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26 years ago Linus Torvalds sent out this message to the comp.os.minx newsgroup.
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
- Linus
PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
Fast forward to today and Linux has more than 12 000 contributors from over 1300 companies that contribute to the Linux kernel.
The Linux Foundation released a fairly detailed progress report, including an infographic which I was tempted to include here but you can view it in it’s original context here.
While you’re over there, remember you can be a sponsor of the Linux Foundation too.
Happy Birthday Linux and a giant thanks to not only Linus but every single one of the contributors that have taken part of it over the years.5 -
Manager: You devs are constantly complaining about context switching, if you were on my level you would be able to multitask and switch from task to task without an— hold on I’m getting a text *tap* *tap* *tap tap* *tap* *send noise*
Manager: Right, what were we talking about again?
Dev: …15 -
Remember Apple's initiative to scan photos on user's devices to find child pornography?
Today I finally decided to research this.
The evidence is conflicting.
For context, the database of prohibited material is called CSAM (child sexual abuse material).
“If it finds any CSAM, it will report the user to law enforcement.”
— Futurism
“Apple said neither feature would compromise the security of private communications or notify police.”
— NPR
CSAM initiative is dead. It won't scan photos in iCloud. It won't scan photos on your device. It will be a feature that only works in some countries, only on children's devices, and it will be opt-in. It will only work for iMessage attachments.
This is what Apple actually said at https://www.apple.com/child-safety:
- “Features available in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, UK, and U.S.”
- “The Messages app includes tools to warn children when receiving or sending photos that contain nudity. These features are not enabled by default. If parents opt in, these warnings will be turned on for the child accounts in their Family Sharing plan.”
News outlets telling people they will be automatically reported to authorities, and then telling there can be false-positives is a classic example of fearmongering. I hate this. Remember, anger and fear are the most marketable emotions. They make you click. News are and will always be worded to cause these emotions — it brings in money.
When presented with good news, people think they're not being told the truth. When presented with bad news, even when they're made up, people think it's the truth that's being hidden from them. This is how news works.
Now, a HUGE but:
Apple is a multi-billion dollar corporation. There is no such thing as good billionaires. Corporations will always wait for chances to invade privacy. It's like boiling the frog — one tiny measure here, one there, and just like this, step by step, they will eliminate the privacy completely. It's in their interest to have all the data about you. It brings control.
This is not the first time Apple tries to do shit like this, and it definitely won't be the last. You have to keep an eye on your privacy. If you want your privacy in the digital age, it's necessary to fight back. If you live in Europe, take the action and vote for initiatives that oppose corporate tyranny and privacy invasions.
Privacy on the internet is one thing, but scanning people's devices is a whole another thing. This is unacceptable no matter the rationale behind it. Expect more measures like that in the near future.
Research Linux. Find a distro that suits you. The notion that you can't switch because of apps/UI/etc. may be dictated by our brain's tendency to conserve energy and avoid the change.
Take a look at mobile distros like Graphene OS and LineageOS. The former only supports Pixel devices, the latter supports a wide range of devices including OnePlus and Xiaomi. They'll have FAR better privacy than iPhones.
Consider switching. It's easier than you think. Yes, it's me who's saying this. I do and will always protect people/companies from unjust criticism, and I consider myself an Apple fangirl for personal reasons related to my childhood, yet I won't fight blindly. CSAM initiative is a valid criticism, and there's nothing preventing me from saying this is unacceptable, and Apple deserves the backlash they got.11 -
Project manager:
"Ah, we have so many projects. We want to finish all at once. Can you work 1 hour on each project every day?"
Not doing that, gtfo.12 -
PM : "I will not tolerate this."
Me : "I don't like it either inside callbacks."
Fellow dev sitting next to me : *facepalm*6 -
Rant:
I am at work, some one says to me this system we are working on is multi threaded. I tell the no its not multi threaded and in this context. Things cannot happen concurrently. Its a single core arm 7tdmi. Arguments ensue abot the difference between multithread multitasking an multiprocessing. I proceed to explain this is a multitasking interrupt driven system. With no context switching or memory segmentation so one heap for all tasks cause thats how we have it configured and there is only one core. So there is no way the error he just described could possibly happen. Then he tells me im wrong but refuses to even look at the processor manual and rejects the Wikipedia entry for multithreading. So I plan on calling off so i can just have the next two weeks off while he trys to figure out why two things ar happening at once on this system. He deserves all the frustration that is to follow.1 -
My best skill is problem is:
*** problem solving ***
Really, at least in all the teams I've been working until now, I'm always surprised by myself. How fast I am in spotting the problem root and find or suggest a solution. Even on things I have almost no knowledge.
My worst skill is:
*** problem solving ***
Being so effective make me everybody's slave.
Everybody always rely on me for any kind of weird shit. If I try to "outsource" the problem, after one day it will bounce back on me and I solve it in no time.
So I've no time for anything else that solving other people's problems.
Constant interruptions and context switching.
