Viewing profile — sam_bristow

A mechanically-minded man reasons that the rules of grammar are fixed by certain, almost mathematical principles. By exploiting this idea, he is able to create a mammoth machine th…

Wait, are these the same GPUs that were diverted from Tesla into xAI a couple of years ago?

The linked page seems to think it does. "As of June 29th 2020, CTA, the CERN Tape Archive, started to be operated as the successor of CASTOR and gradually replaced it."

I think that a large part of Atlassian's problem is their network of extension vendors. Every time you look at a feature request for simple things like "as a user I'd like to see a…

Someone should chuck a clean-up ticket on the backlog.

It's a completely different failure mode, but this reminded me of an infuriating situation I had a while ago with single-use URLs and safe-links functionality in MS Outlook. I can'…

No, but it seems to be par for the course for enterprise software.

Any idea if their internal version has improved dramatically since they stopped maintaining the public version?

What does Facebook use internally these days. I'm amazed that the state of review tools is still at or behind what we had a decade ago for the most part.

I believe that once the OpenBSD team started cleaning up some of the other gross coding style stuff as part of their fork into LibreSSL that even fairly simplistic static analysis …

I'll give you most of those criticisms, but I'm a little surprised you think our tax system is overly complicated. For the vast majority of people it's pretty much just a progressi…

Assuming your discomfort is around the defense side of things here's an example of a diving reberather system using Spark/Ada from a while back. https://youtu.be/zL9vVs5vHuQ?si=-th…

One of my the papers I share around a lot is "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2002)"[1]. I like it because it's not purely about software so the ex…

I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-ba…

2025 had a bunch of bits of fun mathematical trivia: 45² = 45 x 45 = 2025 Also, 9² x 5² = 2025 40² + 20² + 5² = 2025 My favourite? 1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³ = 2025

I imagine pink is considered too close to red tail lights.

Honestly, if I was writing some code that depended on dicts being ordered I think I'd still use OrderedDict in modern Python. I gives the reader more information that I'm doing som…

One key point that people overlook with that paper is that they were applying the coding standards retroactively . Taking an existing codebase, running compliance tools, and trying…

Back in my undergrad days I built a similar clip out of a broken clothes peg, hot glue, and some 2.54mm headers. It worked well.

I think the web itself would be stronger if it was served in pure HTML and not 95% created by JS SPAs.

Stoke Space[1] uses a similar system, letting people write arbitrary code to generate a static configuration for their launch vehicle. It means you get all the power of something l…

I've only had a cursory look at Varlink, but it almost felt too simple. In particular the lack of unsigned or sized integers. This might enf up being be fine, but it gave me pause …

I found Hillel Wayne's series of articles about the relationship between software and other engineering disciplines from a few years fairly insightful [1]. It's not _exactly_ the s…