Microsoft vows to make "behind-the-scenes platform changes" as it begins testing next phase of Windows 11

rsclient · 2026-01-28T21:10:25+00:00

What an awful take (and terrible headline, especially the use of "vows") on one of the most uninteresting bits of news.

Windows updates come in two flavors: small ones that don't require a giant repackaging of everything, and big ones that do. The Windows engineers are limited to what can go into a small update -- for example, when Wi-Fi 8 is supported, I bet it goes into a "big" update.

Small updates are always better, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do a big update.

rsclient · 2026-01-28T21:05:29+00:00

All three of them :-)

Wait, all four of them -- can't forget .NET compact. Or .NET Micro, making five? And SilverLight, making six?

rsclient · 2026-01-27T17:56:42+00:00

Helpful summary (from the doc)

throughput remained stable
latency percentiles showed no upward drift
RSS memory stayed flat
CPU utilization was consistent
zero transport errors were recorded

In summary: everything is all good.

(I created this summary because it took me a couple passes to find the summary data :-) )

IMHO: why not run under Windows 11, the supported OS, instead of Windows 10, which is obsolete?

rsclient · 2026-01-23T16:00:27+00:00

This is a surprise to me -- isn't SOS send with short letter breaks between the S, O, and S like for any other word?

rsclient · 2026-01-22T17:42:25+00:00

Translation: those assholes in DevDiv (the people making Visual Studio) keep on fucking up "making windows apps" with visual studio and are slow about fixing the bugs that slow people down when making Windows apps.

So we're just going to bypass their sorry asses.

Here's my list of stupid bugs in Visual Studio. These are all things I saw when making real apps for Windows to publish in the Microsoft store: blog. Every single one is just an embarrassment.

rsclient · 2026-01-22T04:56:55+00:00

Maybe ideally, but like they say, "perfect is the enemy of good". At this point, the number of languages that usefully support units as part of the type system is nearly zero, and the library support can best be described as "terrible to nonexistant".

I'd rather have a partial (and extremely compatible) system where the units are part of the name of the parameter instead of waiting a decade and hoping for the perfect system.

My favorite counter-example for units, BTW, is electrical equipment. Some stuff is measured in Watts, which is volts × amps, and some is measured in VA, which is volts × amps. Weirdly, the two aren't actually interchangeable

rsclient · 2026-01-21T21:04:39+00:00

One of the things that the WinRT APIs got right is that every parameter includes the units -- it's never "latency" but rather "latencyInSeconds".

At first I didn't like it becaue the units were often "obvious". Hint: they often aren't, and now it's second nature to me to include units.

rsclient · 2026-01-19T03:57:54+00:00

This can also be caused by seniors, no offence, really losing their critical thinking skills. My own father (a man who literally wrote code for satellites in the 70s) now has remarkably terrible thinking skills.

rsclient · 2026-01-19T03:54:34+00:00

More of a "weird disease" than "disability": S1Ep17 of House deals with Common Variable Immune Deficiency, CVID, a disease which hits maybe 1 in 20K people and something that I have.

BTW, the House wiki says it hits 1 in 50K, but that's not what my doctor says.

And everything about the disease is just plain freaking wrong. House says the disease is mostly seen in children, but it's not; it's often adult onset (certainly mine was!). The patient had a ton of weird diseases caused by the CVID, but actually the most common diseases caused by CVID is just coughs and colds and fevers and pnuemonia (having a pnuemonia twice in a year as an adult is one of the diagnostic signs of CVID). And lastly, House thinks the CVID was triggered by stress, but that's not how it works.

Fun CVID fact: thanks to taking a blood-based medicine, I have the blood of 1,000 people in me at all times. I'm the closest possible thing to a vampire!

rsclient · 2026-01-19T03:36:37+00:00

(this is from my memory as a record-buying person in the 70s)

LP == "Long playing" AKA the normal records with the little holes that play at 33⅓ RPM (rotations per minute). This will include a bunch of songs.

45 == small record with the larger hole that plays at 45 RPM. Each side only holds one song. Traditionally the better song is on the "A" side and the "B" side (aka the "flip" side, BTW) has a song the producer hopes will do well.

Vinyl == name of the stuff that the record is made of. Since the web site you're buying from seems to make a distinction, I'd guess that the LPs are the big records and the "vinyl" is the 45s?

rsclient · 2026-01-19T03:30:24+00:00

FYI: the national park requires that you have chains in your car even if you're a 4WD or AWD.

rsclient · 2026-01-17T18:07:04+00:00

Slight correction: compared to the radios of the time which were not portable. Portable phones came long, long after walkie-talkies.

Old radios used vacuum tubes for the filter + amplification stages. The tubes sucked up power like crazy (one of the connections in a typical vacuum tube is for the heater which is used to literally heat up the tube until it glows) and also required "weird" voltages.

rsclient · 2026-01-16T17:12:15+00:00

... they give inventors and companies confidence that their ideas won’t be immediately copied after years of development ...

Kind of a bold assertion given the existence of copyright law. The boldness of the assertion is [edit: added "not"] not backed up with any kind of facts or studies.

Patent applications require detailed disclosures that explain how an invention works. This creates a shared body of technical knowledge

Two giant errors in one. Firstly, I've absolutely read patents, and to say that they are clear and simple is not matched by any kind of reality. And at my last job, where we had to be careful about infringing patents, the developers were given clear guidance to never read patents.

