6:07pm
Fredericks:
This guy still talking about technology?
6:08pm
Marie in Chicago:
Hey Mark, hey Everybody.
♥
6:11pm
Ciggy:
My nephew had to deal with this Crowdstrike issue for well over a week. The 1st 72 hours were a tremendous strain for him. His company is a Wholesale Food distributor servicing the Tri-state area. Luckily, the refrigerated trucks went out early that Friday morning.
♥
6:12pm
Mark Hurst:
ultra, Bas, chresti, Deano, Wendy, Webham, tim, PaulR, WtSG, Butterman, DjL, Hugo, Fredericks, Marie, Ciggy - welcome! Thanks for joining this evening.
6:14pm
dk50b:
Greetings Techtonics. How shocking this is my first time hearing about the Google monopolist ruling. I'm at a complete loss to explain the lack of media attention. As usual, there was only room for one story, and it was CrowdStrike.
6:15pm
morphe':
↳
Song:
"Mark's intro"
Barbie Gif ...
Todd Haynes Film: "SuperStar = The Karen Carpenter Story" is worth a watch...
6:19pm
nick!:
A lot of this is very similar to telco culture. As someone working at a US telco, it’s very much a typical office. Not flush with amenities, very 9-to-5. And I think this middle-tech culture you describe is mainly sourced from telco culture…because tech came from telco.
Well said, Jeff! I agree - we need more basic fluency in the public about how these things work. (This way, among other reasons, people know when they're being totally exploited or ripped off.)
6:20pm
nick!:
It spans the globe too. Many of the big telcos have big commonalities in their origins, state-owned or state-affiliated and now privatized, trying to keep up with demand and still innovate
6:21pm
Dean:
I'll repeat my recommendation of a title, Robert Britt Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (1991).
🤖♥
6:22pm
DjLorraine:
Sturgeon Blue Moon tonight, right?
6:23pm
Dean:
I thought the Google decision was well-covered. Here's the opinion:
🤖♥
6:23pm
nick!:
The "move fast break things" attitude is especially NOT present in telco. Which has requirements much more similar to a utility company in terms of reliability.
6:23pm
βrian:
Ooh, I'd love to hear what Paula thinks about "Best Practice," which is an almost meaningless term, especially re refactoring legacy code.
♥
6:23pm
paddy in matawan:
I have been testing refactored code for over a week and it has been driving me nuts. Finally finished today!
🤖♥
6:24pm
Will thee SG OCNY:
the GPS is also dependent on solar flares, bad trajectories, gps reflections off buildings, mountains, and bodies of water... soo many variables to put you on the right level of the bridge...
♥
6:26pm
(Murakami Whywolf))):
Life in a small start-up when things are still going well is, I've found, in fact something of an high. There's nothing like being pushed a little beyond your limits of ability routinely, though it's more survivable if it's not all the time.
There's also a lot of room for craftsperson-ethical decisions, down to 'Will I document this line better even though Iʼm tired and thereʼs a lot to do?', or 'Can I find the best short name for this variable or method so that what Iʼm doing were clear to the next person who has to deal with it (fix it or change it or generalise it)?'.
There's nothing like exercising even a limited mastery and doing the right thing, hour after hour.
🤖♥
6:26pm
Webhamster Henry:
Crowdstrike was where the testing system needed testing.
In addition to the actual information being shared...
I'm very much enjoying listening to and appreciating the subtle facets of accents in Dr. Bialski's speaking voice, which carry all sorts of little flavors which I assume tell the tale of all the places she's spent time in.
Yes! It's a really compelling ride, one I miss even though it was exhausting.
Because it was both exhausting and exhilarating.
6:32pm
morphe':
↳
βrian @6:29
[Gilda Radna voice] What's All This I Hear About Eunuch Testing ????
🤖♥
6:33pm
Webhamster Henry:
Mamgers love all the stats that come out of the "Agile process"
♥
6:33pm
(((Murakami Whywolf):
I once nearly ruined a release by fixing—not in inverted commas, actually fixing—a bug.
