This is so true tho

  • Corbin@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Discussed previously (here, there).

    I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?)

  • agentTeiko@piefed.socialEnglish
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    2 months ago

    Its almost like his name was Dennis Richie and its a shame a blow hard like Jobs died around the same time as him and overshadowed his passing and his legendary legacy.

  • SalamiDommie@lemmus.orgEnglish
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    2 months ago

    The amount of businesses with things you just can’t touch for whatever reason is surprising.

    The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.

    • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
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      2 months ago

      Social collapse isn’t an exciting day in your life, it’s a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.

    • LePoisson@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.

      Reminds me of the Imperium in Warhammer 40k how a lot of the tech they use is barely understood or some of it is not understood at all. Like the adeptus mechanicus believe in the Omnissiah (me too) and a lot of what they do is purely ritualistic.

      But lots of those rituals are just stuff like turning something on in the right order. Or other mundane things that have become an arcane ritual after thousands of years that need doing for a thing to work right but nobody remembers why it needs to be done or how the thing works. Just that these are things you must do to please the machine spirits and make whatever random thing work right.

      Honestly there is enough complexity in enough tech nowadays that I’m sure almost all of us are doing something similar in many areas of our life. Like I would struggle to explain how the Internet works or even how my television actually creates an image on itself. Maybe a better example would be cars, a lot of people use them but don’t know anything about necessary maintenance or basic principles of how they work.

        • mcv@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          Configure the right incantations and the machine god will serve your web pages, brother.

    • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      Or more things will happen like the Bhopal disaster where a chemical plant, over a decade or so, laid off or failed to replace everyone who knew what their carefully designed multi-layered safety systems did. When those systems aged and needed maintenance, the remaining production people took them out one by one. Then 500,000 people were gassed with cyanide. 2,200 immediate deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

      • pelya@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Written in hand-optimized assembly with individual implementation for every CPU on the planet, with integer division function in 10000 lines of code impelented with XOR and bit-shifting which is somehow 0.3% faster than CPU built-in division operation.

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
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          2 months ago

          The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.

          It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.

          • vrek@programming.devEnglish
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            2 months ago

            There is a video where a real game dev was showing how bad a specific benchmark was. It was basically read arguments, get a random number, do a for loop 10,000 times, inside there do another for loop 10,000 times, do some equation with a modulo, put result in array, pick a number from array and print to screen.

            The biggest time cost was the modulo as that’s the hot path. He basically went through and typecast all the ints to double. He got 4x the speed. It went from almost 2 seconds to less than 0.5 second just on that change. This is mostly due to cpu and compiler now using simd instructions.

            Small changes can have big impacts.

            • palordrolap@fedia.io
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              2 months ago

              Yeah, I’ve actually written quick and dirty code that used both a division and a modulus, but then went back later to use the former to calculate the latter with a multiplication and a subtraction to get a speed improvement.

              There have been other occasions where I’ve been able to replace something like average = sum / count; if average > y with if sum > count * y, when it’s not entirely obvious that y could be multiplied by anything and remain meaningful.

              But when a division can’t be avoided, you still want that genius-written magical library to take some of the sting out of it.

              • vrek@programming.devEnglish
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                2 months ago

                He didn’t do any of that. Just typecast the numbers to be doubles.

                The whole benchmark was a mess but that part specifically surprised me.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          He had to de-optimize the init sequence because the little trick he added that caused the init sequence to return a little power to the grid instead of taking it was causing grid stability issues because the returned power from offices starting up was a bit higher than the extra power required for factory startup weekday mornings.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    The myth of Steve Jobs needed the actual genius of others to exist. Steve’s gift to the world was recognizing and pointing out actual gifts tonthe world that would have otherwise gone unoticed or not brought to their full potential.

    If Steve was still around, he would have taken Ronald’s idea and had it rebuilt with a little polish and an exorbitant price tag.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        One hundred percent, but don’t forget Jony Ive. The mythology of Steve Jobs is built on the genius of Woz and the designs of Ive.

  • dracc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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    2 months ago

    Not sure if it’s part of the joke but that word means “jerk” (as in “jerk off”) in Swedish.

    • antimidas@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Most likely is. Many open source projects have a joke as a name, often containing some form of innuendo or a double meaning. Helps in maintaining the free nature of the tool (corporations don’t want anything to do with it) as well as lower expectations on professionalism. Plus it’s funny, especially if it’s an in-joke of a niche language.

      On the topic of “runk”, it’s also been loaned from Swedish to Finnish as runkata, or to runk = to jerk off. The actual act of it would be runkkaus or runkkaaminen. Can also be encountered in the form runkkari, aka a wanker (I’d assume Swedish had a matching equivalent). So the joke works in Finnish as well.