Not to say it isn't useful to a CS education, but the only time I've ever ran into the well-ordering principle was to establish the foundation for mathematical induction proofs. Students usually learn this in discrete math for CS in undergrad. Then in many future undergrad courses that are algorithms focused, the proofs tend to use induction and no one really thinks of the WOP
Yeah. I have had several different courses teach induction, and nobody really thinks of the WOP. I’m pretty sure most of them skips the WOP when introducing induction.
It's so easy to bait me with this nostalgia. There is something mysterious and enjoyable about dialing-in or connecting to a server in the unknown. During those days, many things were not easily discoverable which added to the fun.
For a brief time, this extended to the early internet with IRC servers. I spent most of my early teenage years downloading warez, .wav music files, and trying not to be a n00b on #c while asking n00b questions
Now that I am an old man, I wonder what today's youth do that is equivalent to this fun nerdy culture? Maybe I can partake, LOL.
They do it on Discord now, witch their crackling voices on full display in Voice Chats. I was on an Arch Linux discord and one kid hopped in with a voice changer (was maybe 15) because he didnt want people to make fun of him for being a squeeker.
I remember a period of time where my computer was too slow to play MP3 but it could play WAV files. So I'd process a song from MP3 or similar to WAV and play it that way.
yeah, I sought out 96kbps mp3s because I could listen to those and still use my computer without too much lag. 128kbps was enough to really bog things down lol >_<
My first foray into Linux was because it could burn a CD without errors (when reniced) while doing other things; the same computer under Windows had to be absolutely left alone when burning or it would make a coaster.
Kids these days with their multitasking and interfaces!
Oh wow I totally forgot about that -- leaving the computer alone while burning a CD because even the slightest action might render your burned CD a coaster! Actually, that period lasted quite a while, as I remember quitting programs to reduce issues when burning even in WinXP... lol
I worry that the sad truth is that there isn't anything similar for "kids these days". But hopefully there is something fun and deep like this for the youths in the AI world that I'm just too old to know about.
Hate to comment on the medium or writing style instead of the content but you're not alone. I understand the terms in the article in isolation or used in other fields, but it seems like the author is using a lot of technical metaphors. Or maybe I'm not their sophisticated audience.
As a dev who only really uses the read-only version of Figma for the most part, I really like what they do. I can't speak for designers but having the Figma diagrams match the libraries and the design system we use is very very nice. no guessing about colors, typography, spacing. I can just copy and paste into my CSS for front end work. The interface is smooth and fast for us non-design focused devs
What about variables that don't use pixel units? Often values appear as hardcoded in dev-mode when they are actually meant to be a % unit or something else Figma doesn't support because Figma doesn't actually use CSS for rendering.
When my devs just copy whats in Figma dev-mode they get so much stuff wrong.
as someone whos worked in a bad figma before, dont forget to give credit to your designers for setting up the design system that well that you can copy and paste like that. there are many designers who do not give two shits about how it looks in the dev handoff - figma tries but often fails to put them on guardrails to keep consistency to THEIR OWN designs lol
Curious to learn more about why it is difficult to debug. I'm not familiar with service mesh. I also work at a large corp, but we use gateways and most things are event driven with kafka across domain boundaries. I spend most of my time debugging each service locally by injecting mock messages or objects. I do this one at a time if the problem is upstream. Usually, our logging helps us pinpoint the exact service at to target for debugging. It's really easy. Our devops infrastructure has built out patterns and libraries when teams need to mint a new service. Everything is standardized with terraform. Everything has the same standard swagger pages, everything is using okta, etc.. Seems a bit boring (which is good)
It's easy if Someone(tm) has already set up a system where you can whip up the relevant bits with something like localstack.
But if there is no support from anyone and you'll be starting from scratch, you've print-debugged and fixed the issue before you get the debugger attached to anything relevant.
I suppose in the description of "large corp" and service mesh, Someone would already exist and this would already have been worked out. It would be a nightmare dealing with hundreds of microservices without this kind of game plan.
"I was young, naive, and plagued by impostor syndrome. I held back instead of exploring more, engaging more deeply, and seeking out more challenges. I allowed myself to be carried along by the current, rather than actively charting my own course. Youth is wasted on the young."
This quote really captures how I felt during that time. I wasn't smart enough to get into MIT, but I spent a lot of time sitting in on the open lectures during 2004-2005. I remember meeting a few of their undergrads who wanted to start tech companies and always feeling like I didn't belong. And I may be misremembering things but it seemed like every pitch had to do with P2P.
Also, the first time I walked past those Frank Gehry buildings, I was awestruck. I just stood there for maybe 10 minutes looking up and down.
There was a period when P2P was the latest hotness. Pat Gelsinger who was CTO of Intel at the time said something like, as I recall, P2P was going to be as big as the internet at an Intel Developer Forum keynote.
Stata grew on me over time architecturally. Still not sure how practical they were, especially for the cost, and I've heard very mixed reviews from people working in them.
Stata was a great building to take a walk in. I discovered new rooms, and new coffee machines, every few months, and even started making a Minecraft model of it (got only as far as the elevator shafts).
The people in various "fish tank" sections of the building did not like the Frank Gehry style as much, due to the lack of privacy, water leaks, drafts, and such. But some of us were lucky to have offices in the one part of the building that had 90-degree corners and regular brick walls. We got the best of both worlds... a regular office with a door and a window, and the fun architectural madness right outside.
One of the admins recalled an opening reception for the building in the Kiva conference room. "I call this the nauseatorium", she had remarked. A man in a black turtleneck had turned around, wine glass in hand: "There's a reason why I designed it like that..."
