@ovid@fosstodon.org
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

ovid

@ovid@fosstodon.org

Well-known software developer. American living in France.

I have a poetic license to kill.

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ovid, to music
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

"Bread" is a 1930 silent Ukrainian film banned in the USSR by Soviet censors.

It was rediscovered in the 70s and recently, my friend Luke Corradine, an award-winning composer, composed music for it.

This film was premiered in February at the Alborada Classica Music Festival in Granada, by whom it was commissioned. The piano at the premier was played by famed Australian pianist, Duncan Gifford.

I'm sure the Russians still don't approve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGeHKUS8WBk&ab_channel=LukeCorradine

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

If any gurus want to take a look at a small bug in some code I wrote, I'd appreciate it. https://github.com/Ovid/unset-vars/issues/1

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

#Copilot just wrote the following #Perl code for me, complete with the comment, which is correct.

my $UNINIT = bless => {}, 'Uninitialized::Vars::Variable';
sub uninit () { $UNINIT }
sub is_uninit ($var) { $var == $UNINIT } # XXX: This is wrong

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Surely I can't be the only person whose first reaction to seeing a company is named "Hugging Face" is to wonder if they sell Alien xenomorphs bloodily bursting out of human abdominal cavities as a service?

I mean, what were the founders THINKING?!?
https://mastodon.social/@verge/112450968041276837

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@cstross I've heard they did it because they thought "hugging" sounded friendly and human. They're a French company, so I guesss this was a case of not having heard the "facehugger" reference.

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Exploring Facebook and found an old Texas honky-tonk down the street from where I used to live when I was a boy, decades ago.

There are photos of the place, along with a number of regulars who are tagged. Wouldn't it be interesting if I memorized all of their faces? I could show up and start greeting them by name.

That being said, it's in the heart of Texas. I'd be shot.

ovid, to ai
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

My "Intro to AI talk" that I gave at the German Perl/Raku Workshop is now online.

Let me know what you think!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZxE05sFQEA&ab_channel=GermanPerlWorkshop-gpw

ovid, to javascript
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

I started programming in 1982. Though I'm known as a developer, I tried to remember every other languages I've programmed in.

, #C, 6809 Assembler, , VBScript (and its many variants), , , , , , , Easytrieve, and probably a few others.

I wish I had gotten a job in Prolog, primarily because I loved what I could create with it. I don't love programming; I love creating.

What are you languages?

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

This is not a software glitch, it's the Y1C problem: old mainframes were so storage-constrained that they only allocated two decimal digits for passenger age, and adding another digit would mean rewriting software that in some cases has been in use and constantly patched since the late 1950s.
https://press.coop/@BBCNews/112345996328670433

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@cstross As an ex-COBOL programmer who was knee-deep in the Y2K mess, one of the issues is that many of those old COBOL programs were compiled, but the source code was lost.

In some cases, corporations were worried COBOL vendors would disappear, so they created incompatible, in-house COBOL compilers, making the mess even worse!

Naturally, there were no tests to verify that the software functioned correctly ...

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@DanielEriksson @cstross

My favorite bit? In 2000, I was trying to fix a COBOL program which included the comment "Converted from punch cards in 1968." I was born in '67, so I'm sure it was written before I was born, yet it was mission-critical software for that company.

I was in my 30s at the time, which would have made me one of the older devs in many companies, but for COBOL I was the youngest. They were confused when I complained about the use of GOTO for all flow control ...

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@jackwilliambell @DanielEriksson @cstross The paucity of features in COBOL coupled with JCL are part of why it's so powerful! You'd write a simply COBOL project, save the data, the next step in the JCL would use that data, and so on.

I've always found it fascinating that it was so powerful because it could do less. Definitely a lesson that's been lost.

isotopp, to random German
@isotopp@chaos.social avatar

MySQL folks take a lot of things for granted that are not present in this form in Postgres, and that may be a bad surprise when you try out "the other system".

MySQL for example has a stable and upwards- and slightly-downwards-compatible on-disk format, mostly. Oracle sometimes forgets how important that is and makes changes, or unannounced changes, and then needs to be corrected, hard, by their development partners and testers.