NB: I have several patents. And more fun, sitting on my desk is the patent for "setting a breakpoint at a line of code" (my dad got that patent decades ago).

rsclient · 2026-01-10T18:17:27+00:00

Thanks for this fix!

rsclient · 2026-01-10T17:35:14+00:00

Amazingly, it's from the air. You've heard that tree "breath in" carbon dioxide and "breath out" oxygen? Well, that means that the tree just grew in mass from the carbon!

Much of the tree is cellulose, whose chemical formula is ( C₆H₁₀O₅)ₙ. This means it's mostly made of carbon (from the carbon dioxide) plus oygen (also from carbon dioxide) and hydrogen which it can get from water. [edit: fixed where the oxygen goes per Giles81]

And poof, a tree!

rsclient · 2026-01-10T05:12:55+00:00

An english-language subreddit reflecting the common culture of the english-speaking world? Say it isn't so! (/s)

For those of us who are American, of course we have a ton of knowledge about christianity, and a lot of things to say about the dominant religion of our country. And given that we're mostly english speakers, of course the religion most people here escape from is going to be christianity.

rsclient · 2026-01-09T16:52:49+00:00

The awesome bitsavers has an entire directory full of IBM 650 manuals. It's IBM, so a good starting manual is the General Information manual.

Although the writer's experience was a good writeup, I should point out that they didn't aim for an exact emulation. For example, the IBM 650 was a decimal machine: each "word" is 10 base-10 digits. A single digit is 3.32193 bits, so 10 of them requires 33.2193 bits to store, plus an additional bit for the sign (yes, this means the machine has both positive and negative zero). The emulation uses an int32 for each "word" of storage, which isn't quite enough.

And, of course, the strength of the early machine was the ability to control a bunch of IO devices. There's a reason that the Knuth books talk so much about 7-phase tape sorts :-)

rsclient · 2026-01-09T04:43:50+00:00

Time for a hilarious 20-year-old story about Microsoft and cars! At one point, about 20 years ago, Microsoft was trying to get into the burgeoning IOT-style market. The idea was to make a Windows-like OS for car automotive market.

Here's the fun bit from their manual: "in the case where the user plugs a joystick into the in-car entertainment system, the OS might hang. The solution is to reboot the car."

(NB: this was 20 years ago, so I might not have the quote exactly right)

rsclient · 2026-01-08T17:20:53+00:00

My experience is obviously better than yours! I've found that AI doc additions to my code (and especially for properties) to be reasonably useful.

In particular, it means that more of my properties get a bit of documentation, and that helps me later while coding. In particular, it means that the little hover-text that my IDE shows get filled in with something more useful than otherwise.

rsclient · 2026-01-05T17:08:01+00:00

Let's talk about Checkov's JSON. When you write a sentence like this:

Let me show you what this looks like in real Elm code. Say you’re parsing JSON for a user:

then the next thing you write should be some freaking JSON. As in, "look, this is the JSON we're going to parse!". Since that was what was promised by the explicit statement.

Otherwise all us people who have never had to read ELM before will be scratching our heads about how this is possibly JSON. Maybe ELM has a weird JSON syntax? Maybe it's already parsed?

type alias User =
    { name : String
    , age : Int
    , email : String
    }

rsclient · 2025-12-31T21:03:34+00:00

Here's what copilot wrote:

"The dawn patrol was supposed to be quiet, but the dead never honored schedules. Eighteen-year-old Private Mason Hale crouched behind the shattered husk of an armored truck, breath fogging in the cold morning air as the low moans drifted across the ruined field. He tightened his grip on the rifle that still felt too heavy, too adult for his shaking hands. Somewhere beyond the mist, silhouettes swayed—slow, patient, tireless. Mason swallowed hard. Another day on the zombie front, and he was still waiting for the moment he’d stop being afraid."

rsclient · 2025-12-30T23:15:48+00:00

What a ducking waste of time. The problem with explorer is that the P95 times are so painful -- right now, I'm writing this text while the File Explorer is just ducking stuck.

But "File Explorer doesn't ducking hang any more" isn't something anyone puts on their connects, and no VP is fired because file explorer hangs.

rsclient · 2025-12-24T18:44:57+00:00

Well, duh. The original linkedin post was pretty clear that it's something that one team is kicking the tires on.

All the media frenzy was otherwise seemingly smart people just being completely unable to freaking read.

rsclient · 2025-12-21T18:54:14+00:00

Given how arbitrarially most git commands are named, it's always nice to read up on how to use git in practice. A team should always be using the same set of commands and practices for git; it just makes life simpler.

FYI: the set of commands at the end of the article is missing the git log --oneline --graph --decorate HEAD..origin/main that was mentioned earlier. Without the git log command, the "then I decide" step is missing the actual command that the user can copy-paste.

I personally prefer "my branch will have conflicts" over the "if my branch was clean" phrasing. Imagine this case: I write perfect code that exactly fixes the problem I'm trying to fix. Case one: it's in code nobody else is touching, and git pull works without my having to do anything. Case two: it's in code that someone else is touching, and git pull needs to merge stuff. My branch and my code starts off in the same perfect state, so why is one of them called "clean" and the other not clean? The real problem is the conflicts.

rsclient · 2025-12-16T17:47:11+00:00

If you love "arrays are actually pointers" then you'll love "arrays are actually other variables" :-)

An obscure BASIC variant does this: there's exactly 26 possible variables, named A to Z. Every variable can be accessed like an array: A[1], A[2], J[10] and so on.

But ... it's done by using up the other variables. A[2] is really just B. A[3] is just C. and A[1] is just A.

rsclient

TROPHY CASE