Posts by Someone Else 4357 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Dec 2009
Back in my very first professional assignment, I was a Jr. member of a team that was doing an Operational Test and Evaluation (OTE) suite for the Us Military (Army...IIRC. I was working on the second shift prepping our code to identify differences between what the code from several well-heeled Defense Contractors produced against what the "standard" said it should be producing. (The project was battlefield asset location -- this was waaay before GPS was a gleam in its developers' eye.) Our code was to compare the output from these Contractors' solutions in real time...we were the referee, as it were to define whch of these solutions was the most accurate.
A demo was scheduled for all the Contractors' wares at 0700. Sharp. Full military brass in attendance; never seen so much scrambled eggs in one place live. The sun was coming up and the Law of Demos was raising its ugly head...for us in particular. We had test suites to verify that our code was working correctly, and sure enough, it wasn't. The code was running on the Hewlett-Packard equivalent of a PDP-11 (an HP 26-sumpinornother) that was basically filled to the brim (64K address space; overlays were supported, but they weren't fast enough to do the real-time monitoring and evaluation for 5 separates sets of inputs).
Our team was huddled in our trailer (this was, of course, a field project) trying like hell to debug our code. At T-1hr, 30mins, we found what we think was the bug. But we couldn't fix it correctly. See, the code was in HP assembler, and we had long exhausted the assembler's symbol table space. (Back in the day, that was a thing.) So the "fix" had to be written without adding any symbols. And it had to be small. This meant PC-relative coding (i.e. using *+2 kinds of constructs. The fix required a loop, with two conditional exits at the bottom of the loop. I managed to draw the short straw, and ended up coding this abomination in 4 assembler statements. It just fit...and because the Coding Gods were smiling on us...actually worked! It passed the verification suites, as well as some we cobbled up to verify the conditional exits. With 15 minutes to spare, we submitted our code to the Powers that Be for the Demo...then went home to go to bed.
Word was that our OTE code worked properly throughout the Demo.
Fast forward several months, and I'm now back at the home office, readying for my next assignment. I received our code back from the field, and went to go print up the block of code cobbled up under sleep-deprived pressure, to post on my cubicle wall. I hand wrote on that printout the words: "Don't ever write code like this again!" Later that day, our resident Alpha Geek came in to offer congrats, and saw the code on the wall. He looked at it for a rather long while, then turned around with a big smile and, as he left the cube, said, "Good comment".
Hey there, Liam. You state:
To the Wayland team _this is a feature not a bug_
I understand and accept that, but it is also a shit-fer-brains design. As many other commentards have declared, it is a reduction in functionality from the current status quo. There is a word that describes this process of forced replacing stuff that works just fine, thankyewverymutch, with a new shiny that does less: enshittification (or e14n).
So please explain to me what benefits this Wayland is supposed to provide, then, at the cost of properly handling multiple windows. Is it faster? Does it use less resources on a GPU (or processor)? Or is it just the new shiny-du-jour?
KDE is an attempt to implement a poor replica of the Windows *98* desktop on top of modern FOSS-ish underpinnings: Qt and C++.
So I guess that Wayland is an attempt to implement a poor replica of Windows *Vista*, perhaps as a member-measuring exercise against X11? We all know how that's gonna turn out.
You may be right that I "confusing the effect with the cause". But I'm looking at it from this perspective -- that of the poor benighted user who couldn't possibly understand the brilliance of this New World Order, which appears as a degradation of my "user experience" (gad, I hate that phrase), and as such, confusion or not...I'm just not interested.
Wayland, by design, blocks the window manager from restoring window sizes and positions: they’ll all open heaped on top of one another, in the centre of the screen.
And this is considered a good design?!? What user, anywhere, ever said," Yeah, when I log back in, I want all my windows scattered randomly across my screen" (or screens, as a rather large number of installations use multiple screens nowadays)?
