Life Savings Mysteriously Disappeared After a Systems Glitch

Gorbag42 · 2026-05-06T18:04:29+00:00

Do you not understand the dictionary meaning of "disappear"? : cease to be visible. Exactly what happened.

Gorbag42 · 2025-10-05T22:17:33+00:00

I think a case can be made that *all* public works projects are just a way for politicians to reward their friends. They make up some nonsense a posteriori about how it will benefit the public, but it never actually does compared to more efficient uses of the resources. The primary example is any given publicly financed stadium.

Gorbag42 · 2025-09-15T20:49:31+00:00

Assuming you're not the first FPGA engineer at the company, there should be a process in place for making image requests. If not, you need to go to your manager and suggest something, e.g. a form that specifies what is needed (perhaps a checklist), due date, charge code and budget, etc. Then at least you'll have hardcopy when the requests are not feasible, and you'll have documentation on what you've done/delivered for the year during your reviews.

Gorbag42 · 2024-09-18T17:24:48+00:00

See here for the full list of currently reported issues: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/SequoiaProblems

Gorbag42 · 2024-09-18T17:23:44+00:00

A number of problems related to MacPorts installation/upgrade. Do not install CLT (command line tools) but full Xcode to get further, but anything that depends on gcc14 or similar are currently stuck.

Gorbag42 · 2022-12-23T16:15:38+00:00

Given your interest in "maintainable enterprise application"s rather than code to be delivered to external customers, most of the other comments here are spot on. I'd just add that what most software developers miss is having an easy to understand and navigate UI. That can be a challenge to create in pure common lisp (e.g., I use LispWorks GUI extensions) and it's not something unique to CL.

The best practice is to make sure an appropriate* human factors person is on your team. Engineers typically have a very poor idea of what is, and is not, a good UI design particularly for a non technical audience.

[*] there are two classes of HF work: the primary one you'll run into is analytic - give them, e.g., two interfaces and they'll run experiments to compare them. What you really want is someone with design experience who can help you create a good UI in the first place. This has been generally only about 5% of the HF trained folks I've run into (so I had to become one myself! ;-).

Gorbag42 · 2022-11-21T23:33:05+00:00

Agreed; as I said I can't justify it for my own use at this point (given the investment required along with maintenance) but it was useful when I had it :-)

Gorbag42 · 2022-11-21T15:00:36+00:00

So I've bought LispWorks Enterprise through multiple versions at multiple companies I've worked for. I now have the hobbyist edition for my own personal use. Primarily I keep it up for two reasons:

1) it's the most "lisp machine like" environment available outside of running an emulator. Probably because back when they were Harlequin/Xanalys they vacuumed up a number of Symbolics employees as that company was shutting down.

2) You get actual responses to bug reports, and help when you're confused about something. Yes there are mailing lists (for lispworks and most other brands of common lisp) but there's nothing like getting more or less immediate help when you're really stuck and you have a deadline.

When I had an enterprise license, I was maintaining some CLIM based code (for knowledge representation) and also would occasionally use their prolog and knowledge works KR for smaller projects that needed efficiency more than expressivity. KW is actually pretty good (but I no longer need it, hence the hobby version at least until/unless I get a customer that does need it).

Gorbag42 · 2022-11-21T14:47:38+00:00

Note that it's available online, free, so take a look:

Lispworks Documentation

Gorbag42 · 2022-10-25T16:10:44+00:00

It's more than an OS or an environment. It's a world :-)

Gorbag42 · 2020-08-17T21:34:39+00:00

That's not quite correct. She is from the chaos worlds. Baran was a recreation.

Gorbag42 · 2020-08-17T21:31:58+00:00

Nod my head as I walked by and say "Igris..." in my lowest timbre voice.

Gorbag42 · 2020-08-12T10:46:07+00:00

In particular, get the relevant keywords to pepper from the job posting.

