Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 4

There is a thing called a GIS, a geographic information system. It's a database specialised for the task of storing, indexing and searching geographical information such as maps, with Google Maps probably being the largest such system on the planet.

Did anyone ever implement a TIS? A time information system?

Most databases won't do much more than index times, dates or both at once, but what of time intervals? What of recurring events? What of the date of Easter? Calendars?

Being a computer programmer is a kind of madness.

1. There is a problem.
2. You devise a solution.
3. There are two problems.

Ultimately, the only way of getting a computer to do exactly what you want is to write a program.

Knowing how to code is a curse at times.

Whenever you hit a limitation in your application software, you understand how to fix, but you can't.

Even if you have access to the source code, it still won't be fixed, because getting to the point where you understand code well enough to patch it is a project of its own, and is nobody's idea of a fun weekend.

@azure That would be equivalent to "some other concern [time pressure] had a higher priority".

It's especially fun when the designer of the language or API tells you that you've taken the wrong approach.

Bloody much use that is, when you're months into a project, and everything you did was based on what seemed like a reasonable assumption about their system that turned out to be incorrect.

The one thing I hate the most about programming is having to deal with the decisions of other programmers.

The problem with the statement that I just made? Most programming is in fact the act of having to deal with the decisions of other programmers.

If you ask them why they made a decision that you have a problem with, they'll you that your problem is too obscure, that some other concern had a higher priority, or that you've taken the wrong approach.

I'm not sure why you'd have the concept of shaders that you link into a shader program if you can't stack them.

It makes no sense for every object in a 3D scene to be responsible for the camera, the lighting, etc.

Someone said that the common solution to this is to simply manipulate the source files for the shaders. If you want to combine shaders, you combine source files.

But how do you even do this in a general way? Also, isn't that going to be terribly hard to debug? The line numbers in syntax error messages will be wrong, among other things.

Okay, so from what I can gather, you can't actually create a chain of shaders in OpenGL ES.

If my engine is designed so each mesh handles its own draw calls and selects its own shader program, but there are also elements which are common to all programs in the engine, I would either have to copy and paste those bits across, or make the engine create an entirely new shader program for every possible stack of programs I need.

How to know if you’re a sadist: When you drive and you see a small animal cross the road, you step on the accelerator as your face stays in a deadpan, except you are now slightly smiling.

Innovation has the remarkable trait that people, including those who are themselves innovators, rarely recognise it as such until it’s too late to bet on.

Innovators can recognise copycats, frauds and hacks most of the time, but they can only recognise other innovators some of the time.

Innovation is to have a idea that other people laugh at because it’s absurd. It’s a bit like making a joke, except you’re being serious.

Startup incubators have a problem: They don’t actually attract the best and the brightest. They attract people in their mid-20s with ideas and ambitions.

They do not pair people who are trying to do insane things (index the entire web, make an OS, create a new device category) with insanely smart people (people who actually remember all the stuff they learned in college and are actively experimenting with it).

Instead, you get hipsters trying to outhip each other.

I'm not sure why we expect the average programmer to have a computer science degree.

- So, do you have a degree?

- Yes. Computer science.

- What's your line of work?

- Botnets and blogspam sites.

- Does any of that require a degree?

- I don't remember anything from college. In fact, I don't remember anything, period. Can you tell me what year this is?

Today's little project:

https://observablehq.com/@thor/why-gamma-encoding-is-important

A demonstration of why gamma correction is essential when processing images.

Before the British had a decent navy and an empire, they were hilarious. All sorts of amateurish attempts at trade. Piracy was the only thing they could pull off, and the Queen even encouraged it! I mean, it basically sounds like the sort of thing North Korea would do if they were an island nation.

You may think that instructions, data and multi-level abstractions are the stuff of computer science.

In reality, all humans are huge nerds.

For example, some humans will strip a human naked and lock him away for years if he does not adhere to mutation rules for specific bits of data.

"Specific bits of data" being money, "mutation rules" being laws of banking and finance and "lock him away" being imprisonment for financial fraud.

This sharpening of my mind when I’m supposed to be past my prime makes me wonder what these ADHD medications could have done for me when I was actually at my cognitive peak around age 25.

ADHD didn’t dull a sharp knife. Rather, it took a scalpel and turned it into a sharp knife. It turned a surgeon into a chef, you might say.

I have been given my scalpel, but I don’t know what it would’ve been like if it were new.

The medications I’m on for my ADHD have had the bizarre effect of reversing the cognitive decline you get with age.

Your peak is said to be your mid-20s, which sounds about right to me. Most great scientific papers were written by people about that age.

I’m 36 right now and I’m by no means old, but people over 30 aren’t “young and promising” anymore.

My interest in mathematics and programming has not only been rekindled, my mind actually feels sharper than it ever did.

I’m not convinced that work/life balance is real for programmers.

Ah, yes, Monday. The finest day of the week.