Not the original commenter, but for me, I just .. don't feel like it anymore. I used to be a rum enthusiast, now I've got two very nice bottles I bought myself just as I started ozempic, that are still unopened one year after.
It has the same appeal as room temperature water when you're not necessarily thirsty.
Either read the source code if you have it, or read the docs and do your best. That's how it worked when I was learning to code as a middle schooler in the early 90s.
In grad school I worked on TinyOS, and my advisor told me to print out the source code and spend a week reading it until I knew how to make the changes I wanted.
When I worked at Google there was no external documentation to use, so if you couldn't find the docs, you better figure out how to read the source. They have very good code search there.
I just blew my college sophomore's mind when I showed them that it's literally 10x faster to transfer data over Ethernet than over wifi. They literally had no idea that hardwired cables are massively faster and more reliable than wireless.
Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted.
When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.
In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity?
I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.
OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows.
Another fun anecdote related to Theremin:
> Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952.
> The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it.
Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process.
(This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.)
My worst technology experience of all time was maintaining support for a Zebra label printer in VB6. I can assure you that the users of these printers had maybe 1% the cortisol response I did when something went wrong.
Designing software for a printer means being a very aggressive user of a printer. There's no way to unit test this stuff. You just have to print the damn thing and then inspect the physical artifact.
A million years ago I worked on some code which needed to interface with a DICOM radiology printer (the kind that prints on transparency film). Each time I had to test it I felt like I was burning money.
perhaps the suffering of the printer devs is karmically 'paid back' by the physical suffering of printers around the globe, thus keeping everything in balance.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
something i have always observed, is how considerate Ted Tso's writing always is, but more than that, how consistent this property has been for so many decades.
its quite funny to me that ext4 very much mirrors him in that regard. its underpinning damn well everything, but you'd never know about it because it works so well.
The entire point of the article is that they called themselves collectively Norsemen. Going 'viking' (raiding) was an activity done by 'vikings' (raiders).
1000%. Tailscale is the first VPN I've used that makes my life easier, and I'm using it for personal access to my selfhosted servers at home. I will definitely recommend it to companies I work for in the future.
I've done branchy development to good effect for user-installable software, where we committed to maintain e.g. 3.2.x for a certain time period, so we had to keep release branches around for a long while.
But for continuously deployed SaaS or webapps, there's no point.
I've worked on software where we had multiple maintained release branches and we always just worked off master and then cut long-lived release branches from master at some point. Once a branch was cut we'd never merge master into it again and instead backport just specific fixes, which is quite different from git-flow.
Well in that case it sounds like you're shipping multiple versioned instances of your software for different clients, which is much closer to shrink-wrapped software than it is to e.g. gmail.
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