Viewing profile — opinali

ChatGPT is a pure conversational model, while Google can integrate this into a vast knowledge model to work with actual facts. (Just speculation; Googler, but no inside info on thi…

Maintained an in house Java ORM for years, instead of moving to Hibernate like everyone else. Good for me learning lots of cool techniques, bad for company but it was their idea/pl…

I was a late Spectrum dev, as a Brazilian geek several years behind the international market due to draconian restrictions on computer imports at the time (also, dad not rich enoug…

Thanks! Replying a bit here since that post is from 2015. One can write anecdotal examples that are biased both ways. But let's talk about a single issue, the IX/IY registers. The …

I'm not sure about this simple comparison of 6502 vs. Z80. Sure the Z80 instructions had higher latencies in clocks, but it also had more registers so you could write the same code…

MSX was a hit in Brazil largely because of our closed market at the time, where importing computers was always very expensive and often illegal. A computer had to be a "national" p…

The mental part is easy, if you can do that: close your eyes and focus on the background white noise that exists inside your head, until it becomes a clearly audible buzz that osci…

Virtually all big science/tech projects from early 20th century were state sponsored, so it was difficult for SF writers to imagine a future where important innovation might come f…

What do you mean? No sellers got stiffed by this cancellation, if this happens it's Google that foots the bill (minus its own share).

Support for Javascript? (53-bit mantissa limit)

Old times of hardware designed both for safer Assembly coding, and support for simple OS & compilers thanks to low-level safety... like Obi-Wan would say, "an elegant weapon for a …

We also accidentally dropped two nukes in Japan, and accidentally made Napalm and Agent Orange rain into the Vietnamese, with enormously high and vastly-civilian casualties in both…

And we used to think x86 was a bad design of native code.

I wish we'd crack down on this kind of abuse, but it's an arms race, and at some point hard to distinguish objectively. There's no solution without some parental responsibility... …

Freemium is almost always a scam, remarkably for games where it degenerates into "pay-to-win". As a parent of two young tablet users, I'll happily pay a decent price for any game t…

Mandatory link if you don't know this: https://www.youtube.com/user/smalin/

You didn't understand what I meant by "discipline". I didn't mean best-practices -- i.e. programmers learning to not abuse openness without any help from the language. What I meant…

I usually love James Hague's posts, but this one has his head buried deep in the sand. And he's enough of a veteran to remember early Lisp and Smalltalk systems, where excessive op…

The worst part will be when they force us to translate all search's source code and internal docs to French. :)

Yep, cities may have regulations for that, and they usually do these days. And I don't necessarily agree with your preference. My family used to own a large, historical house that …

Banksy's quote is quite ironic, coming from a guy that's well known as a master of publicizing his own work... even more, doing that by creating/exposing his work in "public space"…

Don't worry about that single time you've been (mis)contacted, recruiters are really a hit-and-miss even at Google. Your best shot is being referred by a Googler. You claim to have…

Yeah, like http://www.codehaus.org/ is living forever? ;-)

YouTube never allowed porn. Notice that "adult content" here means explicit sex, not things like artistic nudity that will continue to be allowed with an interstitial.

"the industrial revolution devised machines which, whilst increasing the efficiency of production, helped to increase the efficiency by which states and key individuals were able t…