Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!

Also ABI compatibility isn’t part of the C specification. Most implementers use System V ABI compatibility guidelines. Many compilers can output code for different ABI’s calling conventions. There’s more than one! Which you use depends on how crufty the code is and on the platform you are using.

I think the big advantage of C like languages here is the plethora of implementation defined platforms. That’s a huge network effect. If you want to target the 6502? There’s a compiler for it. Some chip you’ve never heard of? Probably some fork of GCC that targets it. Want to call some library function in some foreign binary written in a completely unknown language? If you can finagle the bytes and reverse engineer the calling conventions you can do it with C.

I think it might be that C does leave so much out of the specification and up to the implementation and platform that makes it unique and useful at times.

Or you can pay to get off the list.

Not all email services use blacklists anyway. Bit of a racket.

You can mitigate against it by hosting on a dedicated IP.

But I understand the risk. It’s really annoying when I send someone an email and they call me some days later wondering why I hadn’t sent them an email. Failures are often silent on the sending side.

It’s not for everyone. There are risks.

However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.

And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.

I’ve probably spent less than 10 hours over the last 5 or 6 years on maintenance.

Don’t get fooled into treating these systems like they’re people or intelligent collaborators.

At the best of times these chat/agent/loop systems are gambling machines. Very expensive and heavily subsidized machines. Don’t forget to keep building your own skills. You never know when the bubble is going to pop and you don’t want to be left unable to do you job just because some big tech corp goes under.

All the loops and agents don’t protect you from generating garbage.

Which sucks because then how are you supposed to improve your skills when you’re just getting the answers all day… answers you can’t verify?

People are more confident than they ought to be. Always have been. But AI throws gas on that fire.

I’m working towards a solo circumnavigation myself. Love reading about the stories of others.

This isn’t for the protection of kids. It’s for the protection of profits by surveillance capitalism.

Highly experienced programmers seem to have a hard time understanding this.

Why do we have tens of thousands of test cases and we still find new errors constantly? Why is our software so bloated and slow? We do we still have security breaches?

LLMs can be useful tools when guided by experts. I don’t think a PM with a dream is going to cut it in the long run.

But these are skills that can be taught to individuals.

But teaching an organization that their real bottleneck isn’t how fast they’re writing code; it’s producing production-ready software that people understand and are willing to take responsibility for… that’s much harder.

Many businesses want to treat software development like an assembly line and revert back to Taylorism. It’s knowledge work and there’s no royal road. Good teams get fast when they have the right mix of skills and trust from the organization.

What we’ve been delving into for the last decade has been a decline in the value of labour and work.

“Code isn’t the hard part,” isn’t meant as an insult at individual programmers or to devalue their work. That’s being done by big tech and their AI hype machine.

What I, and many people who’ve said, “code was never the hard part,” aren’t referring to the skill of an individual. It’s not the hard part of the engineering process of developing software. Programming languages have manuals. Many data structures are well documented. There are frameworks for damn near everything. While the difficulty of producing code varies by the skill of the programmer and the complexity of the problem domain; writing and understanding the code is a tractable and straight-forward problem. I can and have taught many people. People can learn.

What most people are referring to is that the hardest parts of producing software are all the things an organization has to do in the production of it. It’s not writing the code that is the hardest part for an organization. It’s getting everyone to understand the problems, working together, gathering requirements, developing specifications, validating releases, testing, etc. It can often look like herding cats and is probably harder.

But to a degree it is also about the code. Sometimes your requirements are: be fast enough. In which case you need to think about code: instructions and data.

The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of something. I still believe there is no royal road. Taste isn’t the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over a slab when designing a system. It is experience, wisdom, and the long hard road of trying yourself and failing. Taste comes after.

There is much joy in suffering when the result is knowing.

Too many people have tried to declare victory over software engineering prematurely and it shows.

https://github.com/tlaplus/Examples/blob/master/specificatio...

Another interesting, and underrated one: hotel keys.

It’s a hard balancing act to do. Give in too much randomness and you get non-sensical outputs that are difficult to align. Fit too closely to the training data and the model regurgitates the training data.

And oh, what’s that copyrighted material we never made any agreement to use doing in there?