@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 random
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

Hey, #perl devs. Do you use DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader? Do you also use Perl::Tidy? You can get disappointed if Perl::Tidy reformats the dbic files, so drop this in your .perltidyrc to stop that:

Ignore DBIC-generated content

--format-skipping-begin='#(<<<| DO NOT MODIFY THE FIRST PART OF THIS FILE)'
--format-skipping-end='#(>>>| DO NOT MODIFY THIS OR ANYTHING ABOVE!)'

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

"Visionaries at NASA identified a futuristic new energy source (space billionaire egos) and found a way to tap it on a fixed-cost basis"— ouch!

The Lunacy of Artemis (Idle Words), or why the Artemis moon program is incoherent, badly designed bollocks that will probably kill astronauts.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@cstross OK, I'm going to retract my previous comment. While I generally like idlewords, I think he missed the mark here (somewhat).

In reality, much of the mess of the Artemis program is due to Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. He forced NASA to use outdated technology because it brought the pork to Alabama.

In fairness, the program was started before commercial launch seemed viable, but after it was clear there were alternatives, Shelby said "no."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/so-long-richard-shelby-and-thanks-for-all-the-pork/

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@glitzersachen @cstross I'm not so sure about that. Look at the proposal for reaching Mars they created after Bush Sr. asked them to go to Mars.

The program seemed designed to please everyone in NASA and NASA thought they could get Congress to cough up half a trillion dollars (over 20-30 years). The proposal was laughed out of Congress.

NASA's excellency is because everything, politically, must work the FIRST time. That forces costs to explode instead of rockets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Initiative

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@glitzersachen @cstross OK, that reply was too brief and doesn't even do this topic justice. Let's just say that NASA is in a political grinder (grindr?) where they have to please everyone if they want funding and SpaceX's agile, vertically integrated approach to rockets is better suited for developing technology while minimizing costs.

However, it absolutely does not fit political needs because it doesn't spread jobs across the US (like Blue Origin is trying).

Still too brief 🤨

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@glitzersachen @cstross

There's a point that many are completely unaware of: NASA is part of the executive branch of the US government. They are legally obliged to execute the will of the President. Even if they don't like that will, they're are bound by it.

The head of NASA is always a political appointee and they have to follow the line or get replaced by someone who will.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@hittitezombie @glitzersachen @cstross They had slightly less than a decade to get someone on the moon and the country was (more or less) supportive of the program.

There's an argument that Kennedy's assassination meant a country in mourning supported his legacy. Couple that with "better dead than red" cold-war paranoia and the US was prepared to tolerate quite a bit.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@hittitezombie @glitzersachen @cstross What's that about the Viking biology tests? To this day, we still don't have a good way to test for life (assembly theory might help here, but not everyone agrees). I'll give 'em a pass on the Viking missions because it was one of the first times we could try science like this, so we didn't know what to look for.

That being said, I'd love to hear a difference of opinion.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@cstross @hittitezombie @glitzersachen I assume you've read idlewords post on that topic. https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@glitzersachen @cstross I'm not sure, but I say that without having done a deep dive on Nelson, Bridenstine, Bolden, and others.

I have the vague opinion that the post is offered as a sincecure for someone at the end of their career, but I have ZERO confidence that I'm right (I suspect I'm dead wrong, but I don't know). However, if it's anything close to the truth, would they be either:

  1. Less worried about their career?
  2. Less able to understand the role?
ovid, to Lisp
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

, , and are three powerful programming languages that share a common feature.

Nobody knows how the hell to capitalize them.

ovid,
@ovid@fosstodon.org avatar

@tripleo I always have to look up the capitalization of Smalltalk because I get it wrong every time.

Hmm ... #JavaScript should be in that list.

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!

#AI #ChatGPT #LLM #Claude #Gemini #AIAdoption #GenAI

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 , but 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

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