…because the bug short-circuited a clean-up routine that resulted, eventually, in the damned thing running out of memory…but in the short-term it prevented another bug from getting reached. The fix exposed the underlying bug and killed one part of the demo.
🤖♥
6:35pm
nick!:
Management's flowery language is always so fun to hear. At least where I am, there is a realism and a settling for what's possible. Or good attempts to remove roadblocks and make something happen. Squeezing people for the impossible is limited thankfully.
🤖♥
6:35pm
chresti:
In around 2012 someone messed with the location of the Hollywood sign on GPS so that all these visitors were showing up at the tennis courts in Griffith Park asking where the Hollywood sign was and could they walk there, (it's about 3 miles away).
6:35pm
Dean:
Huh. I don't hear management genuinely promoting perfection. It's just marketing puffery. Management tends to demand good-enoughness: get it done so that it works in time for the release.
Yes I agree. It's a lot of hype and then a settling for something reasonable.
♥
6:36pm
(Murakami Whywolf))):
In my experience the developers strove for perfection and we fought the managers not to make it 'just good enough'. This was both pride on our part—we wanted to 'do it right'—but also because we didn't want to create spaghetti and leave time-bombs in place in the code.
6:38pm
Dean:
That comports with my experience on the sideline, @(Murakami Whywolf))).
My career as a developer culminated in 1977, when in high school I wrote a program to calculate the volume of a function revolved around an axis. It wasn't just good enough; it was perfect.
I... must not really understand this "Agile" thing.
Because I remember getting the impression that it meant something like "Instead of actually designing something thoroughly and correctly, just throw some shit against the wall and fix it later, you'll learn what you meant to design through that iterative process."
Which is an approach I hate absolutely everything about.
So... I must not actually understand what they mean?
6:39pm
Dean:
The perfect, they say is the enemy of the good. I reply, it's also the enemy of the bad.
🤖♥
6:39pm
tim:
Thanks for covering for us, Mark! ;)
6:40pm
Dean:
The program, by the way, produced a visual depiction, too.
♥
6:41pm
(((Murakami Whywolf):
There's nothing like social negotiation between literally aspergic people and managers who remind them of their middle-school bullies. That was a big difference between my small start-ups and medium-sized post–start-ups and the large firm in which I ended my working days—no bros in the former.
I see that as a potential drawback of Agile for sure... my impression of Agile practitioners is that they believe the method has other advantages, if practiced properly...
Agile is differently interpreted in every shop, in my experience. Lots and lots of Agile lip-service! I suspect that when it was done with actual post-it notes, it worked a little better.
🤖♥
6:43pm
nick!:
Paula said The C Word! The source of it all Hahaha
6:43pm
Marie in Chicago:
I don't think silicon valley really cares about perfection. It's like perfection as PR;it it serves thier purposes to saddle people into working 60-80 hours a week
6:44pm
Dean:
You're looking at the wrong outcomes, Mark. Look a the 10-Ks.
This is why "lean" companies are not by virtue of that characteristic beneficial. "Lean" tends to mean fewer workers, more productivity from each remaining worker.
6:45pm
Wild Neil||Peace All:
There was a book put out by Air Force Thunderbird pilot talking about perfect execution. The idea of such a thing kinda pissed me off. I dropped out of Cooper Union because I got a C in my 20's. Glad I am not an architect, but my 14 year old needs to learn about good enough ness.
6:46pm
morphe':
From Good to Great => there was a period in the NYC Dept of Education [=
2000s???] where there were constant mandatory workshops ="From Good to Great " which could be inspirational yet the workshop leaders were so uninspiring ... we would trundle towards the library mumbling "staff infection..."
6:48pm
Wild Neil||Peace All:
I used to spend 8am to midnight 7 days a week at Cooper Union thinking I was accomplishing. I should have listened to the students that said "don't you ever go home??".
