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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

    It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

    Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

    Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

    That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

    I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.










  • Five minutes of googling says some folks thing stone mason. Some copy and paste response says unskilled tradesman. Other response says translation is just “learned” so maybe they could read.

    I’d never heard of this before so seeing that there is disagreement is a fun new thing for me. Especially interesting to see this “learned” response.

    I spent a few minutes looking to see if a name I trust said any of this. Ultimately I don’t have the background to evaluate it and lots of folks spend their lives about historical Jesus. I didn’t see anything from anyone I recognized but, like I said, I don’t know much about this area.



  • We squash. I’m not really interesting in your local journey to land the change. It’s sometimes useful during review, but after that it’s mostly the state of the main branch I care about. It’s what I need to bisect anyway.

    I don’t like commits that are just references to issues. Copy the issue into the commit message so git blame tells you something useful. Unless it’s just closing a simple big. Then the title and issue reference are plenty.

    Depends on the project I imagine.



  • I think the last new instruction the JVM added was invokedynamic like 10 years ago. I believe they did it so lambdas could be called efficiently. Polymorphic incline cache and stuff.

    But the JVM has grown more complex in other ways. The way to force simd instructions is pretty wild, for example.

    I don’t know enough to call it a mess or not. It works though.





  • I used to work for them. It was weird and wonderful and I miss it and I don’t. Lots of mission driven folks working hard to keep things going getting very little respect. But a lot of respect. But sometimes none.

    Iirc a lot of their budget is spent doing charity stuff. Encouraging contributions for tiny languages. Trying not to cave to Russia or the US or France. Trying to make it less of a boys club. Trying to get local organizations going.

    I remember once they sent an email that said “if the French government asks you to delete this page please just delete it. It’s not worth going to jail. Someone outside of France will revert the delete.”

    I wasn’t qualified for the work. No one was. But it was honest work.