Posts

dcoderlt, 11 months ago to random

In 1968/69, two Conferences on the nascent topic of Software Engineering were held in Western Europe, organized by the NATO Science Committee.

These conferences produced, among other things, my favourite longform shitpost of the 20th century. You might also know it as Tom Simpson’s “Masterpiece Engineering”.

As I continued walking round the garden, now looking a little closer at the ground, I came across the bones of a group, still in session, attempting to write down the criteria for the design of the "Mona Lisa". The sight reminded me strangely of our group working on the criteria for the design of an operating system. Apparently the Conference decided that it should establish an Institute to work in more detail on production problems in the masterpiece field. So they went out into the streets of Rome and solicited a few chariot drivers, gladiators and others and put them through a five week (half-day) masterpiece creation course; then they were all put into a large room and asked to begin creating.
They soon realized that they weren't getting much efficiency out of the Institute, so they set about equipping the masterpiece workers with some more efficient tools to help them create masterpieces. They invented power-driven chisels, automatic paint tube squeezers and so on but all this merely produced a loud outcry from the educators: "All these techniques will give the painters sloppy characteristics", they said. Production was still not reaching satisfactory levels so they extended the range of masterpiece support techniques with some further steps. One idea was to take a single canvas and pass it rapidly from painter to painter. While one was applying the brush the others had time to think.
The next natural step to take was, of course, to double the number of painters but before taking it they adopted a most interesting device. They decided to carry out some proper measurement of productivity. Two weeks at the Institute were spent in counting the number of brush strokes per day produced by one group of painters, and this criterion was then promptly applied in assessing the value to the enterprise of the rest. If a painter failed to turn in his twenty brush strokes per day he was clearly under-productive. Regrettably none of these advances in knowledge seemed to have any real impact on masterpiece production and so, at length, the group decided that the basic difficulty was clearly a management problem.

dcoderlt, 1 year ago to goodomens

#GoodOmens

dcoderlt, 10 months ago to twitter

actually, #Twitter was the scientist, Elon is the name of the monster

dcoderlt, 5 days ago to random

Oh right, today is Tiananmen Denial Day. Remember to report those dipshits, even if they are “only asking questions”.

dcoderlt, 19 days ago to random

Give Microsoft a break. Who could have predicted that “Clippy knows which porn videos you watched yesterday” wouldn’t be very popular.

dcoderlt, 1 month ago to Windows11

#Windows11

dcoderlt, 1 month ago to llm

Petition to preface all #LLM output with:
“The stories and information generated by this tool are probabilistic works of word salad and input bias. Only a techbro would take anything produced here as fact.”

dcoderlt, 1 month ago to php

Unpopular #php opinion:

Writing HTML through template engines like Twig is like writing C through preprocessor macros. It has its place, but it should not be glamorous or default.

“So my daughter tells me you write HTML by hand, like I used to”
“Yes, I write plugins that contain Twig templates that extend Twig templates in the theme we use, that extend Twig templates in the platform’s base package”
“You have exactly 10 {{ ‘second’|plural(10) }} to get the fuck out of my house”

dcoderlt, 2 months ago to random

You just know that somebody started replaying Aria of Sorrow today.

#Castlevania

dcoderlt, 2 months ago to random

I’m very disappointed in you, nerds. A vulnerability in a tool called xz has been in the news for a week, and I have not seen a single xzibit shitpost.

dcoderlt, 2 months ago to random

Given all the #Boeing fuckups coming to light, I’m going to re-read Allan McDonald’s memoir of the Challenger disaster. You know, just to remind myself what competent oversight feels like.

dcoderlt, 3 months ago to random

Where’s the “Not now, not ever, don’t show me this noise ever again” option? 🤬

I don’t particularly care if you collect data about 25 test orders in this development environment, but since you’re being such a knob, I’m going to decline on principle.

dcoderlt, 4 months ago to random

#NowPlaying

Lzzy Hale - Dear Daughter

https://youtu.be/DQAHx1-fMug

#MusicWomenWednesday

dcoderlt, 4 months ago to Symfony

“I’m sure #Shopware had good reasons to implement $feature this way, I’ll see the light eventually”, I reassure myself while trying to adapt its 65th aspect to my requirements.

It’s not often that I find a framework that makes me want to go back to Magento 1, so congrats on finding a unique selling point, I guess.

dcoderlt, 4 months ago to random

#NowPlaying

Monday morning pick-me-up: Liliac
(Yup, Liliac again)

https://youtu.be/olR_V-nzoZw