, he gasped breathlessly from atop his Peloton, sweat beading beneath his Gucci Bored Ape sweatband as the horror dawned, all too late. Because once seen, there was no unseeing. "No. No. No!"
Could everything he had felt for his iPhone have been a saccharine substitute for what he'd lost along with AOL, his empire built in search of his Rosebud? It had all seemed too familiar, once he stopped to think about it... but how did he miss it, all this time? The differences boiled down to mere organization!
"I was a fool, so blinded by the beauty of my garden that I failed to notice I was a prisoner of it. I wonder if my garden is merely one of many in a larger garden, and that garden, one of..."
"Ding." His buffalo style chicken Hot Pocket was done. After doomscrolling over his cuisine, he felt better - silly, even - for doubting the uniqueness of his iPhone. It had appeared from vacuum, after all, amidst a techless, empty waste of a world, and brought with it an era where even the past was altered in its wake.
An icon of an envelope, not a mailbox, wiggled. "Oh look, I've got mail."
good code is like vintage wine: you don’t recognise the packaging, no-one agrees on how exactly to describe why it’s good, and the only person who still remembers all the details of production retired ten years ago
I can see the Yelp reviews now: `That White House escape room was really too hard, though +1 for the “Guard”’s guns that gave me the impression they were firing real bullets! Don’t try if you are out of shape — a lot of running is required!
Now I m stuck in the “prison” part of the game and haven’t been able to figure out how to get out and advance to the next level.
Only two stars because it’s really too hard for normal people.’
This morning, I brushed and flossed, which makes me a Plaque Removal Engineer. I then used my skills as a Room Tidyness Engineer to make the bed. After that, I engineered the harness onto my dog and took her on a walk: Canine Fitness Engineer. I engineered the water to a higher temperature using the kettle, and poured it over some coffee grounds to create a chemical reaction in my morning brew: Yeah, that's right, Caffeine Engineer. After this incredibly productive morning, I got in the car and drove to my job as a computer programmer.
I think my favorite (in terms of humor) is a commit from mpv complaining about locales and encodings. You can practically feel the committer's sheer frustration.
a. You come to a green empty field. Nothing is done, everything is possible.
b. You come to a town. A lot has been built, a lot of space used, but there are still many fields around the town to expand to, and build new things.
c. You come to a City. All the space is used. Everything you build must work with has already been built. Some things can be built, but only if it does not inconvenience what is already there.
Software as a whole is approaching/already in stage C. Sure you could make something that does not connect with anything that exists. But what use is that to anybody. People want to connect with the thing they already use.
This metaphor works with a lot of things. Operating Systems, the Cloud, even things like Game Libraries, ala Steam. To produce value, you need to work with what's already there.
My favourite random sqlite story:
The company I once worked for used an outdated version of sqlite (3.8.6) in one of their products. The databases used got bigger and bigger and in a very big project one of the "already known to be slow"-queries took more than an hour on my laptop making the tool unusable.
On a quiet day, I was able to save the temporary table used as part of the process and run the problematic query against it in an isolated fashion.
The query returned an extremely high number of results and when I discovered this I questioned my SQL-fu, my sanity and my trust in computers.
I found that we were hit by a bug that was fixed 6 years before I discovered it (https://sqlite.org/src/info/6f2222d550f5b0ee7ed).
Sqlite's query planner assumed that a field with a not null constraint can never be null, which isn't the case for the right hand table in a left join.
I fixed it by adding a not null check in the query and then later by updating the library. After that the 1 hour query ran in ~700 ms.
This faster run time also helped with smaller projects and in the end allowed extending our test suite considerably.
Living in a tower allows wizards to focus on spellcrafting at the top while business analysts and product owners make unintelligible noises in the basement.
I always keep in mind when I have my first cup of coffee in the morning that it might have a bit of the last breath of Elvis in it, or diarrhea from a T-Rexx.
I didnt read much of the thread but I will assume that most of the people here is aware of how every single NFT game is just a ponzi.
But I've lived myself, what the author mentions as a "way to lift people out of poverty.", from the era before NFT or "play to earn" games existed.
I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world country and I was "lucky" to play an MMO (lineage 2) during my young days and somehow I was good at it, i invested so many hours on it and managed to get into top tier guilds and worlds 1st event, and somehow, my character and my items were worth thousands of dollars in the market, and suddenly i went from being a 14 y.o boy sitting in pc, to bringing more money in 1 week to my family, than my entire family together for 1 year.
I could understand that, while all other people on the game were playing for fun, it became my job, a job that actually got me and my family out of poverty...
At the time (2007) there were a lot of chinese "farmers", and people used to make fun of them, not only fun but the rest of the players were blantantly denigrating towards them, at 1st I didnt understand but once that I became a non-chinese farmer, I realized how It was a really good thing to do.
Eventually I started botting, I bought more PCs and had a full army of bots, I kept making more and more money, and it helped me and my family leave the country and pretty much bought a house, a car and paid my family expenses for like 4 years out of lineage 2 adena farming.
Also, scripting the bots pretty much got me to learn programming and english, so what I am now it's pretty much the result of some guy from chicago offering me 20$ in paypal for an item i had in my inventory that i got it while killing a monster, it all started there, that litle forbidden transaction in an MMO, changed my life completely
So, even tho it was like a job for me, I never saw it like a job, even tho it gave me a lot of money, i never got into the game as a way to get money, i was just a young kid trying to have some fun..
But now, I get really sad everytime I see those ponzi NFT games, that only sell the idea of getting rich, and I get even more sad when I see tons of venezuelan youngsters fall for it, honestly, they are just playing with their desperation.
