ci5er (u/ci5er) - Readit News

ci5er commented on VUW Accidentally Wipes Desktop Computers critic.co.nz/news/article... · Posted by u/podiki

PeterStuer · 4 years ago

People are very, very bad when it comes to proactively mitigating low probability disasters. It is not that it is complicated, although you might underestimate the challenge of having a decent and updated backup that can be restored to the layman inundated with a deluge of commercial offerings trying to outdo each other on interface obtuseness.

We seem to instinctively err on the side of avoiding any short term cost, no matter how potentially grave the consequences in the future if the probability of those becomes low or obfuscated.

You can see this not just in backups, but in lifestyle choices, business decisions, construction, natural resources, financial speculation ...

Any situation where you can say "it does not happen often, but if it does the results will be catastrophic", you can bet that the risks will be unhedged.

ci5er · 4 years ago

Heck, my kids are theoretically engineers (at least their degree says so!), but even buying BackBlaze for them, I can't even get them to hit Ctrl-S from time-to-time. I think their mom must have fucked the milkman, because she is smarter than this herself...

ci5er commented on My self-study plan for electrical engineering i-kh.net/2021/03/20/elect... · Posted by u/bucket2015

dboreham · 4 years ago

> not teaching a person what a person needs to know to go into any related industry job

I'm not sure they ever did. They should imho be teaching the ability to learn and adapt to changing and emerging technologies, and to think critically. I'm still using the mathematics I learned in college, to understand things that didn't exist back then such as elliptic curve cryptography.

ci5er · 4 years ago

Well, I don't know how old you were, but ECC has existed in college for a long time - but may not have been so useful to a lot of engineers building machines (for sure), at the time.

ci5er commented on My self-study plan for electrical engineering i-kh.net/2021/03/20/elect... · Posted by u/bucket2015

ci5er · 4 years ago

Nicely written. For certain.

Would it be cruel to suggest that you might want to advance a bit more before weighng in ?

I'd say that semiconductor physics, real math, control systems, real mixed signal and a couple of others should get a go ... but my eldest child didn't get much past this, so maybe the state of the art today?

Again- I mean no cruelty in my comments, but seems as if modern curricula are not teaching a person what a person needs to know to go into any related industry job...

(And I could be wrong - as I often am)

ci5er commented on Why I did not go to jail (2014) a16z.com/2014/02/06/why-i... · Posted by u/Tomte

jmchuster · 4 years ago

> a 3.5 month non-suspended sentence is not something that is handed out lightly for a white collar issue

Only a single American banker saw jail time from the 2008 mortgage crisis https://ig.ft.com/jailed-bankers/

ci5er · 4 years ago

Hell, I get more than that for child-support (while funding their ivy league schools)!

ci5er commented on Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary getzola.org/... · Posted by u/ibraheemdev

mbreese · 4 years ago

That makes a lot of sense to me. It used to be that writing a blog engine was the "Hello World" of a new language or framework. So, it makes sense that a SSG would be a good non-trivial project to use to learn or understand the pros/cons of a language.

ci5er · 4 years ago

I prefer ray-tracers (or other rendering or physics engines), maybe because I'm old or have nothing to blog about.

ci5er commented on Reflections on IDEA vs VS Code archive.vn/nNdT1... · Posted by u/regexrex

khaledh · 4 years ago

I've been programming with various IDEs and text editors for over 30 years. In my formative programming years (1990s) I relied heavily on Borland and Microsoft IDEs. In the 2000s it was a combination of Visual Studio (C/C++/C#) and various editors (PHP, HTML/CSS/JS). In the 2010s I started working across multiple languages: C#, Java, Python, Ruby, Elixir, Scala, JavaScript (also dabbled with Lisp, Go, and Rust); using various tools: Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, VS Code, Atom, Sublime, Vim, and even Emacs.

My opinion: JetBrains IDEs beat every single other IDE/editor hands down (Visual Studio -- not Code -- comes close). The level of integration and polish is unmatched. I use PyCharm on a daily basis at work and the level of productivity I get out if it is far beyond what I get from any other IDE/editor. I've been developing a hobby kernel recently using C, and initially used VSCode; it was OK. Then I thought I'd give JetBrains CLion a try and I never looked back. I happily paid for license and it's been a well spent investment.

ci5er · 4 years ago

I pay (personally) for the entire Jetbrains tool set. They are damn good. And I guess to be fair, I haven't given a lot of time to VSCode, but TBH: I find that Sublime and IntelliJ cover the spectrum for me (which is Scala, Java, Kotlin, Python, C, Go and Typescript all with git support)

I'm not super exploratory, because it always seems that I have a project due in two weeks, but given that I have pickd up two of the BEAM languages, but am always lagging on learning Ruby and Haskell. These days - I'm starting to wonder about the utility of learning another language, other than re-learning Smalltalk out of nostalgia.

ci5er commented on Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Earth like never before sciencemag.org/news/2021/... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

sstanie · 5 years ago

The inspector-gadget arm sticking out of the space shuttle does look pretty funny https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/usgs-eros-archive-...

I don't think the arm was related to anything with intelligence- they just needed some way to have a second radar slightly moved away from the main one on the Shuttle. The further away it is, the more accurate they could measure elevation, so they stuck it way out on a pole.

But I think you're right that it's possibly one of the most widely used GIS datasets. Some applications obviously need finer resolution than 30 meters, and lidar is more accurate for the small areas that it can cover, but it's still cool that they could cover most of the globe at 30 meter resolution

ci5er · 5 years ago

THEY cover at 10m. You get the low-rez version. Better than the 90m before, so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth.

ci5er commented on 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed bugzilla.mozilla.org/show... · Posted by u/abridgett

NoodleIncident · 5 years ago

Please remove the link.

ci5er · 5 years ago

Why? You can just copy the link, open a new tab, past it in the URL bar and see the material...

ci5er commented on 1977: Zork if50.substack.com/p/1977-... · Posted by u/fanf2

ci5er · 5 years ago

How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)

ci5er · 5 years ago

Edit- planet fall was also fun - these were a nice mix-up with Sirtech"s Wizardry... "A Kobold"

ci5er commented on 1977: Zork if50.substack.com/p/1977-... · Posted by u/fanf2

the_af · 5 years ago

    You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

and

    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

are such iconic phrases, they bring a ton of good memories to my mind. And I never even finished Zork or Adventure!

ci5er · 5 years ago

How about Hitchhiker's? There were a couple of frustrating bits there. Gosh - I must have played a dozen of those things - and now, being old, I probably couldn't remember what I did, and am probably too stupid to figure it out again. (Or I have other things to do than beat my head against the wall ... or all the above)