As far as I understand it, the notion is that believing that you have a perfect design is always illusory, and even if it _were_ perfect you would find-out as you implenented that the requirements, resources, and limitations weren't what you thought ab initio, so you strive to have a reasonably good design and then evolve it from there. For the evolution to work, the selection-mechanism must be right…otherwise you get software with antlers that cost a lot of calories to grow and are heavy enough to hobble it.
And there are also people, borderline Dunning Kruger, who know they have the perfect software idea. These people can Peter Princlple themselves into management...
🤖♥
6:52pm
tim:
I hate to tell you this, guys, but the concept of 'good enough' IS NOT good enough on It's Complicated.
🤖♥
6:54pm
Webhamster Henry:
Maybe our tech is aging, but Kraftwerk's COMPUTER WORLD is timeless and as relevant today as ever.
6:55pm
Dean:
There are very narrow avenues that permit stepping away from big tech, e.g., deploying and developing technology in libraries. I work with colleagues who are tech-skilled and who understand the demands of providing reliable information, which go way beyond tech. They contribute a huge amount to their operation's work, and they find the work immensely rewarding.
6:56pm
GC in Bmore:
Here’s a question to ponder: what if all this aging code was not complicated by the fact that it is owned by domineering surveillance monopolies? Would things be different if there weren’t so many monopolies?
6:56pm
dk50b:
The proprietary software we use at work uses mapping software riddled with errors that shows a lack of familiarity with US cities. The company is in Germany. I wonder....
🤖♥
6:56pm
Webhamster Henry:
Actually the early code is more stable than the newer, because all that surveillance means lots of vulnerable I/O. freeform.wfmu.org
Telling this anecdote is the tech equivalent of the former High School football star re-telling the story of that great play well past late middle age, but...
Once I was working at an outpost of certain Labs largely funded by a telecom monopoly, and our team was doing a port of the X Window System to some different hardware. Several of us were writing code which wrote directly to some addresses controlled by graphics hardware.
Simultaneously, Just For Fun, I was reading drafts of the newfangled ANSI C spec whose details were being hammered out. I came across a section where they said that in the future, under ANSI C, the compiler might be allowed to optimize away instructions writing to places which were never seen to be read from anywhere else in the code; but you could apply a special type specification to pointers the compiler should just damned well use as written. So I put declarations like that where appropriate in my code, set off in #ifdef sections such that they'd only be the active code if a special flag was set which should only be set in a future ANSI C compiler.
And then I forgot about it. And eventually that gig ended, and I moved on to a different job.
And years (5 or 10?) later, a former co-worker from that job reached out to me to say that they had indeed eventually migrated to using an ANSI C compiler; it had become the standard. And the driver code was breaking all over the place.
Except for mine.
He thought I'd enjoy hearing that, and indeed I was most pleased.
6:56pm
morphe':
↳
Song:
"Mark's comments"
A not so old John Oliver show said/showed North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) using 7 or 9" Floppy Discs ???
6:57pm
Dean:
Earlier today, pre-Techtonic, it struck me that we almost never have to deal with having the wrong hammer. Technology is not "just a tool," as some believe. A device that is "just a tool" works almost 100% of the time, perfectly reliably. Software always demands our vigilance, pretty much on a daily basis.
7:12pm
shambolic:
This show feels very adjacent to Cory Doctrow’s theory of enshitification. Code, platforms, services degrade over time after luring you in and then becoming capital generating machines by being good enough but steadily degrading… in other words, input in, profit out, I guess.
I didn't have to deal with this, but we had some driver code for an early card used to implement audio-video codecs. It turns-out that the code was designed to create a delay in one thread by doing a gigantic for(){} loop that did _nothing_…and which the optimising compiler we were trying to use to boost efficiency and frame-rates was smart enough to recognise and completely to remove.
Listener comments!
: Mark! Techtontrists!
Bas NL: Hi Mark! Hi all!
chresti: Hi Mark and techtonicians!
Deano de los Muertos: Howdy Mark
Wendy del Formaggio: Hello Mark and friends!
Webhamster Henry: Hi Friends! The perfect is the enemy of the good!
tim: Hey Mark! Hi everyone!
