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@freemo @Electronics I’ve been watching his stuff for years; just absolutely fascinating. Just gives you so much appreciation for the wonder that is CPUs, networks and error correction, I/O, etc. Tried building some stuff myself but got to the point where I’d have to put down some serious cash to keep going

For anyone in the U.K. who isn’t aware, Clear The Lobby is a great weekly newsletter about whatever’s currently being debated in Westminster clearthelobby.co.uk/

Offering 1% pay rise to health staff in a global pandemic is disgusting behaviour. It infuriates me when people say we don’t have enough money. No; we simply don’t have the right priorities.

rlamacraft boosted

TIL: many #pascal compilers allowed identifiers of any length, but only examined the first 8 characters to determine what the identifier pointed at.

So `foobarbaz` and `foobarbazqux` are both valid, but refer to the **same** variable!

What I _didn't_ learn was why anyone thought this was a good idea. I assume it was for performance reasons, since Free Pascal doesn't do it anymore (wiki.freepascal.org/Identifier) and 8 makes me guess it has something to do with memory representation.

Anyone know?

Having spent so much time in JavaScript land lately, playing with some C is honestly such a comfort. Error messages! At compile time‽ What is this magic??

@yisraeldov @elbeejay Yeah, I think it would do wonders from collective action, upholding ethical values, to making hiring easier. It could also act as a platform for coordinating open source development, and ultimately make software a more rigorously practiced engineering discipline.

I think we would just have to look past the people complaining about being gatekeepers. Practically every other professional field has something (lawyers, doctors, architects, and all sorts of engineering fields), so it’s not unusual. If anything, not having such a system is unusual.

@yisraeldov @elbeejay It depends where in the world you are. In the US and Canada “engineer” is a protected term that cannot be freely used, whilst in countries like France there are no such rules. In the U.K. we have the term “Chartered Engineer” because “engineer” has been eroded to the point of being meaningless as every technician and handyman styles themselves as such (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer). It’s really not a big deal in Europe like it is in North America.

Personally, I would like to see (developers|programmers|software engineers) have a formal accreditation process to distinguish those in the profession but alas, currently we do not

Why are people using Facebook to access government, health, and other information‽ A web company messing up should not be an issue national governments have to be concerned about… theguardian.com/technology/202

I really feel like there’s a divide in the software developer industry between those that value reliability, accessibility, and stability and those that prefer novelty, and aesthetics. Here’s a quick way to find who you are: simply open this link and note whether your gut reaction is negative or positive, respectively. ray.so/

If I am offered the jab this year I will refuse it on the grounds that there are billions of people that need it before I do. Vaccinating our young and healthy whilst the rest of the world struggles to vaccinate their front line workers and those most at risk is both counter productive, because mutations will continue to crop up, and devoid of any morality

schneier.com/blog/archives/202 Deliberately Playing Copyrighted Music to Avoid Being Live-Streamed: “Clever, really, and an illustration of the problem with context-free copyright enforcement.” I disagree. The problem is not with copyright enforcement, after all a company has a right to take down anything it wants for almost any reason. The problem is that YouTube has a near monopoly of online video. Why are a handful of social media companies the gatekeepers to fair and equal justice under the law?

@codesections A bipartite graph? Guess it’s just not *that* common, and is easy to implement using existing graph data structures

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2 “The real ugly (sic) with SVG is how frequently we request SVGs from designers or companies and they hand us an SVG file that contains nothing but a base64 encoded PNG image.” — Am just lost for words

I find the stories of people travelling on holidays and flying to see family in the middle of a pandemic absolutely outrageous. I’ve not seen my parents nor my partner in over a year. So what if they have to cover the cost of isolating in a hotel, they should be thankful that I’m not running the show where they’d be spending the rest of this bloody pandemic in a prison cell

“There was an audible gasp in the room when the images appeared of a Capitol Police officer firing a single fatal gunshot”, “Some were seeing many of the images for the first time.” nytimes.com/2021/02/10/us/poli — how are the senators and journalists only seeing some of this footage for the first time? How are they shocked to the point of gasping? I know exactly how this played out from an ocean away. They were there, and they’re passing judgement on the ringleader. Bizarre.

The British royal family maintain certain privileges under the assumption they can be trusted to not abuse them. Looks like we’ve all been made a fool off. Parliament needs to move immediately to revoke this whole Queen’s consent mess. Never have I felt more

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