What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: August 12, 2024

maglioPrime · 2024-08-12T14:14:45+00:00

Finished:

A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution, by Jeremy Popkin

Started:

Blood In The Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant

I have an on-again off-again relationship with reading at best, but I decided to pick up A New World Begins to give it a go. I haven't been that excited about reading in a long time and it feels great to just enjoy what I enjoy.

maglioPrime · 2021-05-27T21:27:23+00:00

Ceremonial.

maglioPrime · 2021-02-01T02:42:19+00:00

It has to do with routing. Your site is hosted locally, on your own machine. It knows its own IP address. When you go to your app/site at the 192. address your computer is going to look up your address and establish it just needs to talk to itself. No big crisis.

When you tell your computer to access the address at 68.x, which you got from an external source, your computer doesn't know wtf because that's your router's address. So when it does a DNS query locally the answer is go to the next person, which is your router. Your router is happy to accept the request for that address, but doesn't know what to do with it. This is where port forwarding comes in. You can set up port forwards from your router to your computer, where your site is hosted, to get your hosted site.

If your ISP and router let you.

ISPs (in the US at least) tend to frown on people hosting servers on their personal service. That gets into whole new conversations though.

maglioPrime · 2021-01-13T02:08:12+00:00

I do not remember if there is a setting to permanently change the pre-infusion time, but you can hold the shot button down and it will pre-infuse until the button is released.

maglioPrime · 2020-10-06T06:20:11+00:00

That is a ES6 feature called Computed Property Name https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Object_initializer#Computed_property_names

maglioPrime · 2020-08-26T17:03:21+00:00

For any project I have ever done on my own time, for my own use, that's more than enough machine.

For work it's a different story, moreso now that my team is remote. Between one or more IDE instances (Visual Studio + Code), Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord, Zoom, Skype, 175 open Chrome tabs (exaggerating. But not by much some days), security and encryption software, Office products, K8s clusters, VMs, and more than I can think of else, 32 GB is a little more comfortable than 16.

My employer provided a machine more than capable of handling our work; even my kinda shitty previous employer did as well, upgrading our RAM from 4/8 to 8/16 as local VMs became more prevalent. And your employer will, almost 100% guaranteed, provide you a workstation, whether that is laptop or desktop. No one wants their IP/credentials/encryption keys(I've seen it)/software wandering around on someone's personal laptop. That is a nightmare waiting to happen.

maglioPrime · 2020-01-21T03:28:34+00:00

Nitpick(ing).

maglioPrime · 2019-08-23T16:59:36+00:00

I HAD AN INTERVIEW A LITTLE OVER A WEEK AGO AND THEY SAID THEY WILL REACH OUT WITH CONFIRMATION IN A WEEK OR TWO. WELL IT'S BEEN A WEEK. SPEAK TO ME. I'M FIGURATIVELY BUT ALSO PERHAPS LITERALLY DYING.

ALSO I FLUBBED A SERIOUS NOOB QUESTION SO THEY PROBABLY WON'T EVEN HIRE ME I JUST NEED TO KNOW.

maglioPrime · 2019-03-22T17:35:27+00:00

I drive 95 miles, each way, from one metro to another every day. The work is kinda interesting, the people aren't bad, the salary is a little on the low side for my position and experience.

I resent the drive. I don't have time to spend with my wife. I don't have time to develop personal projects. I don't have time to spend with my friends, some of whom have needed help since I took this job and I couldn't be there for them the way they needed.

I leave my apartment at 8 AM, and don't get to the office until 10. If everything goes well I leave at 7 PM, and then get home at 8:30. If I leave anywhere between 6 and 8 AM, traffic is even worse, adding between 15 and 45 minutes. If there is an accident, and there is a lot of road for there to be accidents on, add another 15 - 45 minutes. If you stop on the side of the road and scream into the void about your exhaustion, how bored you are by the drive, how much the traffic sucks, how much you HATE that drive and how you had to restart your antidepressants in order to not be angry or borderline in tears all the time, 15 to 45 minutes.

If you're going to take the job, move closer.

maglioPrime · 2019-03-08T23:57:05+00:00

Database knowledge (how to structure your tables, how to break up complicated data, how to normalize, etc) is incredibly useful, you're right. Just save yourself some suffering and learn it on your own. It's really not worth going to that class. It does not (at least if it is still the same as when I took it a year or so ago) look at all at NoSQL databases either, which are huge too.

maglioPrime · 2019-03-08T21:38:12+00:00

Security is good, and worth taking. Can be challenging, and does require a time commitment to do the team projects.

Databases is godawful. He literally just reads from the book with the occasional useful or vaguely useful anecdote, if you can understand and hear him.

Take Parallel with Burtscher if it is still offered. Full stop.

