Computing | Software and Hardware

[Typhoon]

Interesting perspective.

The problem with programming and how to fix it

[Mr. Perfect]

My brother is a programmer but not doing websites. When I was getting started with this he was zero help even though he could have been. Having said that, at a certain point I had some html going and he finally put the pieces together of what I was trying to do.

At some point I asked him, coding doesn't make sense. It seems really clunky and disorganized and creates a lot of unnecessary work. He agreed and said in his circles people say that we have to remember that coding is really a new discipline in human history. Mathematical and science conventions have been underway for centuries and even millenia, coding just isn't that old. There is no reason to believe that the people that created these formats were doing it right.

Even though I am very green I would imagine that coding will change a lot in the future.

[noddy]

html and css arent actually coding - they are markup, which is not a computer discipline so much as a book publishing / data mangement one.

universities and business have driven it by their needs to separate the actual information and content from the publishing style.

[noddy]

all of the above means - most of the complexity will reveal its usefulness over time.

sometimes doing things the quick way leaves you in the manure a few years later as you try and maintain the website or change to new platforms.

--

as for coding and computing being new and needing new paradigms... sure.. i spose... it has to for business reasons.

i first learnt proper coding in the 80's using turbo c on a XT PC - before that i used an old apple 2e and its crude basic which allowed you to peek/poke memory addresses to get at the secret sauce.

all these years later, c is still the core of computing, not because its good, but because everything else is kinda worse - even its replacement c++ is barely much different and only usefull if you ignore most of the ++ bits (j/j)

the reason for that is very simple - c represents as far away from the actual cpu as you can get without it losing touch with the way the raw machinary works - everything c does is what the cpu does, no more, no less.

by way of analogy - c is a race car with a gear shift and motor parts you can build yourself in the shed with a good metal lathe - everything else is furthur away from the raw technology and takes away as much as it gives... more automatic, less control.

for doing things on time, to a budget, id move up the chain to python or c# - languages which have lots of automatic parts, however they dont let you do off road, or break the speed limits.

im sure over the next decade their will be new ones which are even more protected and allow product to get to market faster - they will be like electric self driving cars, only letting you do what they think is safe.

[Mr. Perfect]

Fascinating. I downloaded Visual and am getting ready to start C#.

[noddy]

Fascinating. I downloaded Visual and am getting ready to start C#.

start at the start.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet ... etcore-2.1

most of it wont make sense for a while but if you just work your way through, then osmosis will start to work.

[Mr. Perfect]

Good stuff, thanks.

So a question for you guys, Alex Jones has been megabanned but what would stop him from hosting video on his own site? Seems like it would be pretty easy.

Seems like a way forward is to have people like Jones, Savage, Limbaugh just host video on their own site.

Would it be difficult?

[noddy]

its very simple to host video but its expensive to host a popular video.

you pay your hosting by bandwidth used which is why everyone tries to use the hosting that google or facebook pays for to avoid that bill.

i believe youtube still runs at a massive loss and this is why google is trying to reconfigure it into a middle class money making machine.

you can see from this middle tier hosting provider that its very very cheap to host a small quiet site - $5 -10 a month but it explodes to $1000 a month for 12 TB.

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

im guessing about 100mb for a video rant, so 12 TB crudely gives you 120,000 views per month - which is not so many if you release daily

a text rant is only in the kb, you could do millions and millions of those a month on the big plans .. hence everyone does host their own text rants.

---

you pay to send data and then the customers pay to recieve data, the old road system could never pull off that double dipping trick

still. your point is the truth - alternative news sources need to get their funding together and make sure their media cant be touched by the usual suspects.

the other approach is to use the technology pirates use - all the customers share data with each other via bittorrent and avoid the big central hosting costs.

however this is only possible with an unblocked and open internet and being prepared to pay for other peoples usage, its quite fragile against government or telco mischief.

[Mr. Perfect]

It looks like he's got something going.

https://www.infowars.com/videos/

[Typhoon]

40030559_10155668567525857_3582046649494536192_o.png (550.91 KiB) Viewed 3391 times

[noddy]

*nix ended up wining the desktop war, even if it took apple and google to make the frontend prettier.

[Typhoon]

*nix ended up wining the desktop war, even if it took apple and google to make the frontend prettier.

True.

[noddy]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/1 ... al_pogrom/

Last week Victor Stinner, a Python developer who works for Red Hat, published four pull requests seeking to change "master" and "slave" in Python documentation and code to terms like "parent," "worker," or something similarly anodyne.

"For diversity reasons, it would be nice to try to avoid 'master' and 'slave' terminology which can be associated to slavery," he explained in his bug report

[Mr. Perfect]

I don't know how well known this is.

z2Whj_nL-x8

[noddy]

you certainly cant trivialise the guy that formulated boolean logic, massive contribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

In 1936, Shannon began his graduate studies in electrical engineering at MIT, where he worked on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, an early analog computer.[9] While studying the complicated ad hoc circuits of this analyzer, Shannon designed switching circuits based on Boole's concepts. In 1937, he wrote his master's degree thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.[10] A paper from this thesis was published in 1938.[11] In this work, Shannon proved that his switching circuits could be used to simplify the arrangement of the electromechanical relays that were used then in telephone call routing switches. Next, he expanded this concept, proving that these circuits could solve all problems that Boolean algebra could solve. In the last chapter, he presented diagrams of several circuits, including a 4-bit full adder.[10]

Using this property of electrical switches to implement logic is the fundamental concept that underlies all electronic digital computers. Shannon's work became the foundation of digital circuit design, as it became widely known in the electrical engineering community during and after World War II. The theoretical rigor of Shannon's work superseded the ad hoc methods that had prevailed previously. Howard Gardner called Shannon's thesis "possibly the most important, and also the most noted, master's thesis of the century."[12]

[Mr. Perfect]

Fascinating. Never heard of him until a few days ago.

