The apparent leap in the capabilities of large language models has been made possible because venture capitalists have been persuaded, by earnest but misguided entrepreneurs like Sam Altman, that given enough resources such models would eventually be developed into generalized artificial intelligence. In other words, with enough money, OpenAI will build you a machine that is capable of doing the same cognitive tasks as your human employees but doesn’t need a 401k or health care and will work a 168 hour week without complaint without a paycheck.

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I was chatting with Dan Lorenc from Chainguard (who I adore as a company) on Twitter about the trevails of patching open source software last week, and immediately thought of many stories-from-the-trenches I’ve accumulated during the past 25 years or so of working at Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, MA.

We are heavy users of open source software and in many situations will use our own builds of stuff rather than distro packages. While this obviously creates some extra overhead, it means that we have a lot of in-house expertise in building and releasing third-party libraries that are critical to us if the need arises.

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Now that I work remotely full time a large part of my day is spent, like most remote workers, in video calls. For a number of reasons, I prefer using a headset rather than a mic and speakers. For an even longer list of reasons, I prefer using an analog broadcast-style headset. I’ve had several of these but splurged last year on a Sennheiser HME 27, which is an isolating headset with a boom mounted condenser mic. This is overkill for video conferencing, but I often use the headset for studio projects as well and the extra sensitivity of the condenser mic is handy.

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Some time back in the ‘80s, I decided I needed a new fishing reel. I spent a couple days of summer vacation fishing with my older cousin, and he’d introduced me to his Shimano Bantam bait-casting reel. It was shiny and black, with small silkscreened text identifying the various capabilities of the machine; claims regarding the number of ball bearings it contained and which parts were graphite or aluminum. It was mounted to a fancy graphite rod with a sophisticated looking rubber grip. It had guides made by Fuji, and this was reportedly a big deal.

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Policy for Language Evaluation and Selection

In 2014, two languages qualify as industry standard Systems Programming Languages, C/C++ and Java. I define Systems Programming languages as the category of languages that have applicability outside web development or desktop applications development. C# and Objective C are a little unclear, but because they tend to be closely associated with a specific platform, and because of their connection to the C/C++ family of languages, I will lump them into one category.

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I originally posted this article 01/15/2011 at my old blog, but owing to Matt Asay’s post I am compelled to post it again here

Linux taking over “the desktop”

In the past 10 years I must have seen a hundred articles titled along the lines of “Will/Has/Could/Can Linux take over the desktop?”. This evening I saw another one somewhere, and it occurred to me what a weird question it is, because as far as I can tell, Linux had utterly demolished everything else in its segment at least 8 or 9 years ago.

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I recently took a position at a new company. This was a big deal for me since I’d only changed jobs a couple of times before. A good chunk of the last job was spent amassing institutional knowledge and (I hoped) maturing as a programmer. I was always dubious on the latter. The new job was exciting because I knew I’d be working in a new language, and there was a good chance it’d be Erlang.

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I hadn’t seen this post before, but it sums up my own feelings on a subject so well that I feel relieved knowing somebody has already done a better job of writing it than I could have done, and I don’t have to do anything.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-magpie-developer.html

This reference is also superb:

http://quoderat.megginson.com/2006/03/06/programming-languages-of-distinction/

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a handful of “Why Golang Sucks” articles. A couple were reasoned, the rest were copy-cat, none of them make any sense to me.

It would be easy to get the impression from pop-software news that the last line of C was written about 5 or 6 years back, and the last small band of C++ programmers are holed up in a cave someplace metaprogramming. I can assure you, this is not the case. If nothing else, one need only consult the sources for the various language-of-the-month compilers, or maybe the source debs for the last 100 or so updates applied to your Ubuntu machine.

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Julia Evan’s article on becoming a kernel hacker reminds me of the the early 90s, when earnest young hackers dutifully ftp’d down the latest Linux kernel patch file and excitedly ran make config to see what new stuff had been added, the rebooted immediately to check out the new uname sweetness.

Rarely was there any real reason for this other than bragging rights on IRC, although occasionally there would be some excitement when a previously unsupported sound card showed up as supported. Mostly it was just enthusiasm, for running one’s own server, making one’s own choices about how the machine would be maintained. We’d all been living under the unspeakable tyranny of root on the university shared UNIX machine, so this kind of freedom was a big deal.

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