Viewing profile — tonysdg

I'd suggest Cory Doctorow's "ensh*ttification" might encompass the sentiment you're looking for: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

For example, I have subscriptions to several news sites that I consider invaluable -- LWN and the LA Times, to name a few. At one point, I considered my IEEE and ACM subscriptions …

I'm guessing this deployed on a secondary computer, not on any flight-critical computers; no way it would have passed airworthiness otherwise (even in a demo). As a result, the wor…

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. A small-ish exchange, run by a small number of developer-employees, with limited computing assets. I can easi…

Replace strncpy and strcpy altogether with calls to snprintf. It takes a fixed buffer size, terminates correctly with the null character, and safely does everything strncpy does an…

I'd add that The C Programming Language should be seen as a tutorial (albeit an older one that no longer is fully up-to-date in best practices, in my experience) that can serve as …

A quick word of warning: be sure to treat C and C++ as two completely separate languages that just happen to have similar syntax. Yes, you can use C++ as "C with classes" (I and ma…

Uh, are you thinking mean? Median is lining up every salary, counting to N/2, and selecting the number you happen to fall on.

Is there a reason no one has built a Cygwin-like environment for iOS yet? As in, is it because (1) it's time-consuming, (2) it's tricky, or (3) Apple won't allow it on their App St…

I know that Allen Sherman did a version of that joke in his "Ode to Fat People" :-)

Fairly certain at least some of those debts can get passed on to your estate and/or children.

IIRC, the idea is to help the (dependents of the) Kurt Cobains of the world: artists who die young and still have loved ones who can now depend on the revenue from the copyrighted …

I've got an interest in obscure programming languages; recently Ada caught my eye due to its origins in the U.S. D.o.D. Does anyone know of any good resources for learning Ada?

Presumably (and I'm partially speculating here, since it's not my expertise) because all of the neurotransmitters, hormones, etc. pay heed to the same laws of thermodynamics that e…

Paper to print my resume out. Got my first job!

> So the question here has to be whether the creator of the machine acted reasonably in designing the machine as they did. I'm wary of this line of reasoning. No programmer outside…

Not even close. Chess is a relatively easy target for AI: the rules are well-defined, all of the pieces are visible to both players, and while the state space is massive, it's a tr…

A fun article about PostgreSQL and fsync(): "PostgreSQL's fsync() surprise" https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/

> abuses of sex I think that's where the breakdown is occurring here: this is ultimately a values-based judgment. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I think both side…

Scrubs?

Possibly this? https://www.wired.com/story/google-wants-to-kill-the-url/

It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility. I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems t…

I always enjoyed, "Need to generate a pseudo-random key sequence quickly? Open up vim and ask a friend to close it for you."

On the flip side, however, I imagine it's a lot harder to convince some entity -- an individual, an insurer, a government -- to pay $1 million once vs. $100,000/year for 10 (or mor…

Popcorn Linux is a thing, and it's a multi-kernel OS too: http://popcornlinux.org (I would know, I've been working on it for a few years).