As a society and as individual computer scientists, none of us actually know what a computer is or how to use them. All programming languages are guesses, mere attempts to encode our natural-language reasoning and philosophy in the purely syntactic and formal fashion required by computers. Don’t let yourself become biased in favor of specific languages; instead, understand that all languages are bad in different ways.
I’m not really sensing contrition here. For those who don’t know, contrition is the part of an apology where the apologizers commit to changing something about themselves, improving who they are as people, so that the trespass is not repeated in the future. Without contrition, dtolnay will do this again.
Well, dtolnay is ex-Palantir. Perhaps he should not receive the benefit of Hanlon’s razor.
Most consumer-grade NICs have a default MAC address which is retrievable with device drivers, but delegate (Ethernet) packet assembly to the OS. If the OS asks the NIC to emit a packet, then the NIC often receives the packet as a blob, DMA’d from main memory, and emits the bytes as octets. Other NICs do manage packet assembly, but allow overwriting the default MAC address. By the time I was learning Linux, we had GNU MAC Changer available in userland with the macchanger command, and many distros have configuration for randomizing or hardcoding MAC addresses upon boot.
I want to say that this is all because olden corporate network management policies could require a technician to replace a NIC without changing the MAC address, but more likely it is because framing and packet assembly was not traditionally handed to a second controller, and was instead bit-banged or MMIO’d by the CPU.
In the Nix ecosystem, I appreciate Cachix quite a bit. It’s much easier than running a Hydra.
Conway’s Law is a category-theoretic statement; it asserts the existence of a homomorphism on graphs, mapping from modules to code authors. Quoting Conway’s original paper:
Speaking as a mathematician might, we would say that there is a homomorphism from the linear graph of a system to the linear graph of its design organization.
The author does not really show an understanding or respect for the underlying maths.
Hi! Please don’t link anything from this subdomain again. It was considered a plague back on Reddit, and this sort of content-free post shouldn’t be encouraged here either.
It’s a little surprising to see Conda mentioned but not Nix.