Auto Code formatting, not a big deal? What kind of hellish demon are you? What eldritch horror created you?

You probably can’t find it because you’re mixing mutually exclusive terminology.

A stack is a First-In Last-Out data structure. If your entry criteria is time, the oldest files will persist and the newer ones will get purged first.

If you want to remove oldest files first, you want a First In First Out queue.

Both of these will permanently delete the original file.

Caches are just a copy of real data, sitting somewhere that ideally has faster access times but smaller storage space. The real original file does not get modified. A cache will typically hold onto as much data as it can until it hits some cap, at which point a replacement algorithm is used to select which entry or entries to make space for the newly requested item. Very rarely will a cache delete entries on its own to minimize actively used space, but if they do they will likely just run the replacement algorithm without backfilling the space

Yeah, but it does take a lot of work to coerce them to do it.

GCC is honestly obnoxious, and you have to do a bunch of unintuitive things to get it. The compile stage needs the built-in RNG seeded, parent file paths stripped, you need to ensure that the date/time macros are not used anywhere, and you need to ensure that all command line flags are passed in the exact same order every time.

I just went through this with GCC16 on a new project.

Current defense worker here:

Was talking with a coworker recently about how ITAR/EAR rules are hilariously out of date. Basic IMUs coming from China these days are good enough that you can establish a reasonable dead reckoning nav to where those parts of the munitions list are just defunct. Shit I did that in college ten years ago with high power rockets and things have only gotten better.

The new proposed regulations over AI chips are also wildly misguided and demonstrate how Congress/Executive branch have no idea what the tech even is. The top of the line chips today are needed for LLMs, fast fixture acquisition and tracking can be done on a way less powerful piece of hardware that new regulations will fail to stop (that’s even assuming that the bans would have worked in the first place, which they won’t)

Carrying forward technical knowledge is definitely a big help. I suspect that’s why Atlas V was able to pay for itself because the booster was so similar to Atlas III which itself was similar to Atlas II.

The satellites I work on play this game constantly. Mission A and B both use the same underlying tech that needs to be developed, but mission A is first. So we charge mission A with all of the cost and then mission B looks a lot cheaper on the books

I work in the aerospace industry, mainly to satellites these days but I’ve worked in launch in the past and have plenty of friends who have as well.

That 450 figure is probably all of Falcon 9s development which has gone through several design iteration cycles. Industry rumors point to a new Falcon 9 booster being around $50 to build and a million or two to refurbish on average. The re-use is saving them a significant amount, but the upfront design cost was just so stupid high.

It’s also worth noting that Starlink supposedly launches at near cost meaning little profit for each of those, but then SpaceX turns around and prices Falcon 9 close to Atlas V for government contracts (90-150m total price so probably 60m profit) and gouges people on Transporter (they’re almost certainly pulling in 150-200m on each of those)

Senior embedded C developer here in the US. I can speak first hand experience at people applying to be on my team that have reasonable sounding experience and then collapse under interview questions.

Everything else you said applies here too, legally we don’t have repercussions for firing someone quickly (once had a team member for two months), but a healthy org will try very hard to get hiring right because it can cause pretty bad morale to see a revolving door and there is a massive brain and resource drain having to constantly be training new people.

Smaller businesses or privately owned businesses with a smart owner do.

Large publicly traded companies are sustained by a perception that an investment in or loan to that company will pay off in a higher dollar amount in the future, so if the perception becomes the company is shrinking then the investments and loans slow down which makes the perception worse, you get that feedback loop which turns into the death spiral.

So the bigwigs at the top of these companies have to be professional liars and gamblers to change the perception and make it look like everything isn’t just fine, they’re doing great! The line must go up.

Yup, sometimes it’s too easy for me to just slip into work mode when talking about this kind of stuff and I don’t elaborate enough. Thanks for stepping in.

Based on industry rumors I believe the Orion capsule control computers are running VxWorks (I’ve heard that maybe a few boxes are using RTEMS?) All of that source code would have been reviewed, audited, and tested to hell and back.