[Typhoon]

Fascinating. Never heard of him until a few days ago.

Shannon's information theory is now ubiquitous in the sciences.

[Typhoon]

Quanta Mag | Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room

A visual prank exposes an Achilles’ heel of computer vision systems: Unlike humans, they can’t do a double take.

[Parodite]

Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch”

Update (September 24): new response from Richard M. Stallman, and Eric S. Raymond (ESR) says the license revocation “threat has teeth.”

Linux powers the internet, the Android in your pocket, and perhaps even some of your household appliances. A controversy over politics is now seeing some of its developers threatening to withdraw the license to all of their code, potentially destroying or making the whole Linux kernel unusable for a very long time.

[Typhoon]

Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch”

Update (September 24): new response from Richard M. Stallman, and Eric S. Raymond (ESR) says the license revocation “threat has teeth.”

Linux powers the internet, the Android in your pocket, and perhaps even some of your household appliances. A controversy over politics is now seeing some of its developers threatening to withdraw the license to all of their code, potentially destroying or making the whole Linux kernel unusable for a very long time.

Wow.

[Simple Minded]

Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch”

Update (September 24): new response from Richard M. Stallman, and Eric S. Raymond (ESR) says the license revocation “threat has teeth.”

Linux powers the internet, the Android in your pocket, and perhaps even some of your household appliances. A controversy over politics is now seeing some of its developers threatening to withdraw the license to all of their code, potentially destroying or making the whole Linux kernel unusable for a very long time.

Wow.

Shades of Ellis Wyatt.

https://www.shmoop.com/atlas-shrugged/ellis-wyatt.html

I think I've seen this movie already......

[Typhoon]

Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch”

Update (September 24): new response from Richard M. Stallman, and Eric S. Raymond (ESR) says the license revocation “threat has teeth.”

Linux powers the internet, the Android in your pocket, and perhaps even some of your household appliances. A controversy over politics is now seeing some of its developers threatening to withdraw the license to all of their code, potentially destroying or making the whole Linux kernel unusable for a very long time.

Wow.

Shades of Ellis Wyatt.

https://www.shmoop.com/atlas-shrugged/ellis-wyatt.html

I think I've seen this movie already......

The individual spearheading this so-called Code of Conduct makes Ellsworth Toohey look good.

The woman who spearheaded this whole campaign and the CoC, is a mentally unstable SJW, who was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward and fired from Github, after consuming a copious amount of barbiturates.

Her personal blog

https://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/

Related post on Twitter by yours truly

https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/ ... 9193317376

[noddy]

their is a conspiracy lurking in all this, which is kinda fun.

one of the transgender sjw's waving their CoC around is an ex intel employee.

the linux dev getting the treatment is the one that discovered intels random generator might have a CIA backdoor and decided linux should stick to the entropy based one.

a while back someone pointed out that even tho linux was still open source the real development and support had been coming from the big boys in google, microsoft and intel and they wanted more control over what had become a core part of their business models.

having a corporate Code of Conduct with vague and broad rules about behavioural standards would let these big players remove linux devs that didnt play nice with their agendas.

the current system of Linus driven meritocracy has no political agendas except code up to his grumpy standards... unfortunately for the diversity muppets that means a team of engineers who prefer blunt and harsh talk, which leads us back to their fears of wishy washy terms of conduct.

[Simple Minded]

The individual spearheading this so-called Code of Conduct makes Ellsworth Toohey look good.

The woman who spearheaded this whole campaign and the CoC, is a mentally unstable SJW, who was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward and fired from Github, after consuming a copious amount of barbiturates.

Her personal blog

https://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/

Related post on Twitter by yours truly

https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/ ... 9193317376

Thanks for posting. reading this:

"I really enjoyed the job I had in 2015. I was a principal engineer at a health tech company, with a polyglot team comprised of Ruby and Clojure developers ranging from very early career to very seasoned. I was learning a lot and doing really interesting work. I felt like I had finally found a company that I could stick with for a few years or so.

Then I got a strange message on Twitter. Someone at GitHub wanted to talk to me. I thought I knew what it was about: a year before, I had been talking to a diversity consultant (who was contracting there at the time) about working with GitHub on diversity and inclusivity and exploring their interest in adopting the Contributor Covenant across all of their open source projects.

But that's not what they wanted this time. They wanted to offer me a job. They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people and creating features for project owners to better manage their communities.

At first I had my doubts. I was well aware of GitHub's very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds. I myself had experienced harassment on GitHub. As an example, a couple of years ago someone created a dozen repositories with racist names and added me to the repos, so my GitHub profile had racial slurs on it until their support team got around to shutting them down a few days after I reported the incident. I didn't get the sense that the company really cared about harassment."

makes me realize my universe has absolutely no intersection with her universe. Someday, I should create a secret identity to hide my superpowers and venture into social media. I suspect it will be like sticking your head into the mouth of a lion but by starting at his asshole.

The second link was even better. I doubt it is real. I think it is noddy creating an online personality. time to fess up noddy.

[noddy]

wait till you see the CoC she is waving around.

https://postmeritocracy.org/

We do not believe that our value as human beings is intrinsically tied to our value as knowledge workers. Our professions do not define us; we are more than the work we do.


We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills.