IHeartBadCode

I mean I’ve been trying to formally request that ISO change the C API for send() to yeet() for sockets where connection reliability is not required at the network interface level.

Maybe I’m not Rusting enough.

Or you can make multiple accounts. The app makes it super simple to swap accounts on the fly.

Wayland development. Tons of folks yelling “X is good enough!” Where they just ignore that no one is actively developing XOrg which is pretty much the biggest X11 implementation.

Plenty maintaining XOrg but new things aren’t coming to XOrg, there’s just no one there the XOrg devs moved to Wayland.

So all these people shouting, they’re telling you keep a piece of software that’s very fragile, in a space that hardware makers are progressing at rapid pace, has decades of hot fixes, duct tape, and cruft, and nobody is actively developing for.

Like I just don’t understand the people yelling that Wayland is raping peoples wives and setting fire to their dogs. The yelling group is screaming for people to use something that nobody wants to work on and nobody is paying enough for people to work on. The code base is horrible and it easily causes burnout in three weeks or less. No one in their right mind is picking it up for shits and giggles.

So if everyone abandons Wayland, what’s the end goal? Keep riding XOrg till hardware outpaces it completely? Like I don’t understand what the Wayland haters are trying to get at. There’s so little going on in XOrg at this point and everyone seems to universally hate the code base. And a rewrite of the base sounds a whole lot like Wayland but artificially adding in X11 restrictions that make no sense since we all aren’t using PDP-11 to run the clients.

I get that Wayland has configurations that don’t work yet. All software has bugs, including X11 implementations. But Wayland is arguably a technology that is more in line with how modern hardware works than the X11 protocol will ever be. And Wayland is designed to be easy for devs to work with, not a cobble of archaic limitations due to a protocol that was designed for 1970s era computers.

That level of hate for Wayland is just this confusing Luddite cry for software that hardware that properly supports it no longer exists. The reason modern video cards do run on X at this point is because of a lot of hacks. I thought everyone understood this when we did the whole AIGLX vs XGL thing.

A:\SPICYMEMES\MODEMSOUND.WAV

but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won’t make people switch to Firefox

Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.

For those who have never worked on legacy systems. Any one who suggests “we’ll fix it in post” is asking you to do something that just CANNOT happen.

The systems I code for, if something breaks, we’re going to court over it. Not, oh no let’s patch it real quick, it’s your ass is going to be cross examined on why the eff your system just wrote thousands of legal contracts that cannot be upheld as valid.

Yeah, that fix it in post shit any article, especially this one that’s linked, suggests should be considered trash that has no remote idea how deep in shit one can be if you start getting wild hairs up your ass for changing out parts of a critical system.

IBM hawks new conversion tools all the time. None of them are amazing sliver bullets, all of them require humans to comb over the resulting output. And every single one I’ve ever used chokes on any weird case.

From the RPG fixed form to free form, DDS to DDL conversion, and so on all of them are usually more trouble to use than to not use.

IBM does this kind of stuff all the time. And for some folks it’ll work some of the times. But at this point, I just skip any WS tool they put out and have a snippet on RDi and RDz that does all the required plugging away to call web services from the COBOL module.

This sounds no different than the static analysis tools we’ve had for COBOL for some time now.

The problem isn’t a conversion of what may or may not be complex code, it’s taking the time to prove out a new solution.

I can take any old service program on one of our IBM i machines and convert it out to Java no problem. The issue arises if some other subsystem that relies on that gets stalled out because the activation group is transient and spin up of the JVM is the stalling part.

Now suddenly, I need named activation and that means I need to take lifetimes into account. Static values are now suddenly living between requests when procedures don’t initial them. And all of that is a great way to start leaking data all over the place. And when you suddenly start putting other people’s phone numbers on 15 year contracts that have serious legal ramifications, legal doesn’t tend to like that.

It isn’t just enough to convert COBOL 1:1 to Java. You have to have an understanding of what the program is trying to get done. And just looking at the code isn’t going to make that obvious. Another example, this module locks a data area down because we need this other module to hit an error condition. The restart condition for the module reloads it into a different mode that’s appropriate for the process which sends a message to the guest module to unlock the data area.

Yes, I shit you not. There is a program out there doing critical work where the expected execution path is to on purpose cause an error so that some part of code in the recovery gets ran. How many of you think an AI is going to pick up that context?

The tools back then were limited and so programmers did all kinds of hacky things to get particular things done. We’ve got tools now to fix that, just that so much has already been layered on top of the way things work right now. Pair with the whole, we cannot buy a second machine to build a new system and any new program must work 99.999% right out of the gate.

COBOL is just a language, it’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the expectation. These systems run absolutely critical functions that just simply cannot fail. Trying to foray into Java or whatever language means we have to build a system that doesn’t have 45 years worth of testing that runs perfectly. It’s just not a realistic expectation.

In July, Musk tweeted about Twitter / X’s financial situation, saying, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

Advertising could be up two fold for all it matters. You sack a company that last turned an annual profit in 2019 with $44B in debt, it won’t matter if Musk is shitting gold bricks. You can’t pay that size of debt off fast enough. To just get started on that debt Musk would need to make Twitter twenty times more profitable than their 2019 profit. And even then that debt is going to be a monkey on his back for forty years in ideal conditions.

That $44B isn’t chump change for Twitter, like maybe if Tencent took a sudden $44B debt they’d make good on it, but they’re wildly profitable. Twitter barely gets by and has only gone on this long because of the Tech Bro funding that all but dried up when the interest rates were going up.

Next hardware reset and automatic reorientation for Voyager 2 is October 15th. Yes the device automatically resets itself about four to five times a year. Communications are expected to be reestablished then.

If I built a social media mega hub that can be abused to brainwash humanity

Humanity is capricious as fuck. You can brainwash them, but then after a while, you just got to brainwash them again. Gets old.

I would like to think keeping it off the wrong hands is priceless

Yes, BUT have you ever considered that with enough money you can just not care?

Also, look at what’s his face that started Twitter. Now he’s got insane levels of Musk’s cash and started yet another social media company, Blueksy which a lot of people ran over to. I punch those numbers into my calculator, it makes a happy face.

It’s LaTeX mathbb{x}

For anyone interested. Here’s a video of programming an EEPROM with dip switches and using it to drive a seven segment display.

The guy’s channel also includes how to build a very simple computer using various ICs. If breadboard computers are your kind of thing.

The actual problem, binary labeling. If the category system is just “sexy” vs “non-sexy” you’re going to piss off a ton of in-between. However, you want to do it, IDK. It can be sexy+1 to sexy+10 or mildly suggestive to NSFW. But Twitch needs to acknowledge there’s a spectrum and ignoring that there is one is just going to piss people off.

Poor people aren’t human and therefore don’t deserve rights or help

Incorrect. Poor people are replaceable with other poor people and eventually with robots. The fact that poor people aren’t doing anything today about any of this means that there will come a day where the 1% makes up around 50% of the still living global population.

When we invented the car, horses didn’t go get better jobs we just started having fewer horses.