PaulRobeson1924: Hi Hi Hi!
Will thee SG OCNY: Good evening Mark Hurst and all!!!
The Butterman: Evening, Mark. Hi folks
DjLorraine: Hi. Oh, so the bug they claim is an undocumented feature
Hugo (NL): Hello!
Fredericks: This guy still talking about technology?
Marie in Chicago: Hey Mark, hey Everybody.
Ciggy: My nephew had to deal with this Crowdstrike issue for well over a week. The 1st 72 hours were a tremendous strain for him. His company is a Wholesale Food distributor servicing the Tri-state area. Luckily, the refrigerated trucks went out early that Friday morning.
Mark Hurst: ultra, Bas, chresti, Deano, Wendy, Webham, tim, PaulR, WtSG, Butterman, DjL, Hugo, Fredericks, Marie, Ciggy - welcome! Thanks for joining this evening.
Webhamster Henry: hahah I AM legacy code.
dk50b: Greetings Techtonics. How shocking this is my first time hearing about the Google monopolist ruling. I'm at a complete loss to explain the lack of media attention. As usual, there was only room for one story, and it was CrowdStrike.
morphe':
↳ Song: "Mark's intro"
Barbie Gif ...Todd Haynes Film: "SuperStar = The Karen Carpenter Story" is worth a watch...
Jeff Moore:
↳ Song: "Interview with Paula Bialski"
Not stupid questions; more, basic questions.Which are essential for people who aren't already marinating in domain-specific knowledge.
βrian: When you're congested by an early strain of covid, a legacy cold becomes a legacy code.
chresti: Oooh fighting!
Jeff Moore: The way she works is also how I get my best photos of people.
Just be there, embedded, until you cease to be a novelty.
Franco Twinkie:
↳ dk50b @6:14
Suzi Hotrod dropped the bomb on her show a week ago yesterday.Who said WFMU is all about music?
Folsom: I assume the company is Tom Tom?
Mark Hurst:
↳ dk50b @6:14
It's the biggest news in the tech industry in over 20 years - except the media 20 years ago wasn't so dependent on Big Tech for survival...Quinn02:
↳ Mark Hurst @6:17
thank you for introducing me to HamsterdanceWill thee SG OCNY:
↳ Webhamster Henry @6:13
nicenick!: A lot of this is very similar to telco culture. As someone working at a US telco, it’s very much a typical office. Not flush with amenities, very 9-to-5. And I think this middle-tech culture you describe is mainly sourced from telco culture…because tech came from telco.
tim:
↳ Franco Twinkie @6:17
What did Suzy say?Mark Hurst:
↳ Jeff Moore @6:15
Well said, Jeff! I agree - we need more basic fluency in the public about how these things work. (This way, among other reasons, people know when they're being totally exploited or ripped off.)nick!: It spans the globe too. Many of the big telcos have big commonalities in their origins, state-owned or state-affiliated and now privatized, trying to keep up with demand and still innovate
Mark Hurst:
↳ Quinn02 @6:18
Glad you enjoyed it. A classic meme song!Franco Twinkie:
↳ tim @6:19
Just the facts - not an opinion piece.Dean: I'll repeat my recommendation of a title, Robert Britt Horwitz, The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (1991).
DjLorraine: Sturgeon Blue Moon tonight, right?
Dean: I thought the Google decision was well-covered. Here's the opinion:
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c368725101c/43d7c2a0-full.pdf
Franco Twinkie:
↳ DjLorraine @6:22
Right!chresti:
↳ DjLorraine @6:22
Super and Blue Moon!nick!: The "move fast break things" attitude is especially NOT present in telco. Which has requirements much more similar to a utility company in terms of reliability.
βrian: Ooh, I'd love to hear what Paula thinks about "Best Practice," which is an almost meaningless term, especially re refactoring legacy code.
paddy in matawan: I have been testing refactored code for over a week and it has been driving me nuts. Finally finished today!