The one thing you should understand is the average programmer is not a good programmer.
The reason is simple.
The average programmer is a newbie with little to no experience.
It's like a pyramid or a triangle. There's more area or volume at the bottom than at the top.
Every year, more new people arrive at the scene.
New programmers are easily fooled by "shiny" objects.
So, whatever place you join, there's a high likely hood that the culture at the place is dominated by what is considered popular, with little to no regard to what actually works well.
It's different at each place, but almost every company I've been too has things setup in a way that's very painful and frustrating to work with. Every thing takes many steps. "Compiling" javascript takes 3 minutes. "Hot Module Reloading" takes 30 seconds and refreshes the page 5 times. You have to jump between 4 different repositories to fix a small bug. etc etc etc.
If you are experienced and notice that things at your company are broken, you either try to advocate for fixing things or just leave out of desparation. So the organizational culture continues to be dominated by people with very little experience.
If you are not experienced, you may just think that the "suck" you have to deal with on a day to day basis is just what progamming is like, and you might well decide to quit programming. It's hard not to think so when you have never seen a better version of how things can work.
The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in guiding experimentation but also in interpreting findings.
Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist).
The means by which scientists and engineers reach consensus are very different from politicians and other soft studies.
Because of the role peer review plays in the scientific community consensus is built up over time, not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data. Consensus is less "we sat around and decided X is true" but rather "there is an overwhelming amount of data that suggests this is true". This is often translated into models which spur further experiments to attempt to verify or disprove these models (for instance the LHC and the Higgs boson as a high profile example).
So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. A big difference is also that in science it only takes a single very compelling counter-point to significantly disrupt consensus. See here Einstein's photo electric effect or his theory of relativity - both disrupted fairly intrenched consensus.
This latter point is very important because unlike scientists soft fields often struggle to break consensus even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Everyone feels like they should get an "opinion" and that scientists are just voicing "opinions". This leads to people equating the voice of relatively uninformed individuals with that of scientists. I don't know this can be resolved but if it could be it would allow society to move forward at a much faster rate.
Article: "Icehouses never became fashionable for anyone but the most elite. Few except kings or governors would have the resources—money, labor, space, materials, time—to construct a building just for freezing or storing ice harvested from the mountains."
In Texas, former ice houses are a cultural tradition. Ice merchants diversified to sell groceries and cold beer, serving as early convenience stores and local gathering places. The widespread 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores in the U.S., first known as Tote'm Stores, developed from ice houses operated by the Southland ice manufacturing company in Dallas and San Antonio in the 1930s.^[12] Many Texas ice houses have since converted into open-air bars. In central Texas, southeast Texas (especially the Houston area), and the Texas Hill Country, the word "icehouse" has become a colloquialism for an establishment that derives the majority of its income from the sale of cold beer.^[13]
Laura Ingalls Wilder's novel Farmer Boyhttps://archive.org/details/farmerboy00wild_0 decribes her husband's New England childhood; one chapter is a story of how he and his father filled their family icehouse with ice bought in the winter from the Frenchmen who cut up the river ice. His father was a prosperous farmer, one of the richer men in town, with several horses and many cows and pigs, but he was no king or governor; his son got up at 5 AM every morning to milk the cows. While Farmer Boy, like her other books, is fictionalized, she did try to remain broadly factual in what she described; and, more generally, she is fairly reliable about what kinds of things people of her time considered normal.
The late modern history of the ice trade is really quite remarkable, and it's unfortunate that the article gives it such short shrift. Starting in the 01700s, ships carried ice from Scandinavia and the Great Lakes all the way around the world, until the invention of practical heat pumps (implicit in Carnot's 01824 heat engines) in the late 01800s made it cheaper to produce ice locally anywhere on Earth's surface with a steam-engine. The key to this was "chimogene", a fraction distilled from petroleum that boils at or below 0°; now we call it propane and butane. But it wasn't until after 01900 that the last ice ship sailed, and daily ice delivery for home iceboxes was common in the United States until the 01950s. The Amish still practice it today.
Even today, in the United States, air conditioning systems are rated in "tons"; a "five-ton air-conditioner" provides as much cooling as a daily delivery of five tons of ice.
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The fundamental physical phenomenon that makes icehouses possible is Galileo's square-cube law. A one-meter cube of ice weighs about a tonne and has six square meters of surface area through which heat can enter to melt it, 6 m²/tonne. A ten-meter cube of ice weighs a thousand tonnes but has only 600 square meters of surface area, 0.6 m²/tonne.
So, with a little straw around it, it can remain frozen throughout spring, summer, and fall. Water's humongous enthalpy of fusion of 333.55 kJ/kg is 333.55 MJ/tonne or about 300 MJ/m³, so such an icehouse can soak up 300 GJ from its environment before it loses all its wares. For a seasonal thermal store, that's about 10–15 kilowatts, depending on how long winter is. Dividing by dry straw's thermal conductivity of about 0.05 W/m/K, we get 190 kilokelvin meters; divided by 600 m², this gives us a maximum thermal gradient of 300 K/m.
So, if the outside of the icehouse averages 30°, 100 mm of straw is enough.
Nowadays many building air conditioning units use the same principle on a shorter timescale, freezing water when electricity is cheap and using the ice to cool the building all day long. And similar principles apply to other phase-change energy storage systems, whether using sal mirabilis, its eutectic with halite, or the aqueous eutectic of sylvite; though I expect thermochemical energy storage using muriate of lime and perhaps magnesia to make most of these obsolete, in part because they need no such insulation.
