> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
* Do this with "<0" and ">=0" to only test the sign of the result. A
* good compiler would generate better code (and a really good compiler
* wouldn't care). Gcc is currently neither.
It's funny the love-hate relationship the Linux kernel has with GCC. It's the only supported compiler[1], and yet...
[1] can Clang fully compile Linux yet? I haven't followed the updates in a while.
To be fair this comment predates git history (before 2005) when GCC wasn't a very good compiler. The kernel developers at one point were sticking with a specific version of GCC because later versions would miscompile the kernel. Clang didn't exist then.
Even funnier is the history. IIRC, the very first Raspberry Pi was an idea based on a bunch of stock of shitty SoCs for set-top boxes that Broadcom couldn't get sold, so Eben Upton got these for cheap for the foundation he and a few others had started to promote computer literacy.
Honestly, in all my life I've never seen the Pi being sold in EU for €35. The min. price I've found has always been around 45/50, with Pi5 never under 75, because of scalpers
I've been seeing this from time to time since at least 2016. As others have noted, it's more likely to happen when you type quickly or immediately after pasting your search in the url bar.
Even if the chatbot served only as a Rubber Ducky [1], that's already valuable.
I've used Claude for debugging system behavior, and I kind of agree with the author. While Claude isn't always directly helpful (hallucinations remain, or at least outdated information), it helps me 1) spell out my understanding of the system (see [1]) and 2) help me keep momentum by supplying tasks.
A rubber ducky demands that you think about your own questions, rather than taking a mental back seat as you get pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant.
I assure you that if you rubber duck at another engineer that doesn't understand what you're doing, you will also be pummeled with information that may or may not be relevant. ;)
I don't think that's right. When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail. Of course that itself is an acquired skill but never mind that.
The point or rubber duck debugging then is to realize the benefit of verbally describing the problem without needing to interrupt your colleague and waste his time in order to do so. It's born of the recognition that often, midway through wasting your colleague's time, you'll trail off with an "oh ..." and exit the conversation. You've ended up figuring out the problem before ever actually receiving any feedback.
To that end an LLM works perfectly well as long as you still need to walk through a full explanation of the problem (ie minimal relevant context). An added bonus being that the LLM offers at least some of the benefits of a live person who can point out errors or alert you to new information as you go.
Basically my quibble is that to me the entire point of rubber duck debugging is "doesn't waste a real person's time" but it comes with the noticeable drawback of "plastic duck is incapable of contributing any useful insights".
> When you explain a technical problem to someone who isn't intimately familiar with it you're forced to think through the individual steps in quite a bit of detail.
The point of Rubber Ducking (or talking/praying to the Wooden Indian, to use an older phrase that is steeped in somewhat racist undertones so no longer generally used) is that it is an inanimate object that doesn't talk back. You still talk to it as if you were explaining to another person, so are forcing yourself to get your thoughts in order in a way that would make that possible, but actually talking to another person who is actively listening and actually asking questions is the next level.
I guess I can see where others are coming from (the LLM is different than a literal rubber duck) but I feel like the "can't reply" part was never more than an incidental consequence. To me the "why" of it was always that I need to solve my problem and I don't want to disturb my colleagues (or am unable to contact anyone in the first place for some reason).
So where others see "rubber ducking" as explaining to an object that is incapable of response, I've always seen it as explaining something without turning to others who are steeped in the problem. For example I would consider explaining something to a nontechnical friend to qualify as rubber ducking. The "WTF" interjections definitely make it more effective (the rubber duck consistently fails to notify me if I leave out key details).
> Feels like the article is just a cheap dunk on macOS.
That blog, Howard Oakley at eclecticlight.co, is consistently the most informative on the internet about macOS behaviors and internals, that Apple does not explain. He is also the author of several useful tools [1] to help observe and understand some of its underlying details. It's maybe the closest we have to a SysInternals for macOS.
It is. Add we all have off days. Perhaps Howard has had one here. I mean, he is defining what type of OS it is by how it's configuted. Which is just wierd.
I got a chuckle out of that for my own reasons as a long time Mac user as “Mac OS X is Unix” was the brand back in the 10.0-10.3 days, to the point I believe they got a Unix certification by someone, and then again with macOS 15 they got an Open Group UNIX certification.
Funnily enough, they had no certification and weren’t compliant in 10.0-10.3 days, so what they were doing was trademark infringement, hence the lawsuit from the Open Group. 10.4 was the first compliant version. And oh boy they really milked it for several years afterwards.
That just highlights my point about this article being a cheap dunk?
Because I was very disappointed with it ending at “SSV doesn’t let you”. SSV can be disabled, and the author should have known (almost certainly knows) that.
Disabling SSV may have been beyond the scope of the experiment the author was attempting. I suppose he could've been more explicit about that.
From one of his comments on his post:
> I wish whoever takes that project on, every success, even more so at working out how those processes can be disabled completely while keeping the SSV intact.
The thing I find disappointing about the article is that nothing else seems to have been explored. Now no options might exist, but then again, isn't the point of such a write up to find the ones that.... do...?
A lot of people know that modern macOS is a bit of a let down when it comes to modifying it unless you disable a bunch of security layers. So the information gained is basically 0.
Edit: I should clarify that some of the ways they analyze how services are launched etc. are quite interesting, though I hope my prior thought makes sense to some.
Disabling the SSV is perhaps the worst mistake you can make to a macOS install. Howard certainly knows that this is true but has chosen not to explore the details in this article.
His website are deep dives into the technical workings of macOS that no one else does. I’d even argue he has more insights and documentation than Apple. It might sound harsh, but he’s just very clinical about it.
That could be boilerplate legalese for "obviously we need access to your code if we're to display and share it (as is the purpose for a public git host)"
Germany stopped importing Russian gas after the start of the Ukraine war. One also has to understand that only a small fraction of gas use in Germany is for generation of electricity and much bigger part is for heating. Finally, the amount of electricity generated from gas is around 80 TWh and did not increase after shutting down nuclear.
Counter-anecdata: I have 2 Dell U2720Q (Ultrasharp 27") bought in 2021 and they've been great.
That said, I've always stuck for Dell's upper-range Ultrasharp (U prefix in models) monitors, being slightly wary of their cheaper series which the S in your S3221QS implies.
I'm using 2x Dell U3011s, one I purchased around ~2013 probably and the other I got used recently for $100. My only issue with them is that they have PWM coil whine that only goes away if I crank the brightness to ~90%, which seems to produce an immense amount of heat and probably power consumption. I'd love to find a viable alternative solution for this, because these are my favorite monitors for now.
The model appears to have been released 16 years ago.
I haven't yet found a monitor that makes sense to replace them with either.
I think there is a slightly newer version of these, but I have the same set up.
I haven’t been able to find anything that has the vertical space that these monitors do. Even Ultra Wide monitors just aren’t tall enough. If I got this 52 inch behemoth that would help, but I would actually lose horizontal space.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
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