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From novice to master, and back again (2013)

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Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#111

Post by robocat »

hinkley wrote: post #28
hcks wrote: post #17

This reminds me of an old joke I heard a while back, which is that the opposite of "it's like riding a bike" is "it's like the UNIX command line". No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.

I get a little offended by people who think stackoverflow is a character flaw. I go there because it will tell me things like if you get the arguments to ‘dd’ wrong you’ll zero out the drive you were trying to back up. That the function breaks if you pass in null for the second parameter. Or that it simply doesn’t work properly.

I used the if= and of= command line parameters last time I used dd: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#113

Post by agumonkey »

nu11ptr wrote: post #106

I can't even tell you how often this happens to me. People come to me because I wrote something and I then tell them: "Let me go read the manual" (because I can't remember what I did a month later, so I'm always consulting my own docs). I always tell people: "You think I wrote this manual for you, but I'm not that altruistic. I wrote it for future me." To be fair, not exactly the same thing. I typically remember I wr…

this kind of job is very memory constrained

you get into a task, you cram stuff in as you go, you finish it, and then you dump everything go onto another task.

i find my most valuable skill is to slow the pace to ensure retention of information

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#114

Post by eurasiantiger »

ealexhudson wrote: post #79
eurasiantiger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…

Is 1 indicative of current flowing? Or not flowing? Is that consistent with a given chip, let alone an entire system? Is it always DC current, or can it be AC? In fact, is the 1 represented by current, voltage, and/or frequency? There's lots of different answers here in different contexts. The reason 1s and 0s are good is because they represent the information in the digital domain, not the implementation in the anal…

Indeed. Those are implementation details and arbitrary conventions. :)

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#115

Post by eurasiantiger »

feoren wrote: post #90
eurasiantiger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…

You contradict yourself here. > (A) Modern computers run on electricity [not ones and zeroes] > (B) one could build a computer out almost anything that lends itself to both being on and off You got it right in B, which is exactly the point when people say computers are just 1s and 0s. Computers are a mathematical concept, not just some electrical device, as you seem to claim in A. The fact that you can build a comput…

Cut me some slack, I was referring to our beloved contemporary devices when I was saying modern computers in A, so the comparison is a bit apples and oranges.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#117

Post by eurasiantiger »

falcor84 wrote: post #73
eurasiantiger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…

> 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science Long before standing for true or false, 1 and 0 have stood for the presence or absence of something arbitrary, so I don't see any issue here.

Just 1s and 0s don’t really do anything useful before we agree on some conventions, such as

- byte and word size,

- endianness,

- semantics of what means what in a string of bits (think Two’s Complement, IEEE 754, ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Shift-JIS, Unicode),

- what it means to do certain operations on bits (Boolean algebra),

- how different binary operations can be constructed from transistors / logic gates (ALU design),

- how information can be retained in and recalled from memory (basically just flip-flops),

- how said memory is laid out with respect to internal/external devices and program regions (conventions!)

- how said memory can be addressed, and how information can be transferred between CPU and memory (bus architectures),

- how the computer architecture can be programmed to do things (processor instruction sets),

- and whatever I forgot just now…

And then some people design and build trinary computers, imagine that.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#118

Post by bluedino »

hinkley wrote: post #84

I write this shit down so I don’t have to remember it, thanks. Back in the age of modems, when PPP was still the new hotness, I was proud of myself for memorizing the IP addresses for a few of the services I used regularly. Two or three times I got to punk my friends when the DNS servers got messed up, and they’re sitting with me in the computer lab wondering what else we could do to pass the time when they looked ov…

Looked like a hero when I set DNS to 4.2.2.2 or whatever when AT&T or Charter would have an outage.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#119

Post by jwilk »

sneak wrote: post #37
nerdponx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where exactly does that message come from? Su itself, PAM, some other library?

I think it's from sudo, not su.

Indeed:

https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/SUDO_1_9_9/plugins...

But this particular message was removed in sudo 1.9.10:

https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/6aa320c96a376136

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#120

Post by lolive »

agumonkey wrote: post #113
nu11ptr wrote: post #106

I can't even tell you how often this happens to me. People come to me because I wrote something and I then tell them: "Let me go read the manual" (because I can't remember what I did a month later, so I'm always consulting my own docs). I always tell people: "You think I wrote this manual for you, but I'm not that altruistic. I wrote it for future me." To be fair, not exactly the same thing. I typically remember I wr…

this kind of job is very memory constrained you get into a task, you cram stuff in as you go, you finish it, and then you dump everything go onto another task. i find my most valuable skill is to slow the pace to ensure retention of information

Still less efficient than dumping your piece of knowledge insomzthing like a second brain, aka personal knowledge management. The tricky part is whether to write down everything and make your notes too long to read/follow, or summarise things with the risk of forgetting an important piece of info [why you should do this or that, what you should NOT do, what additional piece of knowledge is required, etc]. The art of taking smart notes is really fascinating.
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