Will thee SG OCNY: the GPS is also dependent on solar flares, bad trajectories, gps reflections off buildings, mountains, and bodies of water... soo many variables to put you on the right level of the bridge...
(Murakami Whywolf))): Life in a small start-up when things are still going well is, I've found, in fact something of an high. There's nothing like being pushed a little beyond your limits of ability routinely, though it's more survivable if it's not all the time.
There's also a lot of room for craftsperson-ethical decisions, down to 'Will I document this line better even though Iʼm tired and thereʼs a lot to do?', or 'Can I find the best short name for this variable or method so that what Iʼm doing were clear to the next person who has to deal with it (fix it or change it or generalise it)?'.
There's nothing like exercising even a limited mastery and doing the right thing, hour after hour.
Webhamster Henry: Crowdstrike was where the testing system needed testing.
(((Murakami Whywolf):
↳ paddy in matawan @6:23
How much automated unit-testing is in place for it?Webhamster Henry: Ai refactoring and translating to more capable computer languages will help with a lot of these problems.
paddy in matawan: Ha! We have 2 "I'll fix it laters" after tonight's deployment.
(Murakami Whywolf))):
↳ Webhamster Henry @6:26
Not just a joke: I've found defects in automated testing when valid stuff I've written's failed.paddy in matawan:
↳ (((Murakami Whywolf) @6:27
I am a happy (mostly) E2E manual tester. We have some automation and I know the devs talk about unit testing but I am not so familiar.βrian: Unit testing is an interesting idea. So far, that is.
Jeff Moore:
↳ Song: "Interview with Paula Bialski"
In addition to the actual information being shared...I'm very much enjoying listening to and appreciating the subtle facets of accents in Dr. Bialski's speaking voice, which carry all sorts of little flavors which I assume tell the tale of all the places she's spent time in.
Mark Hurst:
↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:26
Good perspective, thanksWebhamster Henry: They tried to make me a manager, and I said "Why? that's not my skill set!"
Jeff Moore:
↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:26
Yes! It's a really compelling ride, one I miss even though it was exhausting.Because it was both exhausting and exhilarating.
morphe':
↳ βrian @6:29
[Gilda Radna voice] What's All This I Hear About Eunuch Testing ????Webhamster Henry: Mamgers love all the stats that come out of the "Agile process"
(((Murakami Whywolf): I once nearly ruined a release by fixing—not in inverted commas, actually fixing—a bug.
…because the bug short-circuited a clean-up routine that resulted, eventually, in the damned thing running out of memory…but in the short-term it prevented another bug from getting reached. The fix exposed the underlying bug and killed one part of the demo.
Mark Hurst:
↳ Webhamster Henry @6:33
The book does go into Agile processes a bit (daily standups etc.)βrian:
↳ Webhamster Henry @6:33
Agile? Oh, I remember the early oughts, too!nick!: Management's flowery language is always so fun to hear. At least where I am, there is a realism and a settling for what's possible. Or good attempts to remove roadblocks and make something happen. Squeezing people for the impossible is limited thankfully.
chresti: In around 2012 someone messed with the location of the Hollywood sign on GPS so that all these visitors were showing up at the tennis courts in Griffith Park asking where the Hollywood sign was and could they walk there, (it's about 3 miles away).
Dean: Huh. I don't hear management genuinely promoting perfection. It's just marketing puffery. Management tends to demand good-enoughness: get it done so that it works in time for the release.
nick!:
↳ Dean @6:35
Yes I agree. It's a lot of hype and then a settling for something reasonable.(Murakami Whywolf))): In my experience the developers strove for perfection and we fought the managers not to make it 'just good enough'. This was both pride on our part—we wanted to 'do it right'—but also because we didn't want to create spaghetti and leave time-bombs in place in the code.
Dean: That comports with my experience on the sideline, @(Murakami Whywolf))).
My career as a developer culminated in 1977, when in high school I wrote a program to calculate the volume of a function revolved around an axis. It wasn't just good enough; it was perfect.
