Edmund Fliski

'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.'

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

This is my account on Mastodon - https://t.co/JXAZQtuRzY - verified by https://t.co/x6yrNVDt7F https://t.co/jQg5uKXIGf

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

No, you definitely cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Now, hold my beer, will you?

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

The NoEstimates Movement https://t.co/iuISj5rjDu

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

Don't you find it puzzling that the most lucrative industry in the history of human kind seems pretty much busy these days producing more heat than light?

In every possible sense of 'heat' and 'light,' including the literal ones.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

And how about you?

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

Q: Can you tell the difference between staffing and stuffing?

A1: No, actually. Neither can they.
A2: Yes, it's in spelling and pronunciation (and BrE vs AmE, perhaps).
A3: That depends which side of the table I'm on.
A4: I can tell once being approached... Ugh!

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

Yep, I know who they are, which makes me concerned about them processing my own personal data now, in a recruitment process I have never applied to. A question too far ('Why me?') makes the conversation uneasy.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

A company that has just let personal data of its customers' customers leak in a series of massive breaches (of epic proportions each) is asking me in a direct e-mail if I know who they are. Out of the blue.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

...as in 'ex-parrot'. An ex-bird.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

Can't you smell that? Something must have died here. It's definitely ex, as its very name implies.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I've always secretly wanted a PDP-11. When I was a little kid, they were state-of-the-art. When I was in college, they were a staple of our CS program. I rarely got to touch one and never expected to own one.

I found it on eBay for sale a couple of months ago, with proceeds going to charity. So I bid (yay, https://t.co/vWJHo6k9b9) and won it. The price included free national crating and shipping, so I felt slightly cheated that it was only coming from Oregon!

A cheerful fellow dropped it off from his liftgate truck, wheeling it and the pallet on which it sat into my garage before leaving. According to the shipping manifest, it weighed 840 lbs.

I have a 2-ton portable shop crane (engine hoist), but wasn't sure if it would go high enough to lift the PDP or if you were even supposed to grab a PDP by its chassis and lift it. Nonetheless, the lift had the height, but the legs weren't wide enough to clear the wood shipping pallet, so I couldn't get the lift over the PDP.

We set up the lift on top of the palette, then blocked it up so we could lift the PDP and slowly cut the pallet away with a Sawzall. Which is what I did. It seemed super-sketch but was never dangerous. I'm much too good-looking to be killed by a 1970s minicomputer.

I then did something that earned me the nickname "YOLO" on the PDP-11 groups: I just plugged it in and turned it on to see what confronted me.

The machine emitted a scary roar, like a powerful fan rubbing on the chassis or maybe an arc. The power dipped out every time it made the sad sound. It wasn't happy.

It turns out there's a big electrical contactor in the power block, which was cycling intermittently. A helpful forum member told me what capacity was most likely responsible, and he was right! Five cents and some solder later, it powered up!

I pulled a VT220 over and connected it, which brought me to a boot prompt! But any attempt to boot from any device (I had 2 fixed drives and a removable as part of the system) just locked things up.

Coming out of the back of the machine was a giant 100-pin ribbon cable that daisy chained from one drive to the next. It ended in a unibus card on the end of an 8' extension cable. Clearly intended to plug into another cabinet, which I didn't have.

Long story short, the bus wasn't terminated because the termiantor was in the other stack. So I located one on eBay and waited patiently for it to arrive, spending most days on the front steps waiting for the UPS truck in anticipation. In the meantime I redid all of the filtration in the system, which is a lot of it!

When the terminator finally did arrive, I installed it and the machine still wouldn't boot. None of the drives seems readable at this point, but at least it was trying.

The good news is that I can load old DEC diagnostic packages over the serial port, and it passes all CPU, logic, and disk controller tests. So beyond the physical media (which I can emulate in the worst case) it's up and running, if not doing a lot yet!

PS: I bought the M3 new in '03, and it has 12K miles on it now...

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

'I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member,' LinkedIn.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

LinkedIn is getting better all the time.

Someone I have never heard of before has just offered me co-authoring a chapter in a book I would have never bothered myself to have a look at when in bookstores (provided the book would have ever made it there).

Just great.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

A piece of advice from some hiring managers, to programmers in their 50s, 60s:

'Try your best to stay relevant.'

And here are programmers in their 50s, 60s, returning the favor:

'*You* stay relevant, motherfuckers!'

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

@dnwiebe @kaleidic @waq_r My point is Prolog isn't hard to learn at all, for people learning it as the very first PL in their lives. And a random undergraduate can make it, except for the CS departments where it takes a PhD student in AI or PLs. That's your background that makes it *seem* hard to you.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

@dnwiebe @kaleidic @waq_r Still, so much for geometrically easier, I guess.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

@dnwiebe @kaleidic @waq_r OK, how about switching from one of those — anyone from Fortran to Pascal to C to C++ and all the way up to Rust or Scala — to Prolog or Haskell?

I've seen dudes scratching their heads trying to rewrite control-flow diagrams in Prolog, mutate data structures in Haskell.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

@kaleidic @dnwiebe @waq_r While there's something to it that all those programming languages you've learnt make it easier for you to learn yet another language, I wouldn't call it *incrementally* easier. On the contrary, some make it actually harder to learn certain aspects of some other ones.

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

This is seriously a new level of being a douchebag.

- You directly undermine Ukraine's defense effort by turning Starlinks off for the Ukrainian military right in the middle of important operations and letting the Russian military use it despite U.S. sanctions
- You spread the most idiotic "nuclear war" takes whispered to you in the ear by the Russian ambassador in the U.S. and even Putin himself
- You give voice and listen to the most insane conspiracy theorists talking about "proxy war", "biolabs", "deep state", and "money laundering", as well as blowhard demagogues and media con artists openly praising Putin and his regime
- You use your multimillion-stong global audience to directly propagate the Ukrainian surrender to Russia's war of aggression and publicly ridicule Ukraine's calls for international defense aid in its war against one of the world's largest military powers
- You directly undermined U.S. aid to Ukraine and publicly called for "killing" a long-belated aid at the U.S. Congress despite Ukraine running critically low on air defense and munitions because you and your arrogant yes-men had decided that "Putin just can't lose"

And when the situation deteriorates, particularly due to months-long delays in the most essential and urgent defense aid, this shameless douche says "I did predict it" (while again completely ignoring the fact that POLITICO makes it perfectly clear that Ukraine is 'heading for defeat' due to the West's failure to send weapons to Kyiv).

No, Elmo, you did not 'predict' anything.

You precipitated this.

This war started with Ukrainians praising you as the free world's techno hero and naming streets after you.

Now you have degraded yourself to being one of Russia's key useful idiots amid the most terrible and the largest European war of aggression since Adolf Hitler.

Keep listening to the likes of Ian Miles Cheong and David Sacks and dive deeper into your delusions and absolute moral bankruptcy.

We in Ukriane have seen our share of smartasses giving us between 48 and 72 hours two years ago.

In this war, we've been through so many impossible things that you can't even imagine, let alone "predict".

We will overcome this too -- and will get the aid, will survive as an independent nation and a democracy, and will bring peace back to Europe by derailing Russian aggression.

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

#RememberingTogether #WarsawGhettoUprisingCampaign

[Edmund Fliski @efliski]

My hometown, on this day 81 years ago
https://t.co/ZaGShscz3c