And worst, my bosses don't understand why I don't finish my tasks. And I cannot blame my team.8 -
Ability to handle context switching (jumping between tasks and interruptions) like it didn't even happen.2
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Rant.
It's really frustrating and confusing when switching the context from Java to js and vice versa.4 -
Being a full stack developer has been an amazing journey. Looking at a project and understanding how the entire stack work starting from the mobile apps, APIs and DB is a total bless.
Nevertheless, lately switching context between modern languages has been extremely frustrating.
Swift looks like kotlin, elixir looks like ruby. Hell even swift and ruby are very similar.
Writing ruby in Xcode and wondering why the fuck Xcode complaining. Well no shit, swift is not ruby. Took me 5 mins of head scratching to notice it 😢
Hell I am now writing down the latest language I am working with on my hand to keep track 😂
5 -
From perfectly working scrum team to... Don't know what it is now...
Long story short - our SM left company and our team have ongoing "reorganization", our tester leaving at the end of this month, probably we will be out of tester for next month...
I don't mean reorganization, it's normal thing, but... It looks like it's slowly collapsing under bad head decisions (one of them is the reason why our tester is leaving)... Multiple "side" projects / tasks for ppl in team and problems with delivering sprint tasks on time because of it, context switching etc.
I fucking like this project, it gives me much opportunities to learn new things and design new features - it's up to us how we will implement it. Client is satisfied with our work and we worked for their trust for long time. But if things will be going same way as now, we will probably lose it.
How do you think, is it worth to try stay with this project? Or should I update CV just in case?6 -
Worst: having to deal with "senior" unity devs who bullied me out of the company I was working in and who believe people should make ~200 lines of code functions cause "context switching is heavy on performances"
Best: i have started to automate a lot of stuff and to auto-generate definitions (e.g. keys for i18n) and can't really stop doing it anymore ☺️
Extra: stopping to care about the language and focussing a lot on approaches is also a thing I consider good about this year... Last time I was concerned with learning go, now i am more like: "how do I make this hot reload" or "how can I auto-generate routing if the configuration is default?" -
Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).
The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.
I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.
First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).
Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.
I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.
Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?1 -
So due to some necessary repairs on my Nokia 6.1 i had to use an iPhone for the last 2 weeks (was the device they gave me for the duration of the repair). And let me say something in advance: I own a Macbook Pro, i own an iPad Pro, both devices are excellent for what i use them for. I enjoy OS X, i enjoy iOS on the tablet. But oh boy is the iPhone a shitshow of a magnitude i have never seen.
First off: The notifications. They feel like Android 4 or something. No customization, no grouping, not context. Also the swipe down gesture simply blocks whatever i am doing.
Multitasking: What a shitshow. There is no continuity, apps reload on a whim, no switching between apps (except that strange thing where the app shows up on the left upper screen, but i can't go back from there?)
Settings: WHY ARE APPS SETTINGS IN THE GLOBAL SETTINGS!! And not even all settings are. They are all over the place. And the settings are so convoluted and bloated, i can't find half of the things i am looking for.
Clock & Alarm: Goddamn that design choice with the edit button infuriates me to no end. Why can't i click an alarm and simply edit it? Also: Why do i have to enter the clock app to even see which alarm is going off next?
The Appdrawer: WHY CAN'T I SORT MY APPS BY NAME?? I have to conciously remember where i put things. Apps i use rarely, apps i use often.
God, iOS on the phone is so fucking terrible.4 -
Heres some research into a new LLM architecture I recently built and have had actual success with.
The idea is simple, you do the standard thing of generating random vectors for your dictionary of tokens, we'll call these numbers your 'weights'. Then, for whatever sentence you want to use as input, you generate a context embedding by looking up those tokens, and putting them into a list.
Next, you do the same for the output you want to map to, lets call it the decoder embedding.
You then loop, and generate a 'noise embedding', for each vector or individual token in the context embedding, you then subtract that token's noise value from that token's embedding value or specific weight.
You find the weight index in the weight dictionary (one entry per word or token in your token dictionary) thats closest to this embedding. You use a version of cuckoo hashing where similar values are stored near each other, and the canonical weight values are actually the key of each key:value pair in your token dictionary. When doing this you align all random numbered keys in the dictionary (a uniform sample from 0 to 1), and look at hamming distance between the context embedding+noise embedding (called the encoder embedding) versus the canonical keys, with each digit from left to right being penalized by some factor f (because numbers further left are larger magnitudes), and then penalize or reward based on the numeric closeness of any given individual digit of the encoder embedding at the same index of any given weight i.
You then substitute the canonical weight in place of this encoder embedding, look up that weights index in my earliest version, and then use that index to lookup the word|token in the token dictionary and compare it to the word at the current index of the training output to match against.
Of course by switching to the hash version the lookup is significantly faster, but I digress.
That introduces a problem.
If each input token matches one output token how do we get variable length outputs, how do we do n-to-m mappings of input and output?
One of the things I explored was using pseudo-markovian processes, where theres one node, A, with two links to itself, B, and C.
