Gary Wolfe

@bhalomanush Richard Stoll complained in the ‘90s about the unreliability of info on the internet. We shifted from expensive, but curated articles, to cheap, plentiful, and less reliable ones.

@davepl1968 My first thought was, "Oh, an XOR problem." Took me a moment to see it's just XOR two lines. Allow them to overlap the middle. Simple and effective.

I'm going to give you a computer science problem, covered by a software patent (US 4,197,590). Let's see if it's "obvious" to experts in the field. You're on a monochrome display. You want to draw a PLUS sign cursor, like in a paint program, leaving the pixel in the middle unchanged. How do you draw the vertical and horizontal lines without stomping on the center pixel? Do you save the center and put it back later? Or what's your solution? No sprites, of course, all done via Get/SetPixel(x,y) only. Assume something like bool GetPixel(uint x, uint y); void SetPixel(uint x, uint y, bool b);

@grok @patricklatuszek @unusual_whales Didn’t “the conflict” begin in 1979? Imagine the cost to the whole Mideast. Not sure how it affected oil over time, though.

**The Iran conflict began in early March 2026 (~60 days ago).** Pre-conflict US average gas was ~$2.90/gallon. It's now ~$4.40 (up nearly $1.50/gal per AAA data). Americans burn ~377 million gallons/day. In the first month alone, collective extra spend was $8.4 billion. With prices still rising into May, the total extra paid is now well over $20 billion.

Trump: The increase in fuel price is a small price to pay

@saeki_hideko @TrisH0x2A There was a time where we sometimes had to push for greater efficiency. Now we can burn gigabytes of RAM and don't care.

@TrisH0x2A こういうのを神格化してはいけない。

the most famous comment in all of C programming history. written by a developer at id Software in 1999 for Quake III Arena one line of pointer casting, one bit shift, one subtraction and somehow you have 1/√x. just bit manipulation, a constant, and a final newton refinement step. the comment reads: "what the f***?"

@htmx_org Even VB6 required the IDE. I'm not sure WinForms is all that more complicated, but software development does seem like it needs a lot more overhead and boilerplate. Gone are the days of BASIC where you could just type something into the interpreter... maybe immediate mode?

there's no good reason in 2026 to have a heavy build/tool environment everything should be as easy as VB was, or at least moving in that direction

@28hHVkCrOXWFcyA @maimai_ahaha I had an RX-7. Lots of fun, but in retrospect, it was more money than I should have spent on a car. On the other hand, what other car could I have gotten that would have been as much fun (and not more expensive)? And manual shift? A 3-series was a similar price.

@maimai_ahaha 2シータースポーツカー乗っておいて正解だよ。 年取ってからなんてそんなん乗ってらんないから。

40代以上のおじさんに聞きたい。 20代の頃の自分に 今会えるとしたら何て言いますか？ 「もっと遊べ」？ 「もっと貯金しろ」？ 「あの子に告白しとけ」？ 一言だけ教えてください。 21歳の私に言われてると思って聞きます🥺

@maimai_ahaha "Don't buy that expensive RX-7. Get something more affordable!"

@maimai_ahaha "Buy Microsoft stock." 😅

@pirooooon3 @bhart1977 Are you free? Was it attainable?

@bhart1977 自由は手に入れられますか？

アメリカ人に聞きたい トランプ大統領とアメリカ人は イランを占領したいのか？ それとも他の理由があるのか？ 日本人の私にはらアメリカが どうしてイランを攻撃するのは分からない 日本はホルムズ海峡が閉鎖されて 医療品が不足して困っている

@DCDave5436 @jackrwilkie Yeah, you have to work pretty hard to find good rock music these days. As Billy Corgan recently reminded us, rock was pushed out. Even so, some of the pop songs are pretty good.

@jackrwilkie You wanna stop hearing great music from the past? Start making great music in the present. Until then, you have to endure hearing Don't Stop Believing or Separate Ways or Who's Crying Now for the umpteenth time because there are no viable alternatives on mainstream radio.

I’m not trying to hurt any Gen X feelings with this, but we as a society have GOT to chill with the Journey music. They were on 3 stations at the same time today. It’s been 40 years. Move on already.

@Mike_Preston17 @_quietwarrior I guess I need to reread his book, but I don't recall him pushing for polymorphism. These days, it seems like the general consensus is that composition is preferable to inheritance.

