jadero @ jadero @programming.dev

Fully retired now and one of the things I'd like to do is get back into hob

---

Read more

Posts

1

Comments

146

Joined

2 yr. ago

The paradox is that people don't actually implement agile methodologies but rather try to shoehorn them into their waterfall mindset.

After several decades and several methodologies in a number of fields, I've concluded that very few actually think methodologies are useful. It's always pick and choose or mix and match the various elements. This is all driven by the belief that my business is a special little flower and needs it's own custom little process that only I can invent.

Yeah, that makes sense. A general purpose community or one with a lot of sub-topics could make effective use of tags. Woodworking, for example, can be anything from detailed hand carving to home construction and renovation, so tags would make sense.

I'm not convinced that post tags make a lot of sense in a system that is already categorized by community name. I see the primary value of tags in systems with an undifferentiated flow of posts on anything and everything.

The system as described in the RFC contains the tags to a separate field and the tags themselves are not generated on the fly during posting. This should elimate (I hope) the use of hashtagging within the body of the post, something that I personally detest. It should also reduce the prevalence of tag spamming.

The system as described also makes it possible for a client to have a "hide tags" setting, to reduce clutter.

Even though I don't see the value doesn't mean others won't benefit, maybe even my future self! So I guess I'm fine with it.

I think it is, but NSFW has quite a bit of metaphorical use, too. I've seen particularly beautiful examples of craftsmanship labeled jokingly (?) as NSFW to highlight the the difference between merely masterful work and artistry. That's one of the reasons I manage by subscription rather than by filter.

Even the word "porn" doesn't really work. There are various Porn groups on Reddit, like EarthPorn, which was dedicated to amazing examples of completely natural landscapes.

I ran Copperhead OS (the predecessor to Graphene) and really liked it. Sadly, the phone went into the lake and I've not been able to afford to replace it with one capable of Graphene.

I learned that Android was not open under my personal definition of "open" right from the outset, because there was no programmatic access to telephony. My first project was to build an on-board answering machine with call screening capabilities.

I used an answering machine on my landline to avoid paying for caller id and voicemail and wanted to do the same with my cellphone. I was very disappointed to learn that this was not possible, at least with my skillset.

I knew that things were going the wrong way when my Tasker script to manage airplane mode stopped working when Android required locked it away. My use case there was that lack of connectivity at the gym and at home meant that connection attempts were draining my battery and heating up the phone. Now, of course, Android does a much better job of that particular task on its own, but it still makes me cranky. :)

Everything that has happened since has only cemented my opinion that Android is not actually an open platform. I do see many of the changes as potentially valuable security measures for the masses, but I wish that it wasn't quite so difficult for a power user to use the power of the little computer we carry in our pockets.

Sweet! That means I can encrypt my code to keep prying eyes away.

Or maybe just a powder balance. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Dad did a lot of reloading his own ammunition. We kids had fun doing things like weighing our names (weigh a small piece of paper to get the tare, weigh again to get the loaded weight, subtract) and other miniscule things. As I recall, it was accurate to less than a grain (0.065 gram).

One of the things we did was weigh different shapes of paper to calculate area. Start with a sample of a unit area. Cut out a funky shape and weigh it, then do the math.

dBASE was not my first language, but learning normalization and modelling completely transformed my user interface design. Starting with dBASE, every UI I built used all available data to do some combination of reducing the potential for error and reducing user effort.

For example, choosing "Tesla" as the make of car should obviously hide "F-150" from the list of models and hide all fuel types except "Battery Only". This seems obvious to pretty much everyone, but there are a lot of UI designs that completely ignore analogous data relations. Less obviously, but just as important, having reduced the list of fuel types to one possibility, it should be automatically filled in.

I find web forms, especially government ones, to be particularly bad at this stuff.

The last assembly I could understand. Well, pretend to understand.

All those assembly language instructions are just mnemonics for the actual opcodes. IIRC, on the 6502 processor family, JSR (Jump to SubRoutine) was hex 20, decimal 32. So going deeper would be really limited to not having access to the various amenities provided by assembler software and writing the memory directly. For example:

I started programming using a VIC-20. It came with BASIC, but you could have larger programs if you used assembly. I couldn't afford the assembler cartridge, so I POKED the decimal values of everything directly to memory. I ended up memorizing some of the more common opcodes. (I don't know why I was working in decimal instead of hex. Maybe the text representation was, on average, smaller because there was no need of a hex symbol. Whatever, it doesn't matter...)

VIC-BASIC had direct memory access via PEEK (retrieve value) and POKE (set value). It also had READ and DATA statements. READ retrieved values from the comma-delimited list of values following the DATA statement (usually just a big blob of values as the last line of your program).

I would write my program as a long comma-delimited list of decimal values in a DATA statement, READ and POKE those values in a loop, then execute the resulting program. For small programs, I just saved everything as that BASIC program. For larger programs, I wrote those decimal values to tape, then read them into memory. That let me do a kind of modular programming by loading common functions from tape instead of retyping them.

I was in the process of writing my own assembler so that I could use the mnemonics directly when I got my Apple //c. More memory and the availability of quite a few high level languages derailed me and I haven't touched assembly since.

Prairie Centre Credit Union.

After years of complaining, they finally did something about their hopelessly insecure authentication, only to completely bork it.

Bitwarden could open the site, but couldn't push the login info. They prohibited pasting, so I had type everything by hand. And they couldn't even get that prohibition right, because I discovered that I could type a character then CTRL+V to paste, then HOME, DEL.

All of that is written past tense, because it was the last straw. I took my banking elsewhere, despite the fact I now have to drive 2.5 hours if I need to talk to someone in person.

I'd just like to take a moment to commend you on an absolutely exquisite answer.

Given time, there is a slim chance I could have covered the same ground and no chance that it would have been as clear and concise.

If you've been working the front end, you know what the backend is supposed to provide, so you might have been picked because see you as a domain expert. Don't be surprised if you end up acting as a leader in that regard.

And C# isn't that hard. I earned my living with Visual Basic, Access, and VBA until thrown into a C# job. Other than the damned braces and semicolons, it wasn't that big a deal.

I eventually learned to never trust any restrictions on the user.

I quickly learned to make sure everyone had a copy of decisions made, so that I could charge by the hour for changes. I eventually learned to include examples of what would and would not be possible in any specification or change order.

Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought "Fahrenheit 451" was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.

"Brave New World" struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).

It's been too long since I read "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.

I don't see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as "neutral" demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.

Fair enough. What evidence have you got that it's any different than what humans do? Have you looked around? How many people can you point to that are not just regurgitating or iterating or recombining or rearranging or taking the next step?

As far as I can tell, much of what we call intelligent activity can be performed by computer software and the gaps get smaller every year.

It's a "gaps" problem.

Creationism has the "god of the gaps" where every new fossil forces them to set the goalposts closer together.

The people who think that human intelligence is something special have to adjust the spacing on the goalposts every time a corvid solves a new problem and every time someone figures out how to make a computer do something new.

Now that you mention it, I might have used as many different basics as all other languages combined.

In addition to those you listed, I've used VIC basic, Apple Basic, Pick Basic, Z-Basic (that one was nice, with a cross platform compiler and device independent graphics) and I bet there are a couple I've forgotten about.

Okay, thanks.

So twisted knickers are understandable, but it might be more effective to mobilize forks instead of pitchforks. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)