Restrictive laws may make criminals more powerful. I was thinking about laws against collecting and selling personal information. Now, good people’s hands are tied by the law, while criminals still freely collect and use personal information. Did you notice that the number of unwanted calls has declined? I did not. How about the number of scam messages about your undelivered USPS package? Nope.
I cannot find it anywhere, so I’ll play by memory. Someone asked Richard Feynman: is it possible to make an antigravity machine? And he said, define antigravity? If you define it as a device that cancels gravity, I would say the chair I am sitting right now is the antigravity machine. 😜
I work a lot, so I hope my kids won’t have the need to work.
What I have learned over years of software engineering is that if you think it’s impossible, it will happen tomorrow, guaranteed. So now I am thinking everything is possible; nothing happens.
Windows 95 had multiple releases, or patches on them, one of which was called OSR2. It still had a lot of bugs and crashes; it was a minefield of bugs. Over time, you just learned how not to step on the mines. There was a joke circulating: How to fix all the bugs in OSR2 with a change of one byte? How? OSR2 -> OS/2.
I like UTF-8; I think it is a good standard. It has some drawbacks, for example, it is expensive to calculate the number of characters in the string, but I think it has more pros.
I really like how KDE does taskbar buttons; the way I configured them, they don’t have any brains—it is all manual, and they don’t group. I can’t figure out how to do the same on Windows. If I open two Visual Studios, they stick to each other, and I even can’t swap them.
I use ChatGPT daily, and while it is often mediocre and produces poor code, I continue to use it to build my skills so that when the technology improves, I will be ready to hit the ground running. It reminds me of the story with Pixar - the founder made a short 3D animated movie and showed it to his manager at Disney, who didn’t recognize its potential and didn’t see the value in investing in the technology. At that time, making a 3D animated movie was taking about the same amount of time as a traditional 2D one and had worse quality. This forced the founder to leave and eventually create Pixar.
Any productivity metrics software engineers would be able to game; they are smart people. This is why the number of lines of code, the number of commits, anything is useless. What you need is a manager who is a good software engineer. That manager would be able to recognize the talent and give the recommendation for promotion.
There are some solitary experiments, like 50 days alone. And people suffering a lot. I feel like I would have so much fun being alone. I don’t know; 50 days sure, no problem; maybe 100.
Quite often I am thinking about time and consciousness. The more I think about it, the less I understand. Why are we as humans experiencing time? Why is our consciousness like a needle on a record player tracking the timeline? I have no idea. Do we have consciousness, does time exist?
What I noticed that has changed on YouTube is a lot of recycled videos. YouTubers ride on the success of other successful YouTubers. For example, when I want to see the original Casey Neistat video, YouTube is just filled with analyses as to why he is successful, interviews, and straight reaction videos. Why am I complaining? Because it’s become too hard for me to find quality content. Maybe it is good for me? I’ll waste less time on YouTube.
Tesla is a darn good car, but it’s just a darn good car. Nothing more, nothing less. Self-driving - bullshit, even autopilot - bullshit. I use autopilot to have a sip of water or stretch. It is that bad.
What brokers break and why is it in the past tense? Singers sing songs, and they are not sungers.
Spoiler alert: Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Hehehe
omg
Back in the day, I did not speak English very well; I did not know what a garbage disposal was called. And it broke, so I went to the apartment management and said, ‘The trash disintegrator is broken.’ 😂
There is a lot of controversy around the famous Donald Knuth quote “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Honestly, I do not understand why. People say it is taken out of context, but I think the quote is perfectly concise. It aligns with my philosophy:
- First make it work, and you can make it pretty later.
- There is infinitely more value in a working and ugly program compared to a beautiful but non-working program.
- Don’t guess, measure first.
Steam’s requirement to credit AI reminds me of the time when people were crediting computers in music albums.
I wonder why software engineers do not have unions? Individualistic personality?
If your Battle.net stopped working (hangs on the authentication stage) under Lutris, you need to add an environment variable WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1.
Arrow next to the Play button → Configure → System Options → Environment variables → Add the following:
Key: WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY Value: 1
I just learned about ABBA Voyage. My jaw is dropped; Hatsune Miku feels like last century.
I am thinking if I need to do something extra to get the traction on my Twitter and YouTube; I have some ideas, and it will take time to implement. Would it be nuts to work on two side projects?
We do not have any official rules for how long we allow to say Happy New Year. So I am thinking to say to people Happy New Year all year along. 😜
I have some noisy construction at home, and in the office, we have some viruses circulating. I went to the beach, and I cannot see anything on my laptop; switching everything to white schema. I think I’ll stay on white from now.
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