B is a transition matrix, and A holds its own state. At any given timestep, A may use either the default transition matrix (training data encoder embeddings) with B, or it may generate new ones, using C and a context window of A's prior states.
C can be used to modify A, or it can be used to as a noise embedding to modify B.
A can take on the state of both A and C or A and B. In fact we do both, and measure which is closest to the correct output during training.
What this *doesn't* do is give us variable length encodings or decodings.
So I thought a while and said, if we're using noise embeddings, why can't we use multiple?
And if we're doing multiple, what if we used a middle layer, lets call it the 'key', and took its mean
over *many* training examples, and used it to map from the variance of an input (query) to the variance and mean of
a training or inference output (value).
But how does that tell us when to stop or continue generating tokens for the output?
Posted on pastebin if you want to read the whole thing (DR wouldn't post for some reason).
In any case I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or if I was off in left field, so I went and built the damn thing, the autoencoder part, wasn't even sure I could, but I did, and it just works. I'm still scratching my head.
https://pastebin.com/xAHRhmfH33 -
Rant time. Oh boi.
So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.
All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.
They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.
Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.
Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.
And I want to fucking explode
I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.
I hang up.
It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?
IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.
YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.
Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.6 -
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/7767049
OOF
It's been a full month. Today's my last with Debian.
Funnily enough, I was so looking forward to switching off from Ubuntu, but I'm almost sad switching away from Debian.
Which is kinda weird for me, before that I kinda assumed they'd be the same thing, and "If you see one you see all the rest"
Apparently I was wrong. I thought Ubuntu being "Debian based" basically just means "Debian with extra steps"
But holy fuck was Debian just more stable and less annoying.
Tomorrow: Elementary OS. Have a few friends who are Apple fans, and use Macbook with macOS as their main system, so I wanna try elementary to see if it's worth suggesting in case they ever get tired from Apple.1 -
How to relax when you need to do so much context switching, many meetings and then your own work?
My breaks are not enough for recharging me.4 -
To add a bit more context to my last rant.
The following situation happened today and similar situations are at the moment common as fuck.
Situation started roughly 1 1/2 months ago as a deployment failed.
Seemed to be a DNS problem for the devs, so my basic assumption was that they checked their shit.
As I was and I am currently more than swamped, told them it had to wait if it is an DNS issue...
Well.
Backstabbing product manager complained to upper management as it took so long.
Backstabbing manager even went so far to propose alternative solutions - think of switching product to work around issue and throwing away a year of development of a 5 man team...
So additional to my work I had to deescalate and prevent complete nonsense.
Today I finally found time for the problem.
After 2-3 hours of turning every stone inside the DNS setup, cloudflare, loadbalancers, etc...
Well. Devs. Don't trust them.
Turned out the devs misconfigured the environment entirely.
Its not so obvious in this product as it is rather complicated, though the devs documentation explicitly mentioned that if one overrides the configuration for e.g. several languages, one has to make sure to set two env variables for TLS mode...
There was only one set.
:(
8 fucking weeks of backstabbing and blaming others while they could have just read their own fucking documentation and fixed that shit in 5 minutes.2 -
Installed iOS 12 beta 1.
OBVIOUSLY it’s buggy, but as an early adopter I’m fine with that.
I’m loving the hugely enhanced privacy measures and the “screen time” feature which really breaks down your device usage into tangible data bites. It’s depressing to me when I see how often I pickup my phone, how often I’m on it, how many notifications an hour I get etc.
I’m really going to take advantage of these new tools to extremely minimise my phone usage. -
Do you have that one person you work with that you just can't stand for whatever reason?
I've been having a tough time with this one project at work and been falling behind because we hired a junior dev and 2 inexperienced freelancers. So to help me out my boss let me use his office for the day to avoid all of the noise.
I had been under the impression lately that I didn't like my job due to the constant context switching and being isolated for the day was a really nice refresher.
Then the project manager starts harassing me at 430pm saying the client is now expecting something deployed in the morning with no warning or requirements. Way to set client expectations.
That one moment made me realize that the context switching wasn't what I disliked about my work. It's that one person. They're so bad at what they do that it makes my job so much harder. -
Whenever I go out for a walk now, I get a monologue in my head about everything wrong with my team... But using managerial terms like man-month, velocity, chaotic, context switching costs, lack of processes and standards, need for more slack, too much low value busy work, technical debt, scope creep, (violation of) the two-pizza rule... by a lot7
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A demon process is running inside me,
whenever I hear your name it's triggers an interrupt to brain,
Causing my brain to stop working and perform a context switching to think about you...
My memories are encrypted by your memories as like wanna cry...
And it demands to always think about you as a ransom...
I tried songs as a patch, But
I found that you memory encryption can't be fixed with any patches...
My heart is not strong as Linux ,
It's so week like Microsoft...
So please don't inject more bugs as my system can't sustain that...
I hope you will also get some disturbance like segmentation fault as you are trying to access my memories.. -
Educate them about context switching and how bad it is for productivity. Also deliver high quality work, at the end you’ll earn their trust and it makes for a much better work environment.
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