It’s one of magi!

I certainly get lag in my pixels but no disconnects.

I think blind itself drives some interesting bias. The public posts are pretty incel. You need a critical mass of folks at your company to have a company private board so it attracts folks from bigger companies. It doesn’t seem to represent average folks well. Unless I have no idea what average is.

I’m not sure what to do with that instinct. The overall results say a thing I wanted to hear. It all feels weird.

Catch 22 is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever read. I don’t think you’ll finish it in a day, but it’s amazing.

Never Let Me Go is the most “not for me” book I’ve ever read. I can see why people love it. And I respect what it’s doing. I just don’t want to play a long.

Project Hail Mary used to come up on r/books from time to time and was polarizing. Lots of folks loved it. Lots thought it wasn’t good.

If you loved the Martian I think you’ll like PHM. I did.

My guess is the big video ram is high resolution textures, complex geometry, and a long draw distance. I honestly don’t know much about video games though.

The smaller install is totally the map streaming stuff. I’m unsure quite why it has to be so big, but again, I don’t know video games. I do recall you having to tell it where you want to start from and it’ll download some stuff there.

I recommend it. Try to go in blind.

“I once ran the Indy 500. I must confess I’m impressed how I did it I wonder how close that I came.”

I like this explanation. I don’t think we can do a lot better than this one at this point.

I think a fun next step is “forget what’s real, I want to write a story with humans interacting with aliens that’s consistent with what we see now.” What do you have to invent to make it work? Nothing really works for me. But stuff like the dark forest is good. I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy it.

I bought some $50 open back headphones a while back and they a just worlds better than anything I’d had before. Is there a step up from there that’d similarly rock my world?

My mic is pretty similar. $100 got me an SM58 and it’s wonderful. You have to basically eat it and I can peak it if I’m loud. But it sounds so much nicer than most things. I know there’s a few steps up from there. But I don’t sing so think I’m fine.

Try your local library.

I feel lucky to have avoided this so far. It’s really not like this on my team. I write a fair bit of code and review a ton of code.

I think it was the EPA’s National Compute Center. I’m guessing based on location though.

When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.

Not looking at the man page, but I expect you can limit it if you want and the parser for the parameter knows about these names. If it were me it’d be one parser for byte size values and it’d work for chunk size and limit and sync interval and whatever else dd does.

Also probably limited by the size of the number tracking. I think dd reports the number of bytes copied at the end even in unlimited mode.

Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It’s been good. I’d recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

I’m a software engineer because I’m bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can’t write. Didn’t want to follow in my mom’s footsteps but I just can’t so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It’s honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I’m proud of it. It’s no google, but it’s honest.

Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don’t deserve it. It’s been good. But I got lucky.

Code talker?

I used gerrit and zuul a while back at a place that really didn’t want to use GitHub. It worked pretty well but it took a lot of care and maintenance to keep it all ticking along for a bunch of us.

It has a few features I loved that GitHub took years to catch up to. Not sure there’s a moral to this story.

When someone is having a computer problem I ask them to restart first. Not because I think they don’t know to do it, but just in case. Some people don’t know. Sometimes people forget. Obvious advice is useful sometimes.