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owenfromcanada

@ owenfromcanada @lemmy.ca

Posts
2
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407
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Removed Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I have two types of servers I join: 1) small servers with friends where we voice chat while gaming, and 2) organizations where discord is their primary media method (e.g., Harbour Masters). It works great for both of those things.

  • Microsoft Teams is getting a controversial location tracking feature that users may hate

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  • Two reasons:

    1. The feature likely won't work as well as you might think. What happens when you leave for 10 minutes to get some lunch, and that's when your boss's boss checks your location and it says you're working from home or something. And now you get written up because you're supposed to be in the office three days per week. I get this is a specific and convoluted example, but stuff like this happens--a feature is released, and management is too stubborn to take things with a grain of salt (or they otherwise won't consider the limitations).
    2. You're assuming they're only using your location data to update your in/out status. Neither MS nor your employer will ever be content to only use limited information when they have access to more. And while it would be somewhat limited if it were only on work devices, understand that a lot of employers expect people to install this shit on their personal devices (I was the only holdout in my department who wouldn't/couldn't install MS authenticator on my phone, it was a whole thing).

  • Did I mess up?

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  • Your friend is gay and he's not okay with it.

  • Acceptable Use Pawlicy [TrueNuff]

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  • Employees who fail our phishing test will have anchovies thrown at them

  • People born in the 1900s, what was life like back then?

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  • People were a lot less emotionally literate or aware of mental health issues. Autism and ADHD went undiagnosed if you were able to compensate half decently (you were just treated like you were being difficult on purpose). And kids were more brutal to each other.

    The music was on point, though. I still enjoy me some Goldfinger.

  • Multi-color FDM recommendations

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  • I've only had one exposure with a multi-head printer, and it was incredibly messy. No matter what settings I used, there ended up being drips from the unused nozzle.

    My most recent printer is an Anycubic Kobra Max 3, and I'd take the wasted filament over the sloppy prints any day. It's a bed slinger, so maybe not what you had in mind, but they do make one with an enclosure.

  • The electronics/logic behind "while(1)" and "for(;;)

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  • Assemblers can come from the CPU manufacturer, but they can also come from a third party. They're most often bundled into the compiler, since it's rare to need to compile without also assembling (many compilers skip the assembly step and convert directly to machine code). There's actually a third tool involved I didn't mention, which is a Linker (takes pieces of machine code and combines them together, so you can separate your software into different parts).

    Some CPUs are more niche, and the assemblers/compilers for them sometimes are created by the manufacturer. But there are a few "standard" processor architectures that many CPUs follow, and because they're common between many brands of CPU (and the architectures are published and well known), the compilers are often created by third parties. And there are some compilers (like gcc) that can compile to dozens of different architectures.

    As an example, you might have heard terms like x86, x86_64, armv7, or RISC-V -- these are all processor "architectures", which means that any processor that meets a particular architecture can run machine code built for that architecture. Currently, x86/64 architectures are common among desktops and most laptops (Intel and AMD processors), while ARM architectures are common for tablets and phones and some laptops (Snapdragon processors, for example).

  • The electronics/logic behind "while(1)" and "for(;;)

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  • It might be helpful to understand the connection between hardware and software better. There are various ways we can create something that a machine can interpret that have evolved over time. We group these into "generations."

    Generation 1: writing machine code directly. Either using things like punch cards, or typing in the 1s and 0s directly (more likely hex code, but close enough). This is difficult and error prone, because it's hard for us to make sense of it. So we came up with...

    Generation 2: human-readable machine instructions (aka assembly). We write code in something that's easier for us to understand, but it's still explicit instructions to the processor. Then we use a software tool (an assembler) to convert that to machine code. Assembly is still specific to the processor and requires knowledge of exactly what registers are available and such. And then we thought: what if we could write software in a generic way that could work on any processor? So we came up with...

    Generation 3: procedural code. With this, we create a new language that is independent of any processor, which means we're not giving direct instructions anymore. Instead, we specify a general procedure, and that generic code is passed through a new tool (a compiler) which converts the generic code to processor-specific instructions. When people say "I'm a programmer" they usually mean Gen 3 programming.

    There are additional generations, but this should help provide a background as to why a language like C exists and how it relates to the actual hardware.

    A statement like while (1) might not seem terribly elegant, but that's because it probably wasn't anticipated to be a common use case when the language was created. A normal while loop would likely be converted into something like a jnz (jump if not zero) instruction, checking the result of the argument, but any modern compiler would likely convert while(1) to a simple jmp (jump, no conditions) instruction.

    I understand your fascination with the point where software and hardware meet. I did my undergrad in electrical engineering, and there was one class where we used a simulator to take transistors (the simplest eletrical "switches"), build logic gates from the transistors, then build processor components like registers and a math processor from the logic gates, then finally a simple calculator out of those components. Super cool.

  • Canada losing top talent as workers head to the U.S.

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  • As a Canadian who recently moved back to Canada from the US, I'm gonna throw my anecdotal evidence around and say this is horseshit. Even my tax person has said she's never seen so many returning Canadians in her decades of work.

  • What is the best email server you use?

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  • I use Proton, but I use their other services as well (drive, vpn) so it's worth it for me.

  • Embrace it

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  • Me, a programmer who indexes from zero: 🫤

  • ‘The party has sailed its ship’: ex-Republican runs as Democrat for Georgia governor’s seat

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  • consider what the off-ramp for Republican leaders should look like in the waning days of the Trump era

    It should look like retiring from politics. Y'all sunk your party, stay away from the others.

  • Can a transgender woman be a lesbian?

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  • Otherwise it's just sparkling homosexuality

  • What questions do interviewers need to stop asking during a job interview?

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  • I think OP is frustrated with the we're-both-bullshitting-each-other-and-we-both-know-it thing. Even if a candidate doesn't think they're a good fit, they're not going to come out and say it. And if the candidate asks a question about work culture at the company, the interviewer is going to give the best possible answer, even though it's probably bullshit. So we all have to lie through our teeth and say things like "it's always been my dream to work here" (even though I didn't know the company existed a month ago) even though we all know what's really going on.

    Being able to be honest--really, truly honest, about more than just pay expectations--is a privilege that you only get when you're at a senior level (and sometimes not even then).

  • Don't ask them to help you with Garry's Mod

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  • ICANN is Accepting Suggestions for new TLDs (for $227k) - what would you pick?

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    • .hell
    • .nope
    • .bruh
    • .con (to be used exclusively for scams)
    • .duck
    • .dot

  • Microsoft has an ambitious plan to win users back, and go toe-to-toe with Valve's SteamOS for gaming — but I'm not getting my hopes up

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  • My only hope with this is that MS doesn't have a complete hold on the gaming market anymore. Valve has to hold some serious sway at this point, and MS doing that might backfire on them.

  • Need some pointers for hardware

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  • I don't know if it would give you as much hard drive space as you want, but I got an Odroid HC4 a while ago and it's been great. One of the very few SBCs with two SATA slots ready to go.

  • Do you know any songs about trains?

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  • The AI-designed car is taking shape

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  • "Software-defined vehicles" is an industry trend. Not specific to AI (the term has been around for a decade or so). It means vehicles that are defined more by their software than by the hardware (which is how people have historically seen vehicles).

    As an example, consider your phone. They have hardware specs, but it's often the software that defines the product more than the specs.