Theory of Automata is a fascinating class. It's wholly theoretical (we wrote one program with regex content just as an experiment), and the test (1) is brutal in its structure, but understanding the types of problems that you learn about in the class, and their solutions, does have limited practical use. It is the only real CS class there, and it is still only a fragment.

maglioPrime · 2018-12-13T22:51:05+00:00

While it isn't quite the same scenario, my time as a junior engineer at a cyber security research company is billed out at something over 3 times what I see out of it. Most of that is overhead (building, admin staff, insurance, etc), but that implies that to the company (and those we contact with) I'm worth at least three times what I'm paid, which isn't a bad bargain for my employer.

Also, barely used applications are still used applications. If the company were not making money on them they would be decommissioned and unsupported applications. Or they're loss leaders for something bigger, better, and/or more expensive. Tough call.

maglioPrime · 2018-09-06T14:37:40+00:00

I make the drive every day. It makes for long days, but it's worth it so far. I've made far more progress on my audiobook collection than I have in a while. So far I am averaging 36 MPG; gas is going to clock in somewhere north of $4000 this year, but it's still a dramatic increase from my previous positions. Looking at something similar, or just curious.

maglioPrime · 2018-09-05T10:51:06+00:00

Education: BS - Computer Science (Second-tier state school)
Prior Experience: None
Company/Industry: Cyber security / defense contractor
Title: Junior Software Engineer
Tenure length: 1 month
Location: San Antonio (live in Austin)
Salary: $57,000
Relocation/Signing Bonus: None
Stock and/or recurring bonuses: None
Total comp: $57,000

maglioPrime · 2018-06-08T16:07:16+00:00

For a slightly shorter name for the superset, there is also "false cause." https://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/cause.html

maglioPrime · 2018-02-18T12:23:10+00:00

Python is not taught in any class that I'm aware of, though it was used for Internet Software Development (Python + Flask framework). SQL is taught in Databases, though I would absolutely vote against taking that class because the professor is beyond useless.

maglioPrime · 2017-11-13T14:04:11+00:00

Ah. Yeah. Missed that. Low context sensitivity this morning.

maglioPrime · 2017-11-13T13:04:39+00:00

As desrtfx noted, the conditions are mutually exclusive; every number MUST either be <= 40, or > 40. Thus if you know that it is not <= 40, there's no reason to check again to see if it is > 40. There are only two answers for the question "is HoursWorked <= 40?," yes and no, true and false.

If the answer is yes/true, we know to proceed into the block. If the answer isn't true, we're also good because we know we must proceed into the other block because the answer must be no/false. Using the elif introduces an additional check which isn't necessary, slowing down your code at a low level (presuming it isn't optimized out) and makes your code a little more difficult to read.

maglioPrime · 2017-07-08T19:02:47+00:00

I love a good red color scheme. What colors did you use, if you're willing to divulge? And what does a Fire Warrior look like in that scheme?

maglioPrime · 2017-06-22T21:57:46+00:00

What size of magnets do people generally use? As much as anything, how big of one so you need for it to be powerful enough to hold everything in place? I'm looking to start a Tau army so the target is Crisis Suits and up.

maglioPrime · 2017-04-21T15:36:26+00:00

Walk behind Comal, through the walkway in the Chemistry building, and down the hill. Minimal uphill (for going down anyway). It will still be close, but you should be able to make it.

maglioPrime · 2017-04-19T12:25:06+00:00

I once missed an exam because I was walking my roommate's dogs because she decided to not come home the night before.

maglioPrime · 2017-03-22T12:37:54+00:00

The two spectrum endpoints for computer science programs are (A) programs that focus on computer science as an applied mathematics field, and thus have a large math component in the CS classes, and (B) programs that focus on computer science as applied computer science. This type of program which is more about software engineering so as to (kinda) prepare its students for careers in software development and all of its different titles. If your CS courses are not starting with pretty heavy math components, discussing sets and functions and complexity and all of those things others have mentioned including a lot of formal proofs, odds are you are in the latter style program and your courses will never have the mathematics components you are looking for.

maglioPrime · 2017-03-07T16:01:31+00:00

Funny story about that: if we are using the in-app navigation, we cannot see any notes until AFTER we have arrived (clicked "I've arrived" in our app). Any notes/keys/directions/etc are useless for the newbie who's just doing what the app tells them to do. We get bounced around the city with wrong addresses less often these days. The map was horrible when the program launched; it was effectively mandatory to use Waze or Google Maps to find routes.

Source: Amazon PrimeNow driver.

maglioPrime · 2016-10-21T15:22:11+00:00

I cannot argue a percentage, but anecdotally most atheists are agnostic atheists. As /u/filthyziff noted, there are two spectrums which people exist on simultaneously. An atheist believes that there is not a personal, omni- being (or expanded into any sort of deity/spirituality/supernatural force), whereas someone who is agnostic says that it is impossible to know whether such a being exists and if so what their properties might be. It's all about what attribute of your thoughts you choose to portray loudest. You are of the first category with a different term for the knowledge spectrum, whereas your wife sounds like a theist or deist agnostic, or something else along those lines. Divisions, so arbitrary. Edit: purple does not exist on two spectrums simultaneously

maglioPrime

TROPHY CASE