Eric Obodo

Developing a new language for high-performance web applications. Details will be posted when it's ready.

[Brendan Carr @BrendanCarrFCC]

Americans get frustrated when they call a U.S. business and end up speaking with someone at a call center located in a foreign country.

Language & communications barriers only make it harder for callers to get the results they want.

So the FCC is seeking comment on several ideas that could help, including

✅ Facilitating the onshoring of foreign call centers

✅ Requiring operators at call centers to be proficient in American Standard English

✅ Further cracking down on illegal robocalls from abroad through the use of targeted tariffs or bonds.

The FCC’s proposals focus on the call centers run by the communications providers regulated by the FCC. And could represent steps for the government to build on more broadly.

[GrapheneOS @GrapheneOS]

We're happy to announce a long-term partnership with Motorola. We're collaborating on future devices meeting our privacy and security standards with official GrapheneOS support.

https://t.co/8flkjD52Eg

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

Iranian Shahed attack drones and their American copies passing each other over the Persian Gulf:

[Casey Muratori @cmuratori]

The top critical replies to Coder Girl here were "4 hours fixing audio drivers nobody asked about", "Installing Linux is a mess", and "sure if you don't like to game".

I have been a Linux user since SlackWare in the mid 90s. I would have agreed with all three of those up until around a year ago.

Here is the reality I have been experiencing now:

1) My livingroom gaming machine is now permanently Bazzite. I installed the default Bazzite distribution from a USB key with no modifications. It can run Steam in deck mode, so I can use it with my (Microsoft!) XBox controller, and I play almost exclusively Windows games on it, which run (shockingly) flawlessly in Proton. I have yet to encounter a single compatibility problem, although I am sure I would if I played competitive shooters since their anticheat kernel drivers are designed to prevent using it anywhere but on unaltered Windows distributions. Anticheat is really the only thing holding Linux back from being an immediate substitute for a Windows gaming machine.

2) My audio workstation is now also Bazzite, since I figured it was easier than maintaining two distros. Default install just worked, no drivers necessary, despite the equivalent Windows install needing both Yamaha and Behringer drivers to be installed manually to function properly. It "just worked" out of the box for audio as compared to the Windows equivalent, and has been rock solid - no drop outs, no crashes. I did not have to touch a single audio configuration option. I just installed Reaper and PianoTeq, and everything worked.

3) The only machine I've found so far that has trouble working out-of-the-box with Linux is a Microsoft Surface tablet. But I still got it to work, it just required me to manually install a kernel patch because support for things like the Surface touchscreen aren't built into Linux distros currently. Once I did install the patch manually, it works perfectly, and even has a touchscreen keyboard just like Windows does. So even Microsoft's own hardware can run Linux just fine, and it would even be turnkey if your Linux distro of choice decided to mainline the Surface driver repo.

The bottom line is that people who think Linux is worse than Windows either haven't used it lately, or are not being honest about how bad Windows has become.

Windows is circling the drain. Every update, it gets worse. The number of problems I regularly have to solve on our remaining Windows machines dwarf anything I have to do for Linux system maintenance.

Windows had a good run, but Microsoft has obviously focused its resources on SaaS and cloud computing. They don't care about Windows anymore, and neither should you. The next decade is about transitioning to Linux everywhere.

[Heatloss @heatloss1986]

Someone asked me to do a comparison of capabilities between F-35A and JAS-39E Gripen. A ton of material is classified but I will do my best here.
In short, Gripen is not even in the same class as F-35A. It isn't awful, but it is not a competitor with F-35.

[dennis hegstad @dennishegstad]

“Good morning. Your payment has been declined”

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

'I Hope Someone Names A Frozen Pizza After Me' Thinks Red Baron While Being Shot Down In WWI Dogfight https://t.co/tOIGtTFgco

[Joe Wilson @RepJoeWilson]

Israel’s strikes on Syria are suicidal. The real enemy is Tehran. Israel and Syria should work together. President Trump will deescalate the situation. Grateful to speak to @FoxNews. https://t.co/iAp4yZLCGU

[Joe Wilson @RepJoeWilson]

I support President Trump’s efforts to de-escalate the situation in Syria. Israel’s unnecessary strikes must cease immediately. The strikes benefit Iran, the CCP, and war criminal Putin. Suicidal for Israel. Also, there must be accountability for sectarian crimes. Separatist drug traffickers with malign influence are sabotaging the most historic opportunity for peace & stability in Syria in our lifetime.

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

After bombing them for the last few days for doing exactly that, Israel has announced that it will allow Syrian “internal security forces” to enter Suwayda for the next 48 hours in order to intervene in the clashes between the Bedouin and the Druze. This follows a plea last night from Hikmat al-Hijri, the chief religious leader of the Druze in Syria and unofficially leader of the Suwayda Military Council (SMC), requesting that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa deploy forces to prevent the “slaughter” of the Druze by the Bedouin and other tribes from across Syria that are heading towards Suwayda.