Jeff Moore:
↳ Mark Hurst @6:33
I... must not really understand this "Agile" thing.Because I remember getting the impression that it meant something like "Instead of actually designing something thoroughly and correctly, just throw some shit against the wall and fix it later, you'll learn what you meant to design through that iterative process."
Which is an approach I hate absolutely everything about.
So... I must not actually understand what they mean?
Dean: The perfect, they say is the enemy of the good. I reply, it's also the enemy of the bad.
tim: Thanks for covering for us, Mark! ;)
Dean: The program, by the way, produced a visual depiction, too.
(((Murakami Whywolf): There's nothing like social negotiation between literally aspergic people and managers who remind them of their middle-school bullies. That was a big difference between my small start-ups and medium-sized post–start-ups and the large firm in which I ended my working days—no bros in the former.
Mark Hurst:
↳ Jeff Moore @6:39
I see that as a potential drawback of Agile for sure... my impression of Agile practitioners is that they believe the method has other advantages, if practiced properly...Mark Hurst:
↳ tim @6:39
Thanks, TimWebhamster Henry:
↳ Jeff Moore @6:39
Agile is differently interpreted in every shop, in my experience. Lots and lots of Agile lip-service! I suspect that when it was done with actual post-it notes, it worked a little better.PaulRobeson1924:
↳ Fredericks @6:07
egg and ham Sandwich with a beer, pleasetim: New premium t-shirt: Techtonic - Good Enough Since 2017.
Mark Hurst:
↳ tim @6:42
Heh!nick!: Paula said The C Word! The source of it all Hahaha
Marie in Chicago: I don't think silicon valley really cares about perfection. It's like perfection as PR;it it serves thier purposes to saddle people into working 60-80 hours a week
Dean: You're looking at the wrong outcomes, Mark. Look a the 10-Ks.
This is why "lean" companies are not by virtue of that characteristic beneficial. "Lean" tends to mean fewer workers, more productivity from each remaining worker.
Wild Neil||Peace All: There was a book put out by Air Force Thunderbird pilot talking about perfect execution. The idea of such a thing kinda pissed me off. I dropped out of Cooper Union because I got a C in my 20's. Glad I am not an architect, but my 14 year old needs to learn about good enough ness.
morphe': From Good to Great => there was a period in the NYC Dept of Education [=
2000s???] where there were constant mandatory workshops ="From Good to Great " which could be inspirational yet the workshop leaders were so uninspiring ... we would trundle towards the library mumbling "staff infection..."
chresti: You get what you pay for?
Deano de los Muertos: Good interview, thanks Mark and Paula
Wild Neil||Peace All: I used to spend 8am to midnight 7 days a week at Cooper Union thinking I was accomplishing. I should have listened to the students that said "don't you ever go home??".
Will thee SG OCNY: Thank you Mark and Paula!
Dean: St. Gall is a site of rich musical history and lore. Not "indie" by any stretch, but damn fine melisma.
morphe': Great Vibrant Interview !!!! Intelligence, Wit and Enthusiasm ... amazing blend...
(((Murakami Whywolf):
↳ Jeff Moore @6:39
As far as I understand it, the notion is that believing that you have a perfect design is always illusory, and even if it _were_ perfect you would find-out as you implenented that the requirements, resources, and limitations weren't what you thought ab initio, so you strive to have a reasonably good design and then evolve it from there. For the evolution to work, the selection-mechanism must be right…otherwise you get software with antlers that cost a lot of calories to grow and are heavy enough to hobble it.chresti: Thanks Mark and Paula!
ultradamno: Mandl will evidently have something sleeping bunny related mastodon.social...
tim: Thanks, Paula and Mark! I'm looking forward to reading the book. This conversation gave me a lot to think about.
Webhamster Henry:
↳ (((Murakami Whywolf) @6:50
And there are also people, borderline Dunning Kruger, who know they have the perfect software idea. These people can Peter Princlple themselves into management...tim: I hate to tell you this, guys, but the concept of 'good enough' IS NOT good enough on It's Complicated.
