@robpike@hachyderm.io
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

robpike

@robpike@hachyderm.io

Long career as a dilettante at Bell Labs Research and Google, mostly building weird stuff no one uses, but occasionally getting it right, such as with UTF-8 and Go.

Also: tootfinder

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robpike, to random
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

There was a gag a while back that the perfect caption to a New Yorker cartoon is almost always, "Christ, what an asshole!". https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/bob-mankoff/your-universal-captions

Here's an upgrade: It's now my automatic response when I see any article about a tech bro and his timeless work.

Christ, what an asshole!

robpike, to random
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It is a fascinating field of study for me. Why some staggeringly complex tasks can be done at 120fps but it still takes me 30 seconds to render the login page at my bank.

https://mastodon.social/@ZevEisenberg/112435500743889014

robpike,
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@twasink It's 30 seconds with an ad blocker.

robpike, to random
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From https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf, a sobering (for me at least) view of the computing industry and what it means for the future until 2027. AI tops it but where is the money supposed to come from? Also blockchain? Fintech is probably real but that's its own kind of depressing given what banking is like in the web world. Well at least software developers squeak in at .

Good news: they project slightly fewer lawyers.

Note: this is a list of most important jobs, not just computing jobs.

StephanieMoore, to random
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I hate the Wordles for which there a many variations around just one letter position. Crashed and burned today because I hadn’t guessed that one right letter in time. Truly just a guessing game.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@StephanieMoore You are not alone.

robpike, to random
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So happy I am no longer an Adobe customer.

https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/112379014175497807

robpike, to random
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Looking for ideas. Apple offered me $500 for my old laptop, but when I sent it in they say, "Oh, a scratch. We'll give you $100." There's no way a perfectly functioning and upgraded M1 MacBook Air is worth only $100. So I got it back.

Now I'm looking for a good home for it. I don't want money, I want it to have a good life. Two conditions:

  1. It has to help make the world a better place.
  2. I'm not shipping it, so the transfer has to be local to Sydney.
robpike,
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@Lyle Thanks, this looks like a great option.

robpike,
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@servusdei In Australia Apple uses an outside company to do their recycling, although I haven't tested the in-store theory.

robpike,
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@gabriel Happy story, good idea.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@czakka @todd

Assuming you meant this sincerely, I will answer. Three reasons.

  1. I want to have fewer machines.
  2. I don't need or want an assistant, automated or otherwise.
  3. I engage with ML as little as possible.

You may feel differently.

robpike, to random
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

A nice talk by my ex-colleagues Eve Martin-Jones and Josie Anugerah about the misperceptions many have about dependency resolution. It's not nearly as simple a problem as the tool builders would have you believe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-niBbN-ufYo&list=PLbzoR-pLrL6p2qBhq7OHXDzCTfIZuzCma&index=9

ElleGray, to random
@ElleGray@mstdn.social avatar

every one of these flowers is currently performing a shakespearean death soliloquy

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@ElleGray That's the way a still life is supposed to look.

robpike, to random
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This is a great book. Do yourself a favor.

https://fediscience.org/@helenczerski/112342597541008010

robpike, to random
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"Use 5.08cm of tape for 454g of weight." Seems oddly specific until we rewrite into imperial units: 2 inches of tape for 1 pound of weight.

Anyway.

Unkindly I am reminded of the Sun brochure advertising a keyboard or mouse or some such that, renormalizing for simplicity, weighed "1 pound or 2.2 kilograms".

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@ids1024 @ericsuh Also that's the wrong value for a number of reasons.

amoroso, to books
@amoroso@fosstodon.org avatar

My copy of the book "UNIX" published in 1985, i.e. the Italian edition of "The UNIX Programming Environment" by Brian Kernighan and @robpike The English edition of this classic was first published 40 years ago in 1984.

Whenever possible I got the original English editions of computing books as the quality of Italian translations was usually low. This book is an exception and is pretty good.

robpike,
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@amoroso Did you know it was actually the second Italian translation? The first was so bad we complained and the publisher pulled it.

robpike, to random
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I had the incredible privilege of working/studying in the cosmic ray lab run by Ed Stone, chief scientist on Voyager. The campus used the auditorium to show images coming from the spacecraft as they arrived. Also classrooms with TVs. An expert was there to provide commentary. I remember Larry Soderblom being asked what to make of the first pic of Amalthea: "I have no idea."

What a machine. Incomparable.

https://mastodon.social/@dabeaz/112317859542802282

danderson, to random
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Turns out, I can still enter a fugue state and rant about BGP, I just need a prompt that starts with "can terrible thing X happen? Where would the packets go?"

It is impossible to know and a sin to ask

robpike,
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@danderson Terrible thing X has happened. It's called X, for simplicity.

mwichary, to random
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What would you consider as the most recognizable bitmap fonts in tech history?

I’m imagining stuff like:

  • the arcade/Atari font
  • Chicago (Mac, then iPod)
  • VCR/video equipment fonts
  • Minecraft font
  • IBM PC fonts (MDA, VGA, stuff like that)
  • perhaps System font from Windows 3.x
  • Commodore 64, just because of the sheer popularity of the machine

What am I missing?

image/png
image/png
image/png

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@mwichary The earliest I saw was the (Navy sourced?) Bodoni vector font, which we digitized at U of Toronto for nroff on the Versatec and later resurfaced in the falsely attributed "Berkeley typesetting software". That font, or possibly someone else's digitization of it, appeared on countless graphs in science papers all through the '80s and early '90s. It was only 100dpi but was free and available.

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Saw Civil War today. It was a well executed gut punch that I'm still processing. So while I can't really talk about the plot or the acting or the directing yet, I'll focus instead on the cameras and lenses used by the two photojournalist characters, all of which I've personally used and have opinions about.

Short thread.

robpike,
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@mattblaze I actually read "Summicron M" and thought, "huh". Couldn't catch the focal length, though.

robpike,
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@mattblaze Well, there are a lot of Summicron M 35 models through history with different markings.

robpike,
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@mattblaze Lots of 28s too, but I suspect you're right.

mattblaze, to random
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I enjoy almost everything about photography except sensor cleaning, which I do not enjoy even one little bit.

And before you tell me to use film, I enjoy keeping dust out of film holders even less.

robpike, (edited )
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@mattblaze I used to be terrified too, until I did it a few times and realized how easy it can be. Eyelead stuff is great, but honestly for large sensors it's dead easy to just drag an e-wipe across the surface, gently, once.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@mattblaze Well there's another option. Just on Sunday, while I was standing at the counter while someone did an inventory check, a tourist walked in with a DSLR and asked if he could borrow a blower to get a huge chunk of dust off the sensor. An employee said, "I'll give the sensor a cleaning for you." "For free?" "Of course."

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