ttgurney (u/ttgurney)

_krii commented on Leon: Open-source, self-hosted personal assistant github.com/leon-ai/leon... · Posted by u/thunderbong

_krii · 4 years ago

Looks like quite a lot of marketing put into this open-source project. Heavyweight glossy website with trendy TLD, emojis everywhere. Is this kind of thing typical in the JS world in particular? Seriously asking.

I'm trying to figure out what they are selling me, or what megacorp they are associated with, but I don't see it yet.

_krii commented on The forty-year programmer codefol.io/posts/the-fort... · Posted by u/revorad

todfox · 4 years ago

This is my 30th year programming. I always hope it's my last. Programming for money destroyed the fun hobby long ago.

It's just reinventing the wheel year after year by this point. The last thing the world needs is more software.

The web is the crappiest platform ever conceived; I won't touch it. Social media is poison. Smartphones didn't impress me in 2007 and they don't impress me now. They're annoying and intrusive. I still like desktop software. I know, I'm a dinosaur.

I just don't care about computers any more. I don't care what direction the industry goes in. I'm not depressed and I don't need to learn a new language or work on a different project.

I love creative problem solving. What I do not love is solving whatever problems are handed to you without asking whether they truly need solutions, or whether it's good for the world. Much of what people want computers to do is a waste of time and of life. Whether it's bureaucratic corporate garbage or thought stopping entertainment.

I'm so tired of computers.

_krii · 4 years ago

Thank you very much for coming out and saying all of this.

I'm reminded of Wendell Berry's essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer"[1]:

> I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

This essay was apparently written in 1987. If Mr. Berry were to revisit the subject today, I suspect he would offer much the same sentiment, perhaps even more strongly.

> The last thing the world needs is more software.

My dream job in this field is to get paid to delete code.

[1] https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...

ttgurney commented on x86 Play by Post asternova.top/x86/index.h... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

ttgurney · 4 years ago

Based on the Zombocom reference and general lack of details, this must be a joke, but I don't get the joke. Is it meant to be a parody of something else?

And why not postal mail, for maximum novelty?

Aside, I wonder which CPU is emulated. A real 8086/8088 (for example) will behave differently than a modern x86 CPU that is running in real mode.

ttgurney commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2022) · Posted by u/whoishiring

ttgurney · 4 years ago

Location: Central United States

Remote: Yes -- remote only.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Unix/Linux tooling, POSIX, general back-end stuff (not web), desktop applications, scientific applications. C, Bash/sh, Python 3, Java SE, PostgreSQL database. All in a Linux environment.

Personal portfolio here: https://ttgurney.com. I publish all of my open-source work at the above site. I have created my own Linux distribution as well, which I use as my daily driver.

Email: (my username) @ (my username) .com

Software engineer with CS degree, 6.5 years full time experience, and lifelong interest in tinkering with computers. Looking for opportunities that make good use of my depth of Linux knowledge.

Also have some interest in low-level, embedded, RE. No professional experience there, but I a fine C programmer and can read and write x86 assembly language.

ttgurney commented on The silent majority in software vadimkravcenko.com/shorts... · Posted by u/bndr

ttgurney · 4 years ago

> They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice.

Serious question: are these languages actually controversial? Doesn't "controversy" usually mean people holding strong opinions and frequently disagreeing? I rarely hear anything at all about Pascal or Visual Basic. Maybe they were controversial in the 1990s? Now I'd call them merely unfashionable.

ttgurney commented on The Office’s Last Stand nytimes.com/2022/08/28/bu... · Posted by u/ctoth

ttgurney · 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/cFEWJ

ttgurney commented on Ask HN: What was your first open source contribution? · Posted by u/aviramha

ttgurney · 4 years ago

My first open-source contribution was a two-line patch for a bug I found in Eclipse while at work.

Eclipse is known as a Java IDE, but it also provides a widget toolkit and other libraries for developing desktop GUI apps. At the time I was working on a team that had a huge desktop app built on top of Eclipse.

The bug I found was pretty trivial; it was something related to incorrect sizing of one of the widgets in some corner case.

The process was a bit of a pain relative to the size of the change. I had to write a test case, sign a CLA (per Eclipse project rules), and of course one of my four different bosses had to review the change and sign off on it.

At the time I was a junior engineer still eager to prove myself, and I figured all of this effort would be worthwhile just so I could say I got a patch into a major open source project. Nowadays I wouldn't bother with so much process, and certainly wouldn't sign a CLA. Would rather work on my own projects. At most I might send a patch out to a mailing list.

ttgurney commented on Oasis: Small statically-linked Linux system github.com/oasislinux/oas... · Posted by u/ingve

ttgurney · 4 years ago

I'm really grateful for Michael Forney's work on this project since I found it a good resource for getting a variety of popular packages to build statically.

I ended up starting my own statically-linked Linux distro, but with some creative differences like shell scripts (vs Lua scripts) and package management. I recently "finished" it (close enough anyway) to the point that I run it as my daily driver.

Not trying to plug my project (it's not public, not yet anyway) but if anyone wants to discuss this sort of thing (distro creation and static linking in particular) and compare notes via email, I'd be happy to.

ttgurney commented on Chess = Pain? new.chess24.com/wall/news... · Posted by u/ycombinete

ttgurney · 4 years ago

Speaking from my experience so far as an "adult learner": yes, it's brutal. At least, tournament chess is. Online play is easy for me not to take so seriously. But when I get up on Saturday morning to go to a tournament and spend all day there, and I am writing down every move, and I'm face-to-face with my opponent, the whole thing is a lot emotionally weightier. I've found that I dislike losing and that I experience empathy for my opponents when they lose to me. My favorite games that I've played have been draws.

I spoke a bit with an older and much more experienced player I know about this. He said the only thing that worked for him was to completely stop caring about winning and losing, and to let go of seriousness about the game. His idea was that chess is supposed to be fun; fun is the whole point. Improving is nice, but why bother if the process is not enjoyable in itself? Been thinking a lot about this since then.