Hey no botting!

NEW

Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

God that sounds awful in headline form.

Pride month is absolutely not an excuse to say “current homophobes will never get better, so they all need to blah blah”. Their current behavior is intolerable, but through continued exposure and humanizing influences, the people can be reached. It’ll go from hatred to extreme discomfort to mild discomfort to … something more normal.

Unfortunately I’m a crappy communicator and I can’t figure out a way to reduce that to a headline without making it some kind of division-promoting reductionist garbage. Sigh.

I think crucially it has the potential to show moderate voters that President Biden is not one to abuse the legal system for his own personal gain. If the outcome is supported by evidence and precedent, obviously some won’t be convinced by even that. But some will be.

Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.

Wait don’t do that. They garnish wages for student debt. They’re happy to do it, too, as they get to keep a big chunk of extra fees that way.

Ok now I’m curious what I’m missing out on. Can anyone recommend a good PCIe token ring adapter and concentrator?

A 20 lb (or so) sealed lead acid battery and an inverter, at U Nebraska at Omaha around 2003-2004. I had imported a Sharp SL-C700 and it was very power hungry. Smart phones were barely a thing (blackberries) at the time.

I think I was vaguely aware of the possibility of some unexpected metal shorting the battery and getting hot enough to start fires, so I bought a green rubber bath mat (which I remember had little sucker feet on one side) and wrapped it around the battery.

I finished my undergrad in 2004 with no incidents.

Do you keep a shopping list? A personal to-do or reminders list? You should stop because that’s a ritual and rituals are clearly bad.

I mean, no, you should keep the rituals that help you work better and discard the rest. Which is what successful agile teams are already doing.

Think of a programming language as a crutch for the human brain. Processors don’t need it: they don’t have to think about the code, they just execute it. Our mushy human brains need a lot of help, however.

We need to think about things on our own terms. Different programming languages, different APIs that do the same thing, different object models, these all help people tackle new problems, or even just implement solutions in new ways.

Some new languages have a completely different model of execution you may not be familiar with. Imperative languages are what we traditionally think of, because they work most similarly to how processors execute code: the major pattern used to make progress, do work, is to create variables and assign values to them. C, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, C# (my personal favorite), Javascript, even Rust, are all imperative languages.

But there are also functional languages, like ML or F#. (The latter, I keep installing with Visual Studio but never ever use) The main pattern there is function application. Functions themselves are first order data, and not in a hacky implementation-specific way like you’re passing machine code around. (I’ve only ever used this for grad school homework, never professionally, sadly.)

And declarative languages like Prolog helped give IBM’s Watson its legendary open question answering ability on national TV. When you need a system to be really, actually smart, not just create smart-sounding text convincingly like a generative AI, why not use a language that lets you declare fact tables? (Again, only grad school homework use for me here)

Programming is all about solving problems, and there are so many kinds of problems and so many ways to think about them. I know my own personal pile of gray mush needs all the help it can get.