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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • 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.










  • I had this one weekend when I was in tenth grade where I did nothing but write code on a fun project. Then I decided I didn’t like writing code. I don’t know why. Kids are weird.

    I decided then I couldn’t make it my job. I managed not to program for three years. It turns out I’m bad at everything else. Miserable.

    That was 22 years ago. That’s still all I’m good at.





  • We squash. I’m not really interesting in your local journey to land the change. It’s sometimes useful during review, but after that it’s mostly the state of the main branch I care about. It’s what I need to bisect anyway.

    I don’t like commits that are just references to issues. Copy the issue into the commit message so git blame tells you something useful. Unless it’s just closing a simple big. Then the title and issue reference are plenty.

    Depends on the project I imagine.



  • I think the last new instruction the JVM added was invokedynamic like 10 years ago. I believe they did it so lambdas could be called efficiently. Polymorphic incline cache and stuff.

    But the JVM has grown more complex in other ways. The way to force simd instructions is pretty wild, for example.

    I don’t know enough to call it a mess or not. It works though.