Peter Amstutz @tetron@octodon.social

Republicans: mass shootings are not about guns, it's a mental health problem

Also Republicans: we're cutting mental health treatment

Also also Republicans: mental health history shouldn't be held against you if you want to buy a gun

RIP AIM

Not that I ever cared for it much, but back in college the dorm hallways would echo with the bleep and bloop of messages sent and received.

Just goes to show that you can have a technology with 100s of millions of users and have it all turn to sand in just a few years.

Fuck man, the glory days of DOS are now as far behind us now as the glory days of the PDP-11 were when I first started programming.

MOV 0013h, AX
INT 10h

OH: all your wikipedia edits will be from Docker Dildo Man #gigascience #ismb

The awesome and also baffling thing about mastodon is that people on the other side of the world are fav/booting my toot before I even manage to reload the page. Do toots travel back in time so the fediverse got them a few seconds before I hit send? Its like a Philip K Dick novel.

I think a lot of computing can be summed up as "we tried the elegant thing but it was too slow, so we made it more complex / compromised the design, and now it's fast and ugly instead"
@natecull

Is the Republican Senate "health care" bill really called BRCA? As in, the gene mutation most associated with breast cancer?

Not only I get thr usual LinkedIn email, and email from recruiters finding me through LinkedIn, now I get email from LinkedIn itself trying to recruit me. What's next, are they going to show up at my house?

Watching a Syfy original movie. Best part so far is that the particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory apparently looks exactly like a water treatment plant.

Programming in the small ("hacking") and #programming in the large ("software engineering") are so different that people end up talking past each other. Shortcuts that work for a 1,000 line program may be disastrous for a 10,000 line program, while other techniques that seem like annoying boilerplate for a 10,000 line program might be absolutely essential to manage complexity at 100,000 lines.

Simplicity in #programming tends to mean two contradictory things. Sometimes it means "can accomplish a goal using simple parts". On the other hand, it might mean "complex parts that make it simple to accomplish a goal". Consider CSS. It gets a lot of well deserved hate for being complex, but actually, setting a few CSS properties is a lot simpler than writing a "simple" layout in code!

Simplicity in #programming is overrated. The lisp curse is that things made of elegant small pieces are no more likely to be elegant in the large, when the complexity of the problem overwhelms simplicity of expression. Complex languages (eg C++) are that way for a reason. Having a bigger toolbox makes it more likely there is a feature that addresses your particular problem.

Spent yesterday trying to get a web app based on Angular 4 up and running. Not normally a front end guy so this involved fighting the node/npm/yarn ecosystem. It's really fragile! Currently resisting the urge to create a build & packaging system based on http://commonwl.org and show people how it is done.

Their current level of skill in SMB is they are still figuring out jumping and tend to just run into first goomba over and over and over again. Zelda is a bit more forgiving, Link is easier to move. They've managed to kill some octoroks but not quiet made the trek to the 1st dungeon (requires surviving 5 screens).

Been trying to get my kids, ages 4 and 5, into classic NES games. We call them "the sword game" (The Legend of Zelda) and "the jumping game" (Super Mario Brothers)

The term "political bombshell" starts to lose its punch when applied to the fourth scandal in five days.