Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org
- My Page
- https://fixermark.com
Career software engineer living something approximating the dream he had as a kid.
Joined Apr 2022
Type systems and unit tests have something in common: they are both in the category of 'documentation', alongside comments.
They differ from coments in that they are designed to be machine-interpretable, but like comments they do not modify the behavior of the code if stripped out. This is the key principle of documentation: it's additional information in a program that does not modify the behavior of the program when it is stripped out.
They are vital for ensuring the correctness of the program. But 'correctness' is a human concept; programs do not care.
The fact that #dwarffortress releasing on Steam has made the developers overnight millionaires by selling over 300,000 units is great for them and not surprising.
the game has been amazing for years, with the largest problem with it being that the ASCII user interface made it damn near impenetrable for a vast swath of potential players. Jumping that final hurdle not only popped the floodgates on a known tranche of potential players for whom graphics were table-stakes, it skyrocketed it past the rest of the indirect-control colony simulators on the market, because none of them can boast what DF boasts...
... two *decades* of development and refinement.
@joe_no_body The two hardest problems in software engineering are naming things, cache management, and off-by-one errors.
@ocdtrekkie @lauren I think a key point to observe is that even if it were a thing, sensor fusion is worth pursuing because the goal is to do *better* than human-driven. If we were just automating to human-driven, that's got economic value but isn't nearly as meaningful as saving lives.
For that reason, pulling in signals human drivers can't use is a huge point of leverage towards doing better than humans could ever possibly do. I've seen videos of auto-braking saving their drivers from an accordion collision on the highway because shallow-bounce radar thrown under the bumpers of the vehicle in front can see traffic slamming to a stop when the vehicle in front of the driver completely obscures their down-road view.
@joe_no_body Totally anecdotal, everyone's-metabolism-is-different comment:
Walking really helps me. It both burns calories and makes it easier to regulate my appetite because I am less hungry and more thirsty after a walk.
The way that I got over the rut of having to do exercise is I stopped thinking about it as exercise and started thinking about it as giving the neighborhood an opportunity to give me an adventure. When I'm out on a walk I see neat things happening. One time I followed a rabbit down a game trail just to see where it would go.
@XanIndigo Not me. I walked away form Birdelas five years ago.
After how many years it mattered to me, it's a weird feeling to see people anxious about it and my default emotional response to be
@lauren Yes. This is particularly maddening in terms of the remarketing systems (the ones that keep giving users the perception that something---Facebook, Google, the Illuminati---is spying on them because they watched a bunch of YouTube videos and now they're seeing Facebook ads for the same topics as those YouTube videos).
I had a front-row seat to the design of DoubleClick's solution to that problem, and I could not explain to the average person how their privacy is protected. I mean literally: *I* don't have the talent to simplify complex concepts (nor memory of enough details to get it right), and *they* don't have the semester of computer science to grasp the tools used (such as zero-knowledge proofs). I know it works---the systems that choose the ad are double-blind so the only place in the universe where enough information collates to display the remarketed ad is the user's client---but the details of *how* it works and *why* it's hard to compromise aren't something I can convey.
... which leaves an (I think justified) mistrust in the mind of the public that the system isn't just doing the simpler solution of spying on them and sharing their private information around behind-the-scenes. I wish Google could take a communication leadership position on this topic, but I see the disincentives to do so. On the other hand, the big incentive *is* there... a sufficiently irritated public calls for these tools to be made illegal.
@ocdtrekkie @lauren @Tweetfiction @PoeticLicenseDK
Turns out there's an awful lot of human-constructed systems that burn quickly to the ground if the humans in charge choose to do the wrong thing.
In the era after the Trump Presidency, I'm under-impressed at dire warnings of what tech CEOs might do. Alternative power structures, it turns out, are also unimpressively robust to failure.
@rjh It does seem fun, but it really doesn't seem to *do* anything useful that I've seen. As a fact-generator, it falls flat (facts seem to be to GPT as fingers are to stable diffusion). As a conversation-generator, it's certainly impressive, but we already have ELIZA.
Haven't seen a killer app for this tech yet.
@denebeim@deepthot.org @lauren Correct. Even your own.
@lauren A gun smuggler named "Viktor Bout."
... a name that the G.I.Joe writers' room would reject as too on-the-nose.
@joe_no_body I remember that vibe from Maryland, as the suburbs exploded in response to the massive price spike due to population influx to DC.
So much "if you build it, they will come" new-houses-in-an-obvious-cow-pasture. It was subtly off-putting in a way I couldn't define.
@2ck It's a corruption of "free speech" ("free speech" --> "freeze peach" --> "frozen peaches"), used as a pejorative for people who use the term thoughtlessly with no care paid to the legal, moral, or philosophical meanings of the term.
Writing a small multiplayer game with Boardgame.io and Phaser.
Things I have not written:
* any unit tests
Things I have written:
* a "DevHooks" file to make it easy to consolidate quick e2e test patches on top of the regular game flow
* Lots and lots of exploratory code that got torn up and replaced right after it was written, which would have taken twice + change as long if I'd written unit tests
Bell Atlantic was the first corporate sponsor of our high school robotics team, right before they became Verizon. I wish I'd been shrewd enough to keep the shirts we had made; simple white tees with their logo, but it was one of the last official uses of that logo.
Meanwhile, my wife's aunt was a systems manager for them for like four decades. Had an electrician over to check the wiring in their home after she passed away and we ran into some phone reliability issues; electrician was taken aback. They built their own house, and apparently, he tells me, the wiring in the building is office-quality. "This would cost a fortune; I can't imagine why they'd do this for a residential property." My guess is she had some favors she called in and it didn't cost a fortune. ;)
#Wednesday (the Netflix series, not the day), quick review:
Cast 10, book 3.
I haven't finished the whole series yet (and I intend to), but as far as I've gotten: I rarely see such talented actors and actresses animating such a shambling carcass (which, I suppose, is very on-brand for an Addams property). Ortega and Myers are fun as hell, their characters really contrast delightfully, and every moment they're on screen is wonderful---as with the rest of the cast as well.
It's just a shame they're stuck in this tropey Hogwarts-adjacent CW high school drama. It's like someone pitched a live-action Monster High series, got shot down, and salvaged the pitch by gluing Wednesday Addams upside-down to an existing plot. I know; that sounds like it should be perfect! It is not.
If you can turn your brain off and enjoy every scene without asking inconvenient questions like "Where is this going?" or "Why are these characters doing this?" I can recommend it. And it still has time to pick up on the back end. But I'm not sure I should get my hopes up.
I keep this comic panel in my back-pocket for every time I encounter a fax machine in a professional setting.
Fortune smile upon thee, Chris Onstad, voice of a generation.
> and the effort to implement those (TACACS as I recall) never really functioned well
This pattern continues to this day with every site that tries to roll its own auth / auth solution. ;)
- My Page
- https://fixermark.com
Career software engineer living something approximating the dream he had as a kid.
Joined Apr 2022
