simontatham

simontatham, 2 hours ago

@fanf 'entitlement' suggests that your code needs to be a member of the nobility to make this work.

But that can't be right – surely that's for peer-to-peer networking.

simontatham, 7 hours ago

@mjd 'develop' always strikes me as a bit vague, perhaps intentionally so. It doesn't say whether you're writing a whole new program, or making major changes to one, or just tinkering round the edges. It doesn't even really promise that you're making it better – only that you're changing it over time.

In that respect it reminds me of 'treat' in medicine, which also seems like a word calculated to vaguely suggest 'doing something about it' while carefully not promising any specific result.

simontatham, 6 hours ago

@mjd well, in fantasy fiction and videogames, doctor-analogues are often called 'healers'. That's definitely a word at the 'promising a result' end of the scale!

simontatham, 5 hours ago

@unspeaker ah, I was wondering about saying that, but thought it might just be my own bias. Yes, I also see 'programmer' as having a connotation of writing whole programs from scratch.

I also feel as if that's becoming a specialism these days, because there's so much work needing to be done on big existing code bases. You can have a career without writing anything new. (Of decent size, I mean; not counting 100-line utility scripts and the like.)

Hence the use of other words, I suppose!

simontatham, 3 days ago

@a thank you, that's not one I'd seen before.

I'd normally use binomial heaps for that merging application (on the rare occasion that I need it at all). Those also have O(log n) worst-case time for a merge. I can't work out in 30 seconds which structure is better, though!

simontatham, 3 days ago

@a I have to confess that despite being a huge data-structures nerd in most other respects, I've never quite managed to get my head round how a Fibonacci heap works. I understand what useful properties it has, and why that makes it a good fit for e.g. Dijkstra's algorithm, but how it works just never quite comes together in my brain.

simontatham, 4 days ago

@christianp depending on your needs, I actually wonder if something sold as a computer monitor might be a good answer! If you can live with all its inputs being HDMI, then a monitor could handle those just as well as an official telly, and wouldn't want Internet.

It wouldn't directly receive broadcast TV signals, of course, so you'd need a secondary bodge for that (maybe via an HDHomeRun).

At least some monitors come with remote controls, and some have OK speakers (like my last Philips).

simontatham, 5 days ago

@OscarCunningham I'm pretty sure you can transform the hats' HTPF metatile system into a form where each higher-order metatile exactly covers a set of metatiles of the next order down. (Use the 'converged' metatile shapes; use a non-overlapping version of the expansion rules; do some horrible limiting thing that fractalises all the metatile edges.)

But then you still have four different fractally-shaped metatiles, and no way to decompose those into individual hats that are all congruent.

simontatham, 4 days ago

@OscarCunningham in fact, here's the paper I vaguely remembered seeing but couldn't put my hands on yesterday, which does pretty much what I said. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05639, diagrams on pages 7 and 8.

simontatham, 5 days ago

@bignose unfortunately, when you're constrained to talk to an Exchange mail server because that's where your email is delivered to, Outlook is still the least bad option I've found as a client. Using any other client via IMAP adds an extra layer of 'impedance mismatch' which outweighs whatever usability advantages the other client would normally have given you.

(And let's not even talk about the mess third-party clients make of Exchange calendaring.)

simontatham, 5 days ago

@dwm I admit I haven't tried Evolution in the last decade. I found it very flaky about 15 years ago, but probably it's had some fixes since then.

But part of the problem is that any IMAP client talking to Exchange seems to see a confusing lack of data consistency, with emails randomly appearing and disappearing.

I'd almost rather use the fetchmail approach – download each message once, and thereafter work locally. But then you can only use your local client. Pros and cons.

simontatham, 5 days ago

@demoographics that sounds actually interesting, at least for the part where it reads your Outlook calendar and gets the information into a locally usable form. What was your technique for that?

With that part solved, I could use a solution of my choice for the most important thing, namely reminding me when I have a meeting. Then I wouldn't mind opening a browser for all other calendar operations, which are much rarer.

simontatham, 7 days ago

@pozorvlak @mjd yes, I see no reason this couldn't be a real human autodidact with a ~10% baked idea, wanting at least some reassurance that they're talking to someone who won't burst out laughing before they go to the effort of typing up their thoughts. I've had similar communications, before generative AI was a thing.

(Is that an OSS thing particularly? I thought it was good sense whenever there's a long round trip time. E.g. intracorporate email between time zones has the same property.)

simontatham, 11 days ago

@fanf that link automatically redirects to the same thing but with https as the scheme, which seems sensible. I wonder if your retro-links in particular would benefit from an automated check for that?

simontatham, 12 days ago

@jugglerchris a couple of weeks ago I saw a totally fearless fox sitting on a grass verge on the same side of the street I was walking down. It let me stride past within 2m without twitching a muscle.

Big contrast to the ones I often encounter when walking late at night, which see me at the far end of a long alley, go 'yikes, a human!' and hastily nip through a hole in a fence.

This one was also enormous, and had an especially fluffy white beard, which made me regret not having a camera on me.

simontatham, 16 days ago

@fanf interesting that that post doesn't mention the other way in which sudo is a bad userv, namely the far less controlled amount of user context it passes in to root. I guess you had enough complaints already!

If I had a user I didn't trust with full root and I needed to let them invoke one root service, I'd never do it by giving them access to 'sudo only this one thing', because it's too likely there'd be a way past the 'only' clause.

simontatham, 16 days ago

@fanf (though, that said, I do sometimes configure sudo to let me do a few things without a password, but only in accounts where with a password it lets me do any rootly thing I like. I don't really think of that as a security measure – if a serious attacker gets as far as that user account then I've surely already lost. It's more a balance between convenience for common commands, and the 'make you think twice' safety-catch of the password.)

simontatham, 18 days ago

@fanf @dpiponi also spigot doesn't match any of the rest of that description! Exact real calculator, yes; but it doesn't come in library form¹, mostly doesn't work² by retrying calculations from scratch in higher and higher precision, and certainly doesn't do anything resembling transactional memory.

¹ unless you count the not-quite-published Python wrapper module

² a few number-generating classes do redo from start, but it's always a last-ditch fallback when I couldn't think of a better way

simontatham, 19 days ago

@claudius and in his spare time, he played bridge, but just couldn't get the hang of the bidding phase.