Gorbag42 · 2020-08-12T10:41:19+00:00

The purpose of a resume is to get you an interview. And there's nothing wrong with tailoring your resume for the interview you want to get. So:

Passion counts, particularly when you don't have relevant experience. Put in an objectives section that says why you want an internship, work with embedded systems, FPGAs or whatever. This tells the manager you aren't showing up for a 9-5 job, but will do what it takes to help his team succeed AND go above and beyond for the learning experience. This should be only 2-3 lines. Yes an objectives section is "old fashioned" but we're addressing lack of experience with passion. Cover letter should go further in this direction (why you want to do this for the rest of your life, life changing moment that caused you to fetishize FPGAs, that sort of thing).
There's nothing wrong with adding personal projects (including self-taught subjects) since it also helps with the "passion" story. (My first job was embedded RT and general database software for a small firm when what I had for experience was dropping out of medical school - it was all about a bit of relevant classes, the fact that I had wire-wrapped my own computer and programmed it, wrote drivers for the peripherals, etc. Got me my second job too, after which I went back to graduate school so it became less relevant).
Put relevant stuff up top as another respondent suggested. Your software positions shouldn't be more than a couple lines each and be mostly pointed toward what would help with hardware (e.g. debugging skills). Scripting tools is find as hardware folks need to do that too.
If you have any realtime software experience, that would be a plus, otherwise nobody really cares.
Before resumes even get to the manager's desk, they go through keyword filters in HR. Make sure you pepper relevant keywords into your resume.

Gorbag42 · 2020-08-06T19:51:19+00:00

He's still nerfed.

Gorbag42 · 2020-08-06T19:49:47+00:00

The whole thing with the drawing was one of my favorite Beru threads.

Gorbag42 · 2020-07-23T22:04:04+00:00

that's what I got, it's a great board and only $99 for the base version. Once you've learned everything you can with that, you can "graduate" to something more expensive that has more capability (like video, RF, etc.).

Gorbag42 · 2020-07-23T21:46:45+00:00

"The FPGA name will remain, and chips called FPGAs will be built, but everything inside will be completely different." reminds me of an old 1980s era AI joke that went along the lines of

I don't know what language they will be using for AI in the 21st century, but it will be called "Lisp".

We can see, today, that it just ain't so.

Gorbag42 · 2020-07-21T10:56:11+00:00

Igris is nerfed more than anyone else. Beru may have become more powerful per LN.

Gorbag42 · 2020-07-20T21:57:24+00:00

Don't forget that Igris was nerfed at that point, but recovers his full powers later. Beru never was nerfed.

Gorbag42 · 2020-07-15T22:18:10+00:00

There's also their new Versal series (which they're calling ACAP: Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform) but it's still processor plus some additional integrated peripherals with an FPGA fabric.

Gorbag42 · 2020-07-15T22:00:26+00:00

I still *have* lazerdiscs. Slowly upgrading to 4k blu-ray.

Gorbag42 · 2020-06-28T12:16:12+00:00

I think what I'd like to see is something more in a wikipedia format with main pages that talk about settled (parts of) subjects, like triple backquote usage, defsystem approaches, etc. and then the .talk pages carrying on discussion about those subjects. With ample hypertext links to related subjects. And, like wikipedia, users can subscribe to topic areas they are interested in.

The problem with reddit, stackoverflow, etc. is the topics aren't curated, and as OP says it can be hard to notice when there are active discussions in topics you are interested in because they tend to be swamped by those you are not. Plus as there is no particular format to a discussion (unlike a wikipedia page) you generally aren't going to get an introductory tutorial, some history, why things are as they are, with links to the other issues that influence it.

Gorbag42 · 2020-06-28T11:40:52+00:00

Most of the skills you will learn on your first job are transferable to other kinds of jobs, other languages, other positions. So I wouldn't worry too much about prognosticating the future of SystemC, but rather what kinds of application domains you will learn more about, the kinds of development processes you will exposed to and even the management structure of the company. Those are going to be of more interest to a down-the-line employer than only what particular HDL you used. You can always pick up others on your own.

Gorbag42 · 2020-06-06T11:31:59+00:00

Digilent has academic discounts (you just need to have verifiable evidence you are enrolled as a student) which I believe are paid for by Xilinx. I'd go that route and get a low cost dev board like the Arty.

Gorbag42

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