I have. It’s a lovely graphic novel. It’d take maybe an afternoon to get through it, including time to stare at the wonderful illustrations. Worth it, I think.

I think it was the EPA’s National Compute Center. I’m guessing based on location though.

When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.

Not looking at the man page, but I expect you can limit it if you want and the parser for the parameter knows about these names. If it were me it’d be one parser for byte size values and it’d work for chunk size and limit and sync interval and whatever else dd does.

Also probably limited by the size of the number tracking. I think dd reports the number of bytes copied at the end even in unlimited mode.

Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It’s been good. I’d recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

I’m a software engineer because I’m bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can’t write. Didn’t want to follow in my mom’s footsteps but I just can’t so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It’s honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I’m proud of it. It’s no google, but it’s honest.

Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don’t deserve it. It’s been good. But I got lucky.

I was curious. Looks like Florida has about the same population as Sri Lanka. Similar to Romania for the EU folks. While I could find them both on a map I couldn’t tell you anything going on their. Much less news from a year ago.

Maybe its fair to bump the populations some because Desantis was a Republican presidential hopeful. But I couldn’t tell you the names of the folks who lost the last Tory leadership election.

So, yeah, comment checks out.

It’s cute. Maybe my favorite use of ai I’ve seen in a while.

I wish it looked at contributions instead of just the profile page. Much more accurate roasting.

I work on a language for a living. It’s fun! It’s a job. But it’s fun.

I’m not super involved with the traditional language parts. The design and parsing and optimization. I spent most of my time on the runtime. We’re embedded in another big system and there’s a lot of things to make it nice.

I spent the day wiring up more profile information for the times the runtime has to go async. Then I’ll fix up some docs generation stuff. Eventually I’ll get back to fun shadowing edge case in the new syntax I’m building.

What a fun tool! It only looks at your public projects rather than your activity. I think. But it really is neat. Good use of ai. Nik approved.

Code talker?

Yeah! Every place I saw that did it seemed quite different from the US. I just thought it was neat that there are places trying this.

Mine looks a little like that. It’s my job though. Everything’s on GitHub.

Mexico does that! It doesn’t look super common but it’s a thing.

I think the technologies are pretty bubble based. We are 80/15/5 Mac/Linux/Windows and it’s been 15 years since I worked on a software team that’s thats mostly windows. But I talk to them from time to time. But if anything Mac feels underrepresented compared to my bubble.

I admit I’m probably biased in favor of believing the survey is representative. I work on one of the databases.

Speaking of databases, I don’t work on SQL Server but can see the appeal. It implements a huge array of features and it’s documentation is pretty good. Folks have told me it’s a lovely database to use.

I’m with you. Words change.

There are still good southerners. But it’s hard sometimes. I still live here but I’m weary for my kids. It’s fine for now.

I wish you peace with your family. Whatever that means.

I downloaded google lense a while back to identify a mushroom. It was pretty and I was curious. After installing and taking the picture it replied… “Mushroom.”

The second image said false widow’s death wish or something metal as hell.

I used gerrit and zuul a while back at a place that really didn’t want to use GitHub. It worked pretty well but it took a lot of care and maintenance to keep it all ticking along for a bunch of us.

It has a few features I loved that GitHub took years to catch up to. Not sure there’s a moral to this story.

When someone is having a computer problem I ask them to restart first. Not because I think they don’t know to do it, but just in case. Some people don’t know. Sometimes people forget. Obvious advice is useful sometimes.

I think all those are a little true. But I’m mostly guessing. I’m happy to change my mind if anyone knows better.

Either way, these folks are my hero.

Years of experience