Stata was visually fantastic - great light, most places you'd look were interesting and nice to look at.
Acoustically it was bad -- the echoes in the open plan areas were terrible. Too many big, hard surfaces that reflected sounds everywhere.
It leaked and tried to kill people with shedding ice. That was a bit of a drawback.
My office would get cooked by reflected light off of the big shiny silver thing (being grumpy twenty somethings, we called it the Gehry crack pipe). They finally added more HVAC vents to my office right before I left, so that's probably fixed. Of course, it took me adding an extra resistor to the thermistor in the wall temperature sensor to finally get them to address the problem. That didn't go over too well.
I've seen many other CS buildings that are about 90% as visually interesting as the Stata center with 20% of its drawbacks, so my primary conclusion is that they let Gehry have just a smidgeon too much free rein and didn't listen enough to the contractors and engineers.
But it's the most visually impressive building I've worked in, inside and out.
I had a GF who worked for an HVAC sub on Stata and she said it was a nightmare to work on as they were pretty much working off a model rather than prints.
I don't necessarily buy the fetishism of Building 20 (old "temporary" WW2 era structure--for everyone) whose footprint was largely replaced by Stata which, for a lot of reasons, seemed an architectural indulgence. I like Gehry in general. Really liked the Guggenheim in Bilbao which I was at a couple of years ago and it was a really big factor in revitalizing the city. But I'm not sure MIT got a great return from that particular structure.
There are several Gehry buildings that I like from a visual perspective, but I've never worked in them so I always wonder what hidden flaws they harbor. :) The thing I found most annoying about my office getting heated by reflections is that it's the exact same problem he created with the Disney Concert Hall in LA, just on a smaller scale.
Building 20 was kinda old and gross. Good riddance. The Rad Lab deserves its place in history, but just because people did great work in a shack doesn't add much magic to the shack. I really liked my office in NE43 (tech square) and it holds really good emotions and memories for me, but that doesn't take away that it was an ugly building. :)
> My office would get cooked by reflected light off of the big shiny silver thing
I knew someone in a Biology lab across from that. The light was blinding at times, and they had to cover the windows.
I later worked in Stata, but experienced mostly only minor quirks of architecture. And there were some good architectural elements too: the healthy and popular "main street" rather than sterile lobby, some of the common spaces where people would linger and impromptu encounter, the plywood fixtures (I suppose a nod to the malleable "plywood palace" Building 20 previously on the site).
I've only ever been on the ground floor which was "fine" but obviously doesn't expose you to a lot of the various quirks. Well, other than the outside features they had to redo.
One thing that does annoy me is that a lot of the expense was justified as it being a new landmark Northeast entrance to campus but that's really been overshadowed by some of the new massive construction like Koch.
P2P should be the future but IPv6 is not really taking us anywhere, NATs are everywhere plus centralization makes trillions and decentralization goes against every power system we have so...
Same here! I was also a teenager in the mid-90s. And I was amazed by IRCd server code and bots. I bought a used copy of the book Slackware Linux unleashed w/CD-ROM and it had some networking code examples in C. I found Beej's Networking site because I was confused by a lot of that networking code. Became even more obsessed and went a deep rabbit hole. I spent a lot of time visiting different book stores hoping they had programming books. Bought Richard Stevens' amazing reference books and never looked back. Thanks for enabling my passion all these years later Beej!
It seems that Arizona is #3 for the total number of for-profit prisoners. There may be untapped potential for slave labor and finding creative ways to imprison Americans here.
This really triggered a lot of old memories from my early career. I started off as the 7th employee - as a Jr dev in a startup that eventually grew to 100+ and felt like an outsider for years. At some point I became a "senior" dev and the insider at this tiny company. It was quite a bit more stressful actually. I made more important decisions but it was super interesting. After having that insider taste, I kept chasing it at bigger corps for many years by becoming staff and eventually leading teams but never got that feeling again. I was either below a director or VP. To be young again...
Your experience almost exactly mirrors my own. I moved from Boston to the Midwest USA in 2016 and kept working remotely until a RIF in 2019. I found a local job that did require a commute but a few months later, we all became remote. In between, I started a family and had 2 kids who have always interacted with me at home. And I am very thankful for that opportunity that many do not have. Our company has since mandated hybrid work now but my team has been categorized as a remote-first distributed group. Now if I go into the office, I would be the only one there. Having said that, I do long for a physical whiteboard where my movements can help me convey my points or understand others better. The current technology is not so adequate in this area yet.. We use google workspaces/chat and meet. I curse it every week..
> The current technology is not so adequate in this area yet.. We use google workspaces/chat and meet. I curse it every week..
I think this is the one place AR/VR is almost ready to really help out. "Teleport" your chair to someone else's space while they "draw" on the "whiteboard" to show you things—with their actual body and hands.
Rigs anywhere near good enough to make this non-terrible are gonna be expensive for some time, and maybe don't quite exist yet (but are the one valuable use-case within striking distance of current hardware, I think), sure—but isn't the claim that this kind of interaction is incredibly valuable? Four-figure cost per six-figure worker should be a no brainer, then (unless companies/managers are just bullshitting about that...). And meeting rooms ain't cheap.
I'd much rather have Google's Project Starline than traditional AR/VR. It seems perfect to replace in person meetings (no goggles). Unfortunately, that is the only value, whereas AR provides virtual workspaces and is likely cheaper in mass production and space requirments (don't need large screens).
Given Google's history, my guess is that Starline is on the chopping block even if showcased at I/O with a scaled back price tag. I hope I'm wrong.
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