The unbelievably mundane answer is "training pilots".
The article goes through an unbelievably amount of fluff to just say that. Thanks for confirming my own read.
Readit Newsjmmv commented on American Airlines flying empty Airbus A321neo across the Atlantic 20 times onemileatatime.com/news/a... · Posted by u/corvad
jmmv commented on An embedded dev kit for EndBASIC with NetBSD by Julio Merino youtube.com/watch?v=WZFYT... · Posted by u/jaypatelani
Hey, thanks for sharing!
I’ll add that the project page is at https://www.endbasic.dev/endbox.html and that the disk images are now available for download. Have fun!
The content in the article is good and important. That said, I don’t find it “practical” enough so… I’ll link to my own tips on preparing and giving presentations ;-)
https://jmmv.dev/2020/07/presentation-tips.html
https://jmmv.dev/2020/07/presentation-preparation.html
(These were originally Twitter threads so apologies for the abuse of emojis hehe.)
I used to dread speaking in public but have come to enjoy it, and all of the above tips have made it easier over time. I think the vast majority of them came to me from more experienced presenters (and even a class I took in college about public speaking).
As others have mentioned in the discussion below, keeping it fun and providing the motivation for the talk are important. And my pet peeve is to remind people that “your slides are not the presentation: what you say is”.
jmmv commented on FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com/FFmpeg/asm-les... · Posted by u/flykespice
There's tons of backlash here as if people think better performance requires writing in assembly.
But to anyone complaining, I want to know, when was the last you pulled out a profiler? When was the last time you saw anyone use a profiler?
People asking for performance aren't pissed you didn't write Microsoft Word in assembly we're pissed it takes 10 seconds to open a fucking text editor.
I literally timed it on my M2 Air. 8s to open and another 1s to get a blank document. Meanwhile it took (neo)vim 0.1s and it's so fast I can't click my stopwatch fast enough to properly time it. And I'm not going to bother checking because the race isn't even close.
I'm (we're) not pissed that the code isn't optional, I'm pissed because it's slower than dialup. So take that Knuth quote you love about optimization and do what he actually suggested. Grab a fucking profiler, it is more important than your Big O
> Grab a fucking profiler, it is more important than your Big O
This is exactly why I wrote https://jmmv.dev/2023/09/performance-is-not-big-o.html a few years back. The focus on Big O during interviews is, I think, harmful.
jmmv commented on What does it mean to be thirsty? quantamagazine.org/what-d... · Posted by u/pseudolus
I'm so interested in this topic, for a weird reason.
Since I was a kid, I've thought I was "prone to migraines", and ascribed various triggers to them - sun exposure, heat, physical exertion, mental exertion, etc. I'd get a migraine sometimes after a long hike on a weekend - and also a long business meeting entirely indoors in an air-conditioned space.
Only when I was around 35, did I figure something out. All these situations lead to me getting dehydrated without any obvious accompanying feeling of thirst. Hiking all day will do it - walking around an outdoor shopping mall on a hot afternoon - or sitting in an all-day business meeting focused on the work at hand and forgetting to drink. And all these situations lead to a migraine - my only "migraine" trigger is simple dehydration, nothing more complicated.
The weird thing is, it took me a long time (decades) to put this together, because I just figured that I couldn't be dehydrated if I wasn't thirsty, and I had no association between "feeling thirsty" and getting a migraine.
I get what I consider normally thirsty in other circumstances, but somehow there's a failure mode where my body doesn't warn me. So now I just remember to chug lots of water (and electrolytes) if I'm exerting myself even if I don't really feel thirsty, and I can systematically avoid triggering migraines.
Now that I understand it the association is quite clear and obvious in retrospect.
Hah, same. I recently started getting many more back to back meetings than usual and, by lunchtime, I had a headache most days. It took me a while to realize that, while I’m at my desk, I keep drinking from the huge water bottle that I keep there, but when I go to meetings, I don’t. I started carrying the bottle with me (when I remember) and the headaches are gone.
Discussed at length back in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456222
3 emojis in the first paragraph is where I close the tab.
This was originally a Twitter thread where emojis are customary. But you don’t have to read it.
jmmv commented on Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/06/m... · Posted by u/jandeboevrie
About a year ago, I wrote https://open.substack.com/pub/blogsystem5/p/a-cli-text-edito... , which covered the history of editors in DOS and Windows. The article was sparked precisely by the GitHub issue in which Microsoft was proposing re-adding a text editor to Windows and the heated debate that followed.