John Vert

@marklucovsky @davepl1968 to be fair, using plain C you can still get into a lot of trouble in multi-threaded environments with pre-emptive multi-tasking (and exceptions)... C++ just makes it easier to hide the trouble in constructors/destructors/overloaded operators & functions.

Some of the angst might have also been due to GDI initially and then made worse by GDI in kernel mode. I think they/we all learned a lot about how much trouble you could get into using C++ in multi-threaded environments with pre-emptive multi-tasking. Remember that phase where they used to take out locks in constructors and released them in destructors — just because. That’s probably part of the issue with number 3… Every morning I’d have a pile of stress failures: “hung no ready threads” — 96.4% of these where due to holding locks across callbacks or holding a lock and then calling a function that queued some work and the worker would need to same lock. AI would have done a better job than some of the folks we worked with back in the day…

I had this conversation at Microsoft in 1996: Me: "Why do we have our own pointer array code?" Mgr: "Because it's solid and well tested." Me: "So is vector<> in the STL!" Mgr: "Devs don't know the STL" Me: "They're devs, they should know the STL!" Mgr: "That's great, but they don't, so no." And so we continued to use and write all of our own containers and so on. Because the STL was scary.

@talankori This trick worked with Seattle/Ichiro long before LA/Ohtani

being in japan is great cause when someone asks where I’m from I say LA and then we lock eyes and say “shohei ohtani” in unison

@Pinboard Need pockets to hold your multitool

Anyone on space twitter know why astronauts can't just wear flipflops and a smile, to avoid the surprisingly irksome issues with doing laundry on a long-term space mission? Bonus points if you have thought about this before today, or even have actual data.

@marklucovsky @claudeai @vadimspivak But you have to write Fortran

@marklucovsky @claudeai @vadimspivak 55+

Hey @claudeai (@vadimspivak) — can we get a Senior Plan? 👴🏻 You know… like haircuts and the grocery store. Some of us old punch-card engineers move a little slower, think a little longer, and occasionally forget what we were debugging after standing up. Still, today I managed to hit 98% of my session quota before noon on the $17 “Everyday productivity” plan. During the cooldown I actually had to go write a bunch of code by hand — the old way. Got a lot done. Felt great about it. But honestly… if I’d had quota left, I would’ve just had you do it. Proposal: Senior Plan (60+, 40+ years in tech) • 10× the quota • Cap it at $20/month • Complimentary FORTRAN nostalgia included We promise to spend the extra tokens wisely. Mostly.

@nbevans it's a joke - especially the part where they expect you to manually load-balance quota across multiple deployments. Hello, you are a cloud, that is literally your job.

Is Microsoft AI Foundry a serious platform? We put in a quota request to increase a model from the pitiful default of 50k TPM up to something more reasonable, that was like a week ago and it's been crickets ever since

@JamesMontemagno @code Your Google Play buttons point to the wrong app, should have spent 5 more minutes on testing 😅

I needed a new website for the skiing app I build for a non-profit. The result is 🤯 - #GitHubCopilot in @code - 4 Prompts gist.github.com/jamesmontemagn… - 10 mins w/ Opus 4.5 - 30 sec deploy to GitHub Pages via Actions - Live site in under 15 minutes: meissnernordic.app

@jessicawruan I worked in the windows kernel team for ten years and I assure you I never once had to reverse a singly linked list or detect a cycle.

@aki_korhonen @davepl1968 Microsoft didn't do the same because it was common to boot multiple OSes on the same hardware. Most of those earlier OSes (DOS, OS/2, Win 3.x,etc) expected the RTC to store local time. I doubt this was "never a problem" on Linux, they probably just didn't care.

@davepl1968 This never was a problem on Linux, because RTC==UTC. I always wondered why Microsoft didn't do the same. It's the obvious solution.

Daylight Savings Time seems like a simple problem, and today with UEFI and Windows, it probably is. But it wasn't always so. In the olden days, who owned the clock? The RTC? The BIOS? MS-DOS? Windows? There was no standard, so all could do it. And many often tried. And thus Windows was left in the final unenviable position of trying to figure out of anything ELSE had already changed the clock for DST, and if not, changing the clock for you. And if it was wrong, you'd get a double bump. Hardware/BIOS: The IBM PC/AT’s RTC (MC146818) could itself jump for DST using a hard-wired rule (last Sun. in Apr → last Sun. in Oct). That rule quickly went stale as laws changed, so the safe guidance became “leave RTC-DST off and let software handle it.” Many BIOSes also shipped a “Daylight Saving” toggle that blindly added/subtracted an hour—no standard way for the OS to know it had happened. MS-DOS: DOS kept local time only. No system-level time zone or DST model; it just read/wrote the BIOS clock. Libraries/apps sometimes honored a TZ env var, but the DOS kernel didn’t. FAT timestamps were stored as local time, which means DST shifts literally changed the file times you saw. Windows 3.x/9x/NT: Windows added time zones and an “Automatically adjust for DST” option, but it assumed the RTC was local time. If your BIOS (or another OS) also auto-adjusted, you got the classic one-hour “double bump,” which Microsoft documented for NT: the OS couldn’t reliably detect the BIOS change. (NT even polled CMOS hourly, which made the race worse.) Modern cleanup: UEFI finally gives a real time service with UTC plus explicit time-zone/DST fields, and Windows has a (hidden) option to treat the RTC as UTC . But historically Windows defaulted to RTC=local for BIOS compatibility.

@davepl1968 The x86 CMOS also stored an extra bit to indicate whether the clock has been adjusted for DST or not. But there was not really any agreement over who/when the bit should be set or cleared, so that was also a disaster.

@davepl1968 Only x86 Windows stored local time in the BIOS. All the other various ports stored UTC, thus the Windows setting.

@mrexodia one of the first things I did when I started at Microsoft was the Windows NT boot sector code... FAT12 & 16 in < 1 sector

@jvert I didn’t forget, just didn’t want to implement it 😂

Had an awful time implementing a rudimentary real mode boot sector in C, do not recommend…

@jujubileen I don't have a Mac but you could vibe code an obsidian plug-in or a website.

@jvert I doubt it is that easy to code an iOS widget due to Apple red tape but prove me wrong

All I want is a widget on ios that I can push tweets from and a simple mp3 transcriber integrated into gdrive or obsidian but apprently this is too much to ask of the free software market

@sixtyvividtails @DebugPrivilege 🙏 beauty

Here's a better (the correct one 😏) dump analysis: pastebin.com/psVhq6Pe. Same dump, different take. Much different conclusion. Huge thanks to @DebugPrivilege for always providing [non-exploisive] kernel dump files with his analysis!

@davepl1968 And you perhaps have glimpsed the eldritch horrors underlying IEEE 754 floating point

Calculators are a great UI programming challenge. It's all dead simple, but by the time you're done, you've used the event model, the layout system, and all the pieces needed to build a basic app. On any system.

@jujubileen Tinkercad?

@jvert no, I wish! do tou remember which cad tool I used?

My toddler's demands for "robie movie" have become a series of diy robotics videos that have now rekindled my own interest in robotics