I studied the Gang of Four in University and red some of Bob's posts online, then learned SOLID, TDD, DRY from other sources. I've gradually stopped using all of them and despise polymorphism (the way it's taught, primarily, not necessarily the technique itself, which is severely theoretical and not realistic to the real world.) "C# adopts literally everything uncle Bob talks about" Yes, but you don't have to conform to any of Bob's ideas with C#. That's my point, in a nutshell. For example, I hate how polymorphism is used. Not everything needs a grand, planned OO architecture that only makes sense to an unhinged Senior programmer. That's a communication problem made worse by a practice that really isn't understood well. Polymorphism is for establishing variety, not for making deep hierarchies. If Clean Code or Bob pushes that, then I'm against it. Seems so.

"C# is just a Java derivative" It's also powering modern game development, running most enterprises (that have figured out that Java still needs a SLOW JVM). "Small fraction" Bob, you have NO IDEA what C# is capable of. Your response is VERY telling that you've not taken your own advice and tried that language. That, or you tried it and didn't go deep enough to understand what it can REALLY DO. Is it not possible for a 'slice' to be better than its predecessor's AND competitors, even if it's only 5th on the TIOBE? Is it not possible for a multi-paradigm lang such as C# to do what it was designed to do - let the dev use multiple paradigms of OTHER LANGS? Because that's what C# does. You ROOKIE.

@CharlesScott @unclebobmartin They did. C# just feels more organized. Surely, that was Anders. Not that I have tried to do a comparison between the two, but I always felt like C# was a better Java. Even if you didn't think so, many businesses trusted Microsoft, so it ended up being a default choice for many.

@unclebobmartin I was a big Delphi back in the day. When Microsoft recruited Anders Hejlsberg, I thought Microsoft languages and IDE’s were going to get an upgrade.

I'm struck by the number of complaints about my assertion that C# is derivative of Java. I guess people just don't know the history of the language.

@CordasFilip @unclebobmartin One of the big complaints back then was that VB.Net wasn't like VB6. They just forced the VB syntax onto the underpinnings that C# used. You couldn't simply recompile your old VB code, but if you were used to that syntax, it was easy to move into the new system.

@unclebobmartin That's because that's a stupid take from someone that absolutely doesn't know what he is talking about. It's a derivative of VB and c++ and really had little to do with java

@unclebobmartin I hadn't used Java a lot when I first learned C# (at the beginning, around 2001), but it was pretty obvious that they had the same basic curly-bracket style, bytecode, and garbage-collection. I never went back to Java. What else would C# be like? Not JavaScript.

@htmx_org @JimInElkhorn I didn't do a lot with Access, but I loved FoxPro, the little I did use it. Very easy to learn, when coming from dBase II days, and fast, as I recall. Always seemed tragic that it was shut down. :-(

@JimInElkhorn yeah foxpro was awesome

VB6 was one of Microsoft’s crowning technical achievements, outdistanced only by excel with VBA

@IratxeGarper Before Trump tariffs, the EU imposed 10% tariffs on US cars, while the US only had 2.5% tariffs against the EU. Was that a "serious escalation"? What was that? It's OK as long as things favor the EU, right?

Trump’s 25% tariff threat on EU cars is a serious escalation that undermines trust. The EU keeps its commitments while the US breaks them. Europe must stand firm and activate the anti-coercion instrument. This isn’t partnership. No more concessions under threat.

@Republica09 @IratxeGarper Before Trump tariffs, the EU imposed 10% tariffs on US cars, while the US only had 2.5% tariffs against the EU. Don't pretend that you have some moral high ground.

@IratxeGarper Es sencillo debemos echar a todo aquel que quiera tener negocios con Trump, y dejar todo tipo de contacto con los EE.UU mientras haya gente como Trump en el gobierno. Asi que lo mejor que le puede pasar a Europa es, abrazar como hermanos a la gente de Europa, Asia y aislar EE.UU

@thevivafrei I wonder why this secret agent was named "86"? Must have been a random number.

Remember everyone, no one ever understood the term “86” to mean “murder”. No one. Ever. Oops.

@SassClassNiceAs @colossus_cap Back around 2006, we were looking for a house. I recall looking at one ranch in particular that didn't seem special, but nice, at about $275,000 -more than my budget. I thought, who can afford that? I knew it was unsustainable. It took a couple of years before crashing hard.

@colossus_cap Can I buy my dad’s $1.5m house, which he bought for less than $300k? NO FUKING WAY. Ima die a renter.

Another way to view this — can you afford to buy the home you were raised in? Almost all my friends are more successful than their parents, and their wives work… but the answer is a resounding NO

@ai_saboru_tech The series "86" is pretty rough, just based on realities of war. But the way they time the music to hit right at the emotional points.... 😬

海外ニキに質問🙋 あなたの思う、日本アニメの「一番号泣した、または感動した名シーン」は？ いいリプは引用します！