The day-in-the-life stuff for the astronauts is entirely believable to be Windows. The risk of it failing is so low (medium probability, low impact), it’s what they’d be familiar with, and it’s part of daily life at NASA anyways. Linux is no better when it comes to safety critical components and the astronauts almost certainly wouldn’t want to be dealing with Gnome’s… uniqueness…

I have not worked on human rated launch vehicles, but I’ve been adjacent to them, saw what went into them, and a few close personal friends have worked it.

Anything that can jeapordize the safety of the crew must go through a rigorous independent validation and verification process that takes years, software included. No shot a Microsoft product was even in consideration for those systems.

Being in industry I find it crazy that so many people are freaked out by this. Astronauts have email, they have tasks and schedules and reports to make. Why would NASA reinvent the wheel on a task/schedule manager when the ground operators and astronauts are already used to using Outlook.

Spacecraft software engineer here:

They are and they aren’t. Radiation causes problems in terms of Single Event Upsets where a 0 turns to 1 and a 1 turns to 0 for a super tiny second. CPUs take some amount of time to let the transistor circuit stabilize before moving onto the next instruction so if an SEU happens in the beginning of this period it won’t have any downstream effects. Like a bump on the road.

Memory however is vulnerable to this tiny amount of time and can flip a bit to a different state than it’s supposed to be, but both are solvable problems with hardware and software based solutions, with ECC being the most common.

The other major problem is Total Ionizing Dose. Put silicon based semiconductors in radiation long enough and they will break down, and there’s no real hardware or software based solution to that. But it takes a long time

I hope this meme never dies, but I fear it’s already reaching obscurity

I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they’d fail like bulldozer

I think it’s a perception and noticeability problem.

I’ve been around a lot of guys who cc, and I only knew because it happened or come up in conversation or someone else told me. If I walked by them on the street, never would have noticed.

Former friend from highschool, his whole family was military, gun nuts, who all cc and they made sure you knew it. The dude went into national guard and was ecstatic about getting deployed to the local large city during a police brutality protest.

For a lot of people, I feel like the later is the more common experience with cc than the former, despite the former being the truly more common one

My theory and point was that by thinking about that computer as a console, in the average consumer mindset it should be priced like a console. From a pure hardware product perspective there is no difference

Valve is thinking about it as a computer, and has stated they intend to price it like one and not like a traditional console

I think the problem is Valve lost control of the messaging, which led to bad expectations.

At least in the US, a computer hooked up to a TV to play games means it’s a “console” and not a computer. Maybe we can blame Nintendo back in the 80s for going out of their way to avoid calling the NES a computer (despite it’s name in Japan being Famicom, Family Computer), but the distinction exists today despite technologically no real difference. You know this, I know this, Valve knows this. So Valve wants to make a computer you hook up to your TV so they can get you to use their money printing machine Steam in the living room too.

If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once. It’s always either by name or the terms PC, computer, or system. They likely don’t mention the word “console” because to date, video game consoles follow a different business model, one where the model subsidizes the shit out of the hardware and then make money on the back end with game sales/licensing.

Current “console” hardware starts in the <$500 price bracket, and with so much third party media marketing calling the Steam Machine a console, that got people’s mind set on pricing expectations of that market.

Realistically, computational power

The more number crunching units and more memory you throw at the problem, the easier it is and the more useful the final model is. The math and theoretical computer science behind LLMs has been known for decades, it’s just that the resource investment required to make something even mediocre was too much for any business type to be willing to sign off on. Me and my fellow nerds had the technology and largely dismissed it as worthless or a set of pipe dreams

But then number crunching units and memory became cheap enough that a couple of investors were willing to take the risk and you get a model like ChatGPT1. Talks close enough like a human that it catches business types attention as a new revolutionary thing, and without the technical background to know they were getting lied to, the Venture Capitalism machine cranks out the shit show we have today.

Seems like this war is going to take longer than expected

I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like a Lenovo y510p. Or at least it looks very similar to the one I owned back in the day.

There was a vent in the hinge, and these things would absolutely cook themselves with the lid closed

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care