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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • No not in the same way Tony Stark did. But Tony Stark is imaginary. Obviously nobody can build an electric car or a rocket in the same way that Tony Stark does.

    Of all the criticisms of Musk this is the weakest. There are many way more valid ones… for instance:

    • He’s an arsehole.
    • He straight up called that diver a paedo, and even paid a scammer to investigate him.
    • The scummy lottery thing for votes for Trump. I don’t care if it ends up being technically legal, it’s clearly immoral.
    • Selling the promise of FSD for hard cash when it clearly is never going to happen as he claimed. I still don’t know why there’s been no class action suit over that.
    • Backing proper insane far right groups in Europe. These people are worse than Trump. I wouldn’t say he is backing neonazis, but he’s certainly in the vicinity.

    Despite all that he clearly has a pretty good handle on engineering and is definitely involved. He’s not just a figurehead.

    I know right, people are multidimensional. You can downvote if that blows your mind.


  • Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! 😱

    Interesting footnote: the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn’t yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest “what if” moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there’s a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I’m not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened.

    Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there’s pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows…








  • Yeah there’s more stuff that runs in the shell. But pretty much all the things you mentioned would work on a VT100 from the 70s. This is about modernising the terminal itself.

    Hell, Linux terminal emulators don’t even have a “clear screen & scroll-back” keyboard shortcut like Command-K on Mac. There’s no command output history, there are no auto-complete popups, editing commands is still extremely basic (no multiline input for example). The command prompt doesn’t even have the text editing capabilities of Notepad.





  • Yeah I mean obviously the technical points here are correct (and I wish my colleagues would write more robust code with less Bash and regex all over the place), but I don’t know why he thinks you need an asshole manager to deliver that message.

    Over-engineered. Too many moving parts. Refactor.”

    That was it. No “nice work.” No “good attempt”. Just a hard stop.

    Uhm yeah, would writing “good attempt” have hurt? Obviously not. He could easily have been nice and still deliver the technical information.

    Good attempt, but I think this is too over-engineered with too many moving parts. For instance x y z would be simpler to maintain, and a b c isn’t robust to 1 2 3 for example.

    It doesn’t take much. Don’t be a dick.