Comment Re: Arbitrary Person (Score 1) 62
And by “arbitrary person” you presumably mean someone of whom you do not approve.
And by “arbitrary person” you presumably mean someone of whom you do not approve.
I've only been in silicon valley a bit over 20 years, and I think I arrived on the downslope
Yes; I arrived in 1993, and Silicon Valley was something to behold. Here are some excerpts from a rant I've been working on about the change:
Part of the cause may be the change of dominant business model, from "Make something enough better than the competition that people will pay for it" to "give things away and sell your customers to advertisers." But the problem is older than clickbait; a prominent open-source maintainer with a day job once told me that customers will not pay for quality.
Once users liked us and paid us, and we deserved it: Software got better and added features, and hardware got faster, thinner, and lighter. During the golden age of Silicon Valley, we put a dent in the universe. Now users hate us and we deserve it. (Michael Mace, former Zen of Palm official guru, saw some of the techlash coming: http://mobileopportunity.blogs...) One thing we can do is to stop making it worse by blindly assuming that we’re making it better: Users may have a good reason not to upgrade, and we should stop forcing them to.
Lots of people seem to think they're CPU-bound. Personally, I'm clinging to the last good version of Microsoft Word, or at least the last one I was willing to pay for, which is 32-bit and a lot slimmer than what came after it. I also need VMware to run Windows Quicken, at least until it's ported to ARM Windows, Mac Quicken gets its act together, or Greeks reckon time by the Calends.
> In 2007 I had to do a small job in python
Yes, you had a small job, so you could get away with Python 3. In 2018 I had a medium-sized job to do, which would need to run on other developers' machines. Python 2 was part of the system installation on them, Python 3 wasn't, and some libraries had still not been ported. Some had been ported, but incompatibly (looking at you, unittest).
> Python 2->3 has had the longest transition period in history,
This isn't the end of the transition, it's the start of the middle.
> these people should be given proper pay - in the end, they're helping save lives.
Yes, so tip them _very_ well if they do a good job, and don't penalize them for Instacart's disinclination to correct billing errors.
Not really:
According to the _Times_:
'there were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.
"This app has never been used in any real election or tested at a statewide scale and it's only been contemplated for use for two months now," said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who also serves on the board of Verified Voting'.
(Even twenty years ago, FreeBSD Dummynet was a good tool for testing poor connectivity, and there were commercial tools for load testing.)
Also decent ad-blocking plugins in Safari.
Python 3 still breaks compatibility unnecessarily in places, e.g. unittest; hence the abandonment of the strategy of voluntary adoption.
I wish them well, though we recently caved and upgraded, which is still unnecessarily painful due to some gratuitous breakages, e.g. the unittest framework now returning non-zero on unexpected success. (I admit that Python 3 has some worthy changes, but importing from the future got us the most relevant ones.)
I think the era of "Install Updates Automatically" is over; cp. Apple, which is removing functionality (e.g. MacOS management of iOS apps, effective ad-blocking in Safari) and backward compatibility with 32-bit apps, which are still some of the best versions available, e.g. the last good version of MS Word on MacOS (or at least the last one I was willing to pay for), and the best Oxford English Dictionary on iOS.
I'm reminded of the infamous GCC non-bug which led to a Linux kernel exploit (https://lwn.net/Articles/342330/). GCC had a perfect right, according to the C Spec, to optimize away a security-critical null-check, since some unimportant code had already dereferenced the pointer.
Disclaimer 1: I'm biased, since a much less important GCC non-bug I filed, about regrettable handling of undefined behavior, was dismissed on what seemed to me similarly Stallmanesque grounds at a much lower level of the FSF.
Disclaimer 2: Since Stallman's forced resignation, I've seen allegations of actual misconduct at MIT; I don't know enough about their truth to comment.
> python and python3
Interesting that “python” still implies version 2, as it does on the MacOS and Linux versions I've used.
This is your periodic reminder that your Test Plan template must include a Bill of Materials subsection.
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
