gjost

I love it! I’m a big fan of old.reddit.com. I love how it craps a ton of info and links into a small space. Regular lemmy.sdf.org just requires too much scrolling to see anything.

Not that it has to look just like old.reddit.com, of course, but the density of this layout is great.

I got a 12U roadcase rack at Guitar Center last year. It’s nice but it’s only 17in deep which means my choices for server chassis were pretty limited and I haven’t been able to find any rack rails that fit.

If you had these books plus maybe one more about assembly programming you knew pretty much everything there was to know about the C-64. No stacks, frameworks, abstractions, etc, etc. There’s a part of me that is really nostalgic for this era of programming.

On the other hand, with the C-64 I only ever got so far. I was really isolated back then. I only had one other programmer friend and when he moved away I had nobody to share my enthusiasm with, and I hit some roadblocks with the programs I was trying to write, and it just kinda fizzled away until the Web and higher-level languages made things easier and forums and search engines let me connect with people.

Yeah just tell 'em to fuck off.

Hello world! I spend my work days logged in to some servers which if I interpret mtr correctly are just up the hill from SDF in Tukwila. I joined SDF in 2010 after watching SMJ’s interview on the BBS Documentary. It’s neat to be able to log in to this living UNIX system and type w and see a bunch of other people logged in doing their thing whatever that is.

I’ve been a Reddit user since almost the beginning - my carefully curated set of subreddits have been my favorite way to follow my interests over the years. I love old.reddit’s clunkiness and information density. I’m intrigued by decentralization and federation and think it would be cool to move away from the big silos.

I really wish there was a compact/old.reddit theme for Lemmy

I was able to prod ChatGPT into writing a Python function for computing the compass direction between two points on a 2D grid. It came up with something that worked, but I had to iterate many times and took about as long as it took to google the math when I wrote the function for myself.

My programming career has been built on googling around to explore problems somebody asked me to solve, and then synthesizing the results I found into code. My first reaction was that ChatGPT might short-circuit that process. What would my career have been like if this had been available back then? I feel like all that googling over the years gave me a sense of problem spaces and a certain amount of domain knowledge, and I would have missed out on that with ChatGPT. On the other hand, it took knowledge to know whether its answer was correct…

The other thing I thought was that during my career I’ve gone from hand-coded HTML to Perl CGI to Cold Fusion to PHP to web frameworks, and also from straight HTML to CSS to frameworks like Bootstrap. Each time I’ve fretted over not being involved in the layers below. Is ChatGPT just another layer?

Of course, I have no clue about the browser internals, or about the OS, but I know that somebody does. At some level it’s a clockwork engine that can be picked at and understood. ChatGPT feels different, people don’t actually know its internals, and I worry that future generations of programmers will be generating code that they don’t understand, and maybe nobody will be able to understand.