Category: facebook

November 18 2020, 00:19

A very interesting lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U

I only post worthwhile videos on Facebook, so take a look, you won’t regret it (especially if you understand programmers even a little)

“Software and technology has changed every aspect of the world we live in. At one extreme are the ‘mission critical’ applications – the code that runs our banks, our hospitals, our airports, and phone networks. Then there’s the code we all use every day to browse the web, watch movies, create spreadsheets… not quite so critical, but still code that solves problems and delivers services.

But what about the code that only exists because somebody wanted to write it? Code created just to make people smile, laugh, maybe even dance? Maybe even code that does nothing at all, created just to see if it was possible?

Join Dylan Beattie – programmer, musician, and creator of the Rockstar programming language – for an entertaining look at the art of code. We’ll look at the origins of programming as an art form, from Conway’s Game of Life to the 1970s demoscene and the earliest Obfuscated C competitions. We’ll talk about esoteric languages and quines – how DO you create a program that prints its own source code? We’ll look at quine relays, code golf, and generative art, and we’ll explore the phenomenon of live coding as performance – from the pioneers of electronic music to modern algoraves and live coding platforms like Sonic Pi.”

November 17 2020, 03:22

What a funny newsletter we received from the “Electronic Journal”. This is an “electronic diary” used by a couple thousand schools in Russia, from Moscow all the way to the outskirts. And look, they’re offering scholarships to American schools! Let’s start reading.

As they say, “fact check”. Firstly, it turns out they are not offering scholarships, but a chance to get a discount on a scholarship. What a strange school. Amerigo. We google it — it shows that the annual cost is $62,850. We follow the link. On the Amerigo website, the price range is from $40,850-$57,000. That’s still a lot, but okay, schools vary. But they are listed. Let’s go to the first one, Carmel Catholic High School. It has a website, there’s tuition. $12,950 per year. How about that difference? By the way, this is quite a low price for a private school. All the schools in their list are Catholic. It’s a cheaper option for private schooling. Catholic ones average up to $10-15K/year. Right next to me there’s BASIS Mclean, a non-Catholic school, costing $26,600. But they don’t sell with 50% off 🙂 In general, the level of private schools in the US is pretty good compared to public ones, but darn it, marketers write such nonsense. Such marketers.

In the same letter, for some reason they write about the average SAT score — a whopping 1272 points. They write with enthusiasm. Elizaveta Alieva, check this out. That’s where you should have studied! With such scores, one can dream about universities at the level of Temple University (100th place) or perhaps higher, if very lucky or if there’s a lot more than just grades. “Annually, nearly 100% of graduates continue their education at universities, including prestigious ones like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, NYU, Yale…”. Tricky phrase. Just so you know—a perfect SAT score is 1600, and you need at least 1500, if not nearly perfect, to get into Stanford. If the school’s average score is 1272, yet so many get into the “Ivy League”, it means there must be some really studious folks scoring 1000 on the SAT at that school.

November 14 2020, 00:14

This is how I work. Outside the second-floor window, there’s this guy standing all day with a jackhammer pounding the wall. Seriously, all day long, he has a lot to hammer away. He’ll be back again on Monday.

It’s quite strange to explain to people far from the profession that what’s on my monitor is not a Matrix screensaver, but rather informative Hybris logs from Kubernetes, which I stared at for several minutes and probably at some point exclaimed “eureka” because I eventually spotted the cause of a failure in them.

But as a screensaver, it’s pretty cool too