[Kate from outer space @katefros]

@greg16676935420 @elmo Tough week on Sesame Street

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Mexican Restaurant's Authenticity Questioned After Experiencing Zero ICE Raids https://t.co/wXGKMutFGR

[onionweigher 🧅⚖️ @onionweigher]

working on a theory that US intervention in the middle east is correlated to 11 year solar cycle of sunspot activity

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Waymo Car Achieves Sentience At Worst Possible Moment https://t.co/GsAws0aqYe

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Mexican Rioter Adds Lime Wedge To Molotov Cocktail https://t.co/pLYuFSivmx

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Depressed Trump Asks Melania If She'd Put On A Baseball Cap And Say Space Stuff To Cheer Him Up https://t.co/azlkdfTSeQ

[John Stossel @JohnStossel]

Bizarrely, socialism is still popular among young people. They should listen to those who lived it!

“You don't really know you have it good until you have it bad,” says @charlesNKorea.

He escaped North Korea, twice.

He tells me his story and the importance of freedom:

[Jonathan Blow @Jonathan_Blow]

I read this article about software development, which I knew about because I saw Prime reacting to it:

https://t.co/oXYuMTRXs0

For the most part I think it is fine: a relatively young programmer is doing the healthy work of introspecting on what he should really be doing.

But there's one part of the article that I think is a deep mistake, and the author doesn't know it's so wrong because he has never experienced the alternative:

"Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because https://t.co/KC2vCoIkWK is now https://t.co/KC2vCoIkWK.2. 2

I have had scripts silently fail because a website changed its HTML layout.
I have had configuration formats break because of upstream version bumps.
I have had Docker containers die because Alpine Linux rotated a mirror URL.

In each case, the immediate emotional response was not just inconvenience but something that moreso resembles guilt."

Yes, this is true in much of the programming world. But there is another world in which people build things that last much longer. I have done it many times. I shipped a binary for this game Braid in 2009 that you can still download and play on Steam 16 years later. If you are pretty young (like 35), you can run binaries on Windows that were compiled before you were even born, which is amazing given how hard they have been trying to f up Windows lately.

On an emulator like MAME, you can play arcade games programmed in 1979. If today's software "technology" is so much better, why does it fall apart like tissue paper?

The author is not wrong about the cited decay. But this decay is not inherent to the practice of software. It's due to choices made, usually foolishly, by the people designing the systems being interacted with. And, it's due to a lack of knowing better, non-exposure to the sector of programmers who are very concerned with their code lasting a long time, actually.

The way you make code last a long time is you minimize dependencies that are likely to change and, to the extent you must take such dependencies, you minimize the contact surface between your program and those dependencies.

The actual algorithms you program, the actual functioning machinery you build, is a mathematical object defined by the semantics of your programming language, and mathematical objects are eternal, they will last far longer than your human life. The goal then is to avoid introducing decay into the system. You must build an oasis of peace that is insulated from this constant bombardment of horrible decisions, and only hesitantly interface into the outside world.

This means, for example: If you are shipping on iOS, you only reluctantly use any functions iOS gives you, because when you use them, Tim Apple will come along and break your program next year for arbitrary pointless reasons, because Tim Apple does not respect you or anyone you know.

This means a program cannot last forever on iOS, because Tim Apple likes breaking your things and watching you submissively clean them up. But the core of your program, which could be 95% of the code, is fine, and you can deploy it elsewhere.

This means you have to insulate from Linux userspace, because of all the jackass decision making that introduces constant incompatibilities while somehow never making the system better.

Using a library dependency to do font rendering or sparse matrix math? That dependency gets checked into your source tree, a copy of exactly the version you use. Ten years later you can pull down that source and recompile, and it works, because your program is a mathematical object. If you want to upgrade to something newer that has bug fixes and so forth, you are free to do so, but you are also free not to do so, and your program still works. (And how many of these bug fixes do you really need? Your program worked correctly when you shipped it to the greatest extent you could measure, because you are a skillful software engineer who wants to ship things of a high quality).

Everyone who got into programming for the joy of it knows, at some level, that the magic of programs is that they represent complexity that is replicable over time (and thus they exist outside of time). But the trashy programmer culture of the past 20 years stopped aspiring to this, and now has forgotten it is even possible.

And so long as people have forgotten, decisions will continue to be made that make the problem worse.

There are programmers who only write glue code, and who think that's what programming is; to these people what I have written above will not make sense. But the good news for that contingent is, they can always just stop writing glue code and start doing something else! If today's software "technology" is so good, why do you think it needs so much glue? Maybe there is a stylistic problem.

So if you are looking for what to do in the world of software that can represent a lasting contribution, maybe this is food for thought.

@NotAShelf @ThePrimeagen

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Trump Accepts Generous Gift Of Imperial-Class Star Destroyer From Emperor Palpatine https://t.co/fWCfpdzFuW

[Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke]

It's spring break and my son started a lemonade stand.

I asked him how much lemonade he sold in the last hour.

"$3" he said.

I told him, "Here's $20 for one glass of lemonade. In one hour I'm going to come back and buy a lemonade for $1,000. You're going to take that $1,000/hr revenue - multiply it by 24 hours - then multiply it by 365 days, and tell VCs, 'I have $8.76M in run rate revenue with 99.9% net margins, and 100% of our latest cohort of customers have expanded revenue with us. You're also changing the name of your lemonade stand to 'lemon(AI)de' and incorporating it as a C Corp"

My son was holding back tears.

I said, "Doesn't it feel good to be a millionaire, bud?"

He said, "Dad I'm 4 and I don't know what any of these words are."

I said, "Welcome to life as a tech CEO - neither do I" and drove away.