There is, however form for this malfeasance. Micros~1, our favorite ol' debbil, fucked up RDC about a year-and-a-half ago in the same way. One day, you could log off and come back the next day with all the windows adorning their same places (on multiple screens) as they were when you logged off. These days, please spend your first 5 minutes after logging on putting some 10-15 windows back where you want them.
I always thought one of the driving forces of Linux was to not replicate the brazen, brain-dead foolishness that Windows imposed upon its victims. Starting to find out I was wrong....
The fact that in space there is a hostile and lethal environment on the other side of the wall rather than the balmy Houston air and sunshine also matters a lot.
On the other side of that wall is ... Tejas, which can and should be considered a hostile and (potentially) lethal environment.
Especially if you happen to have certain ethnic or cultural proclivities.
And once the bubble has burst, trillions of dollars paid out by the US government to bail out the companies that are too big to fail, it will all be blamed on the people who insisted on working from home.
...and voted by mail....
From the article:
Two years later, in an effort to reduce its role as a law enforcement data dispenser, the search biz announced changes to its handling of location history data by storing the data on-device instead of on its servers.
I didn't know that...Nice! Now, can someone tell me how to delete said history data from my device?
Of course we do...happens to everybody. I would do it in high school all the time, until I learned not to. That said, I would not expect a paper that purports to present a scientific breakthrough to have such an error in it. (You don't have high-school students doing the coding for your scientific papers, now do you, Micros~1?)
And trying to rationalize such an error in that environment is more than a little disingenuous.
Code reviews? Yeah, we've heard of them...No, we haven't...
In other words, Microsoft's researchers made a basic programming mistake by evaluating the array index – the number identifying a value's position in an array – instead of the value to which the index refers.
The same kind of error I would expect in a High-school coding class (or made by CowPileIt).
Brandwine smugly opines:
“We know how humans fail,” Brandwine said. “We're comfortable with it. So human-in-the-loop isn’t necessarily the gold standard.”
So the devil we don't know is suddenly more desirable than the devil we do? Manure. (Your 'nure and everybody else's 'nure.)
You know, this is rather similar to the argument that one should not comment code, because programmers can't be arsed to write good comments, or keep them up to date. Similar Manure.
I kicked one once...an IBM mainframe, back in the 70's. It actually started working after that.
Haven't done it since...but there were times I considered it. The main thing that stopped me was the fact t hat these things were substantially less...substantial than said mainframe. And I would have had to foot the bill to repair/replace it.
I notice the timestamp on the article -- back in early May (it is now late-ish June). Since then, Herr Muskrat has bought Cursor. So I would expect that Grok will prominently show up in the "New, Improved" Cursor ("CursorX"?) as a model.
If they (CursorX) replace Composer with Grok, I will take my business elsewhere ("Hello? Anthropic? How much would several dozen Claude Code subscriptions cost?").
The most charitable thing I could think to say about this transaction is that maybe Herr Muskrat wants to learn to code?
From the original article:
Jqwik is a tool for property-based testing of Java apps.
Taking the link on "property-based testing" (because I hadn't heard that phrase before, and thought the linked article might be a reasonable definition of the term) turned into a loss of 5 minutes that I will never get back. What a piece of absolute dreck! Liam, I love the rest of the article, as well as the vast majority of your articles, in fact. And I appreciate the use of links to fill in the blanks. But this was a swing-and-a-miss.
It was almost like the drivel was created by a badly prompted AI.
And I still don't know what this phrase means -- help from the commentards would be appreciated>
The real problem is that Microsoft has always had patchy quality assurance and testing practices knowing that legislation means it faces very little financial risk.
I only have 3 letters in response: C-R-A (The <a href="Cyber Resilience Act).
If Micros~1 continues on its current path, they will not be able to sell Windows in the EU after December, 2027. If they attempt to sell non-conforming products in the EU, the fines can grow up to 2.5% of global revenue for a year.
<tee-hee/>
That strikes me as "financial risk"...
