@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
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That critically important web site you use once a year that requires you to reset your password every 6 months.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

Oh and probably time to remind everyone how I had a password rejected because it contained my username. My username was 'r'.

robpike, to random
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One of the lovely (sarcasm) little details about UTF-8 is that the original paper first appeared in the Usenix conference proceedings without the appendix that defined the encoding. The appendix was just the Plan 9 man page for UTF, but it was important to the presentation yet was dropped during the publication process - and not by us.

I've still never seen the paper appear with its appendix. It probably doesn't matter now, but it sure irked us at the time.

robpike, to random
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For us it's one of those days with flaky DNS.

secretgeek, to random
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We’re at a point where software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@secretgeek We've been at (or beyond) that point for decades.

robpike, to random
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That feeling when the tool you bought ages ago just in case is, today, exactly the thing to fix the chair that broke when Aunt Millie sat in it.

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Sunday paper was delivered to my door this morning (I’m not a print subscriber). Spread myself out on the couch with it and a coffee for an hour just now. I’d forgotten just how much I enjoy and am rejuvenated by that simple weekend ritual.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@mattblaze Let me edit that for you.

Internet: Be less happy.

MarieVC, to generativeAI
@MarieVC@social.coop avatar

"Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret" @Katecrawford

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x

robpike,
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@MarieVC @Katecrawford What if Generative AI just went away, poof, gone? That would solve this problem completely. I like that solution.

robpike, to random
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Sign (ha) your newish building did not have the best tech installed.

robpike, to random
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Can someone here explain why heatpumps are the new hotness? (Sorry.) Despite the hype, all I can discern is that they are just air conditioners that can pump in the other direction ("reverse cycle"), and the thermodynamics is poorly explained in the popular literature. Why are they suddenly the thing that can save the world? What am I missing?

My degree is in physics. I can handle the truth.

Thank you.

robpike,
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Thanks to all for this instructive and fascinating thread. I have a much better understanding now.

robpike, to random
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

Wrote this up for a friend, thought I should share it more widely.

Fritz Zwicky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Zwicky was a notoriously difficult teacher and his assignments were brutal. We're in the 1930s or 1940s.

The students (Caltech) complain to the other physics professors, and they hatch a plan. The following year, the other profs create a fake student and the profs work on the assignments. The fake student does really well, but he never comes to class. Zwicky really wants to meet him but...

robpike,
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Just before the final, Zwicky discovers the truth and is furious. For the final exam, after all the students (real ones) have sat down, he takes a quarter out of his pocket and spins it on the table. Once it comes to rest a minute or so later, he says, "analyze the motion" and leaves the room.

(There is a legendary two-volume German book, called (in German) The Top I think, on this problem.)

robpike,
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@dr2chase Do tell.

robpike, to random
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

Informative mail message of the day, as it appeared:

History_of_Geology, to random German
@History_of_Geology@mstdn.social avatar

“I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful…”

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West 🪨📷

image/jpeg

robpike,
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@History_of_Geology There were greys involved too, very well chosen greys.

dabeaz, to random
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Thought: I'd bet a lot of projects would have fewer dependencies if pip was 100x slower. Maybe we should try to do that.

robpike,
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@dabeaz Also if people wrote more code they can understand (and maintain and fix) and borrowed less that they can't. The standard security rebuttal to that argument is failing in practice.

robpike,
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@rhempel @dabeaz Borrowing code from a well-maintained, trusted library is one thing. But if you look at almost any significant open source project you will see hundreds, even thousands of dependencies in the fully realized import tree, dependencies that are never checked, updates that are never verified as safe. Essentially no one maintains their dependency tree as they should, because it is infeasible to do so. We have built a machine that cannot be fixed.

https://deps.dev/npm/kubernetes-client/9.0.0/dependencies/graph

robpike,
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@rhempel @dabeaz And that's a relatively simple one from package that may be well maintained, I don't know. But there are plenty of examples of bigger dependency trees that are not.

And even here, if updates are done well, the workload would be horrendous.

The problem of maintaining dependency trees is easy when the tree is small, but they are never small, people just run "update" and see if their tests pass, and often get away with it. But not always.

robpike,
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@dabeaz @robpike @rhempel Yes. Hence the Go proverb, “A little copying is better than a little dependency.”

robpike, to random
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You're trying something new and difficult with some program or other, and you watch a very helpful YouTube video explaining it all, only to find the video is 6 months old, the UI has changed unrecognizably since, and you still have no idea what's going on.

Thanks, endless useful churn that promotes product managers.

robpike,
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The word "useful" was meant ironically there. How many times does someone ask for some feature because it will be "useful". My reply: If it's not useful, you wouldn't ask for it. That's a given. Instead, explain why it's worth the effort, the churn, the documentation updates, the debugging costs, the maintenance costs, the user learning time, none of which you will bear?

RuthMalan, to random
@RuthMalan@mastodon.social avatar

“Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. [..] Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.“ ../

robpike,
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@RuthMalan I've used that story in my software engineering classes to help explain the difference between a technician (programmer) and an engineer. Steinmetz was a hell of an engineer. And a hell of a human, but that's another story. A forgotten celebrity, once about as well known as Tesla or Einstein, both of whom he knew.

robpike, to random
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

An appeal to my many distant but helpful friends. I have a film scanner that I have not used for a year or so but certainly have used many times and has always worked fine, until today.

This is a new problem. Much has changed since I last used it. The scanner driver is x86 only, and only works on old OSes, so I am using a MacBook Pro x86 running MacOS 10.14.6.

I have no control over this.
...

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

Profuse thanks to all how helped me get a grip on this. There were a lot of helpful answers in there that really helped, but I just couldn't bring myself to install yet another program. So I went back to basics and wrote some code.

robpike,
@robpike@hachyderm.io avatar

@timbray So am I. 😆

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