t implemented in terms of and (and or) but it could be.

Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.

I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it’s not going to be cheap.

The article seems to imply that the intention is to replace silicon entirely, but agreed, there might be niches where it can replace silicon even if full replacement might be unrealistic.

A promising start, but a thousand transistors at 25 kilohertz puts it where silicon tech was 60 years ago, so they’ve a long, long way to go.

If it scales, they can use modern tech and know-how to accelerate their progress and they can get funding, maybe this will be viable in a decade or so.

Surely you jest. Gates has almost nothing to do with Microsoft these days, let alone interface design. In fact, he’d probably be the one to roast any stupid design decisions if he was still active there.

I think there’s a personality anti-correlation that keeps this mostly exclusive.

Serial killers tend to be more outgoing and active (to a troubling degree), whereas coders who create their own languages tend to be indoors types who don’t mind sitting in one place for long periods.

I mean there are plenty of psychologies that could make for someone who does both, but it would seem to reduce the odds a lot.