But in general the following things are true:

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@isotopp I definitely prefer PostgreSQL to #MySQL, but #PostgreSQL deciding that collation derives from your system's locale settings when PostgreSQL installed means identical setups on different boxes can behave differently. This is NOT FUN to debug.

I've heard that there was discussion to change this, but I don't know if it happened.

ovid, to ChatGPT
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Waiting for the Hollywood movie where a 1950s computer programmer mysteriously connects a teletype to ChatGPT, but doesn't realize it's not human

"I'm sorry, but I have no knowledge of events after December 2023.".

ovid, to python
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Someone on Reddit was asking if there is any way of detecting something in an exoplanet atmosphere which would have no other explanation than life. I'm pretty happy with my answer.

You might be surprised that it even includes code.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Astrobiology/comments/1caudbn/can_telescopes_actually_find_biosignatures/l0vzq3e/

Alice, (edited ) to random
@Alice@beige.party avatar

How good can Harriet be if EVERYONE knows she's a spy?

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@Alice @amiserabilist People hate me for this, but as someone who used to be less embarrassed to say "Asperger's" instead of "autistic," I speak up when I see the term.

Pre WWII, Asperger belonged to organizations with strong Pan-German and anti-Semitic leanings,. He referred to his patients as "autistic psychopaths," helped legitimize "racial hygience," and clearly collaborated with Nazis in Vienna.

We should normalize the term "autism."

Fuck Nazis.

https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6

ovid, to linux
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

BitMover's closed-source product, BitKeeper, was used for source control for the kernel. Larry McVoy, CEO of BitMover, was upset because someone tried to figure out how the BitKeeper worked and he pulled the BitKeeper licenses from Linux developers.

Needing distributed source control, Linus Torvalds created in a couple of months.

BitMover is gone and BitKeeper is now open-source, gathering dust, in a git repository.

https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper

ovid, to opensource
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Just stumbled across an old interview with my on the @changelog. I think it stands the test of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcZcfDOP8QU&ab_channel=Changelog

ovid, to Software
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

I love stumbling across great comments in code. Today's example found in client code:

"If [condition X] occurs, this will result in an infinite recursion loop until the heat death of the universe, possibly taking down a server just before that."

ovid, to random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Social media today:

  1. Make a strong, controversial opinion for everyone to read
  2. Have someone disagree, stating that evidence is needed
  3. Have the original, well-meaning poster turn get furious and attack you for asking for evidence

They're blocked, but damn it, why is asking for evidence bad? Why is having divergent opinions bad?

(No need to comment. I'm just venting, which I probably shouldn't)

dgar, to random
@dgar@aus.social avatar

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@dgar This needs to be liked if for no other reason than that first hashtag 😜🍄

ovid, to linux
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

I keep telling myself that I will never break down and add the following to my .bash_aliases file

alias mdkir=mkdir

But it's so, so tempting.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@isotopp Nope. Just fat fingers. I haven't touched MS-DOS in decades.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@luap Close, but what you really want is:

alias emacs=vim

Makes pair programming so much more fun!

:wq

#emacs #vim

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@luap @l13u7anant

Reminds me of years ago when a new developer (switching from C++ to ) joined a team I was on. We asked him if he preferred or . He replied, "nano."

He didn't last long.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@holgerschurig @luap @l13u7anant Though I recall a time at the BBC where they concluded an unmaintainable Perl monolith was too slow and spent years rewriting it in C++. They not only created a new, unmaintainable monolith, but it was also too slow. Turns out no one profiled the original software to find out the real reasons it was slow.

ovid, to writing
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Hey, , a while ago I wrote a somewhat complex short story that I'm proud of, but would love feedback on. "The Names We Never Say."

https://ovid.github.io/blog/short-story-names.html

What works, what doesn't? I've received some very helpful feedback from a writing circle, but would love to reach outside voices.

For a more accessible story, here's some fantasy flash fiction: https://ovid.github.io/blog/flash-fiction-charlatans.html

Please boost for visibility ❤️

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