jimbo9991 (u/jimbo9991)

jimbo9991 commented on The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020) missing.csail.mit.edu/... · Posted by u/saikatsg

enumjorge · 3 years ago

I think you’re conflating two different things: universities selecting and presenting a syllabus needed to earn a certain degree, and students actually learning the material.

The latter is the solely the responsibility of each student, but I don’t understand why the former would be. Some of the content in this course strikes me as unknown unknowns for new programmers. Why would they be to blame if no one told them to learn a particular skill?

jimbo9991 · 3 years ago

Honestly, because its something that should be a prerequisite for starting the degree program in the same way basic algebra is a prerequisite. Likewise, not knowing you need to know this stuff is a sign that you are probably not at the point where you should even be able to have declared the major. The fact that colleges allow this at all is doing a disservice to students, many of whom will go on to permanently damage their academic records.

jimbo9991 commented on The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2020) missing.csail.mit.edu/... · Posted by u/saikatsg

btheshoe · 3 years ago

I personally don't like the undertone of the class (tho very grateful that this material exists!!!) - this idea that universities are failing their students by not teaching them necessary material. I think a better phrasing is that students are failing themselves by not learning the material. I've personally never considered it the responsibility of my university to educate me - some of the classes are certainly useful for learning, but the ultimate onus falls on me to gain the skills that will lead me to success. I find it kind of distasteful how classes encourage a sort of passive victim mentality when it comes to learning - as if students need to be bribed with credits and cudgeled with a gpa to be forced to learn genuinely useful things.

jimbo9991 · 3 years ago

People are going to really dislike what you said but I agree to a certain extent, especially when it comes to the basics of working in the command line. If somebody can't read the manual on that and figure it out then they are going to be so hopeless for so many other things that I don't want anything to do with them.

jimbo9991 commented on Ericsson to lay off 8,500 employees reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

wobblyasp · 3 years ago

Oh no, our mythical infinite growth is growing slightly less quickly.

Absolutely bananas thinking.

jimbo9991 · 3 years ago

I mean I agree with you in principle but that doesn't change the fact that as a CEO you are in danger of losing your job if margins compress that much and you don't make a show of doing something about it. Keeping margins up is kind of important if you want to be able to invest in new products and markets and survive as a company into the next generation.

Edit: I was talking about the comment above me conflating wanting higher margins with belief in infinite economic growth. I wasn't making a statement about the morality of Ericsson layoffs nor do I have any insight on their financials. I was simply observing that margins seem to be a thing that investors care quite a bit about.

jimbo9991 commented on Ericsson to lay off 8,500 employees reuters.com/business/medi... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

whiplash451 · 3 years ago

Except that in the « old » economy, you would be hard pressed to be allowed to fire thousands of people with a P&L showing billions in profit (at least in France).

jimbo9991 · 3 years ago

Yeah not in the US, if anything the past decade has been very good for programmers when compared to other industries. There are lots of industries in the US that are more ruthless than big tech.

jimbo9991 commented on KDE and GNOME seeks $100k to turn Flathub into a Store for the Linux desktop github.com/PlaintextGroup... · Posted by u/evasb

derefr · 3 years ago

> I'd prefer to see more easily-communicated DE standards and published levels of adherence, rather than moving to the uni-desktop.

What's the difference? If everything works perfectly with everything else, and the standards adherence is so high that you can't tell the difference which apps are from which organization, then how is that not a "unified DE"?

jimbo9991 · 3 years ago

The difference is that one of those sets of standards is actually more of a file system hierarchy and API standardization thing, whereas the uni-desktop would presumably force a particular set of gui widgets along with the filesystem hierarchy and APIs that those widgets are built on.

We of course already have something like this (POSIX, Freedesktop, etc). However neither is abided by very well and neither of them go far enough up the stack to deal with certain very visible issues of desktop application incompatibility.

What I think could be done to fix some of the compatibility issues (like when running QT on gnome or GTK on KDE or applications that eschew them both and have janky window decorations) would be some more serious standardization onto something like Wayland. We would of course need something more than a reference implementation for that, but fundamentally I don't see why that would be too restrictive for projects that still want to make their own widgets.

jimbo9991 commented on Time to get the Posix elephant off our necks? queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?... · Posted by u/Someone

quanticle · 3 years ago

    The beauty of UNIX to me is the interoperability of the text stream

What interoperability? Look at the man page for any simple Unix utility (such as `ls`), and count up how many of the listed command line flags are there only to structure the text stream for some other program. "Plain text" is just as interoperable as plain binary. "Just use plain text" is the Original Sin of Unix.

The Unix Philosophy, as stated by Peter Salus [1] is

1. Write programs that do one thing and do it well

2. Write programs that work together

3. Write programs to handle text streams because text is a universal interface.

The problem is that, in practice, you can only pick two of those. If you want to write programs that work together, and do so using plain text, then, in addition to doing its ostensible task, each program is going to have to provide a facility to format its text for other programs, and have a parser to read the input that other programs provide, contradicting the dictum to "do one thing and do it well".

If you want programs that do one thing and do it well, and programs that work together, then you have to abandon "plain text", and enforce some kind of common data format that programs are required to read and output. It might be JSON. Or it might be some kind of binary format (like what PowerShell uses). But there has to be some kind of structure that allows programs to interchange data without each program having to deal with the M x N problem of having to deal with every other program's idiosyncratic "plain text" output format.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

jimbo9991 · 3 years ago

This was a really insightful take on the Unix philosophy that I hadn't heard before but I intuitively agree with because of all the parsing code I've had to write.