@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-03-08 08:27:21
"It is fair to say that Microsoft spent at least the first five years of its history in relative obscurity. The first appearance of the name “Microsoft” on the pages of Byte was a short mention of their BASIC interpreter in an advertising on page 47 of the May 1977 issue. In contrast, page 34 of the same issue included an article about the Apple II by Steve Wozniak. The Woz and Gary Kildall were the biggest stars of the microcomputer industry at the end of the 1970s."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/where-does-microsoft-want-to-go-today/
@scottmiller42@mstdn.social2025-03-10 04:32:50
Looks like the USPS shut down the covidtests.gov at 8:00 PM EDT on 3/9/2025, per text on the website.
I'm feeling somewhat fortunate in that I got my order placed and received in the last couple weeks.
If they had too many tests stockpiled, better management and allowing people to order additional test kits seems like a better choice than destroying good tests.
#CovidTests…
@scottmiller42@mstdn.social2025-03-10 15:05:48
I looked into buying a solar charged battery bank. This product category is completely dominated by no-name 3rd party sellers. 🚩
Charge time is key. No listing had even a rough estimate for solar charge time. 🚩
An example unit claims max solar power 1.13 w, with enough battery power to charge an iPhone 14 Pro twice. Working from that, you'd need ~25 hours of full sun to fully charge. I'd roughly estimate that means at least 3 days in summer. Not quite worthless, but close…
@jlpiraux@wallonie-bruxelles.social2025-04-29 18:22:54
Amnesty International a dénoncé mardi "un génocide en direct" commis par Israël dans la bande de Gaza, où la guerre et le blocage de l'aide humanitaire poussent la population dans une situation désespérée.
#Gaza #AmnestyInternational
@castarco@hachyderm.io2025-03-20 13:50:58
techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.
@cwilcke@bildung.social2025-04-19 19:47:30
Nationwide "Hands Off!" 50501 protests against Trump continues for second weekend
https://eu.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2025/04/19/protest-resist-trump-rally-photos/83173515007/
…
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-04-05 07:27:26
"To make a long story short, at some point during early 1996 I bought a cheap 14.4 kilobit per second modem, taking 10 minutes in average to download a single megabyte. Together with a monthly subscription to the new “Blue Window” service by Telecom PTT (soon to be renamed Swisscom), lo and behold, I was online."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/sniffing-packets/
@jlpiraux@wallonie-bruxelles.social2025-04-29 19:36:43
Un avion Š 60 millions de dollars tombe du porte-avions Harry S. Truman
#jaiglissechef #7èmecompagnie
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-04-05 10:22:59
"Jim Coplien ends his talk with a simple call to action: at every conference where new technology is introduced, software engineers should strive to be skeptical; to ask whether it improves the quality of life of society as a whole, and to take it home only to increase the human value of our products and services.
Focus on the people. Again and again. Because that is what Agile and OOP were all about, to begin with."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/james-coplien/
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-03-19 16:23:53
"On Sunday, July 20th, 1969, at precisely 20:14:19 UTC, just a mere three minutes before touchdown, the voice of Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. confirmed the “Go for landing” order received from Mission Control together with a phrase nobody wanted to hear at that moment: “Program alarm – 1201.”"
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/margaret-hamilton/