Webhamster Henry: Maybe our tech is aging, but Kraftwerk's COMPUTER WORLD is timeless and as relevant today as ever.
Dean: There are very narrow avenues that permit stepping away from big tech, e.g., deploying and developing technology in libraries. I work with colleagues who are tech-skilled and who understand the demands of providing reliable information, which go way beyond tech. They contribute a huge amount to their operation's work, and they find the work immensely rewarding.
GC in Bmore: Here’s a question to ponder: what if all this aging code was not complicated by the fact that it is owned by domineering surveillance monopolies? Would things be different if there weren’t so many monopolies?
dk50b: The proprietary software we use at work uses mapping software riddled with errors that shows a lack of familiarity with US cities. The company is in Germany. I wonder....
Webhamster Henry: Actually the early code is more stable than the newer, because all that surveillance means lots of vulnerable I/O. freeform.wfmu.org
Jeff Moore:
↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @6:36
Yes.Telling this anecdote is the tech equivalent of the former High School football star re-telling the story of that great play well past late middle age, but...
Once I was working at an outpost of certain Labs largely funded by a telecom monopoly, and our team was doing a port of the X Window System to some different hardware. Several of us were writing code which wrote directly to some addresses controlled by graphics hardware.
Simultaneously, Just For Fun, I was reading drafts of the newfangled ANSI C spec whose details were being hammered out. I came across a section where they said that in the future, under ANSI C, the compiler might be allowed to optimize away instructions writing to places which were never seen to be read from anywhere else in the code; but you could apply a special type specification to pointers the compiler should just damned well use as written. So I put declarations like that where appropriate in my code, set off in #ifdef sections such that they'd only be the active code if a special flag was set which should only be set in a future ANSI C compiler.
And then I forgot about it. And eventually that gig ended, and I moved on to a different job.
And years (5 or 10?) later, a former co-worker from that job reached out to me to say that they had indeed eventually migrated to using an ANSI C compiler; it had become the standard. And the driver code was breaking all over the place.
Except for mine.
He thought I'd enjoy hearing that, and indeed I was most pleased.
morphe':
↳ Song: "Mark's comments"
A not so old John Oliver show said/showed North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) using 7 or 9" Floppy Discs ???Dean: Earlier today, pre-Techtonic, it struck me that we almost never have to deal with having the wrong hammer. Technology is not "just a tool," as some believe. A device that is "just a tool" works almost 100% of the time, perfectly reliably. Software always demands our vigilance, pretty much on a daily basis.
Bas NL: Thanks Mark! Thanks Paula!
Will thee SG OCNY: be well everyone!!!
bleubombersune: Mark excellent discussion Thanks All stay safe and be well
Saltonstall: Has Dave Mandl ever voted a panhandl? Y’know, like Oklahoma or West Virginia?
tim: Thanks, Mark!!!
morphe': Thanks Mark !!!!
Dean: Nobody holds a candle to Dave Mandl.
The Butterman: Thanks Mark. Don’t get coal-rolled!
Deano de los Muertos:
↳ Dean @6:58
Place it on the mantleMark Hurst: Thanks, everyone! Have a good two weeks.
Will thee SG OCNY:
↳ Mark Hurst @7:00
enjoy the week off!shambolic: This show feels very adjacent to Cory Doctrow’s theory of enshitification. Code, platforms, services degrade over time after luring you in and then becoming capital generating machines by being good enough but steadily degrading… in other words, input in, profit out, I guess.
(Murakami Whywolf))):
↳ Jeff Moore @6:56
I didn't have to deal with this, but we had some driver code for an early card used to implement audio-video codecs. It turns-out that the code was designed to create a delay in one thread by doing a gigantic for(){} loop that did _nothing_…and which the optimising compiler we were trying to use to boost efficiency and frame-rates was smart enough to recognise and completely to remove.joe_rosevear:
↳ (Murakami Whywolf))) @7:14
That's a problem, right?joe_rosevear: Hello, and Goodbye to all. Sorry I didn't chime in sooner--I was listening while eating a late lunch.
Great show!