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How frequently do you use profilers/debuggers at work?
  • At my last job, doing firmware for datacenter devices, almost never. JTAG debugging can be useful if you can figure out how to reproduce the problem on the bench, but (a) it's really only useful if the relevant question is "what is the state of the system" and (b) it often isn't possible outside of the lab. My experience with firmware is that most bugs end up being solved by poring over the code or datasheets/errata and having a good long think (which is exactly as effective as it sounds -- one of the reasons I left that job). The cases I've encountered where a debugger would be genuinely useful are almost always more practically served by printf debugging.

    Profilers aren't really a thing when you have kilobytes of RAM. It can be done but you're building all the infrastructure by hand (the same is true of debugger support for things like threads). Just like printf debugging, it's generally more practical to instrument the interesting bits manually.

  • Onshore algae farms could feed the world sustainably
  • replace the meat and dairy industry with b e a n s

  • Reddit CEO says the mods leading a punishing blackout are too powerful and he will change the site's rules to weaken them
  • Based on the reporting two things seem clear to me: (1) the commercial value of Reddit is fundamentally a question of selling data access; and (2) the major subreddits will be made to continue operations come Hell or high water.

    When (not if) Reddit circumvents the blackout by force, the obvious next move is to poison the well—make the data worthless by drowning it in noise (AI-generated, if you've a flair for the poetic). I doubt that will happen since (a) it would require coordination among a substantially larger and more dispersed userbase than the moderators and (b) it's something of a nuclear option, but it's an interesting idea.

  • new Beehaw community icons!
  • excellent

  • I'm really enjoying no down votes on Beehaw
  • You can collapse comments on the web interface (don't know about the apps), but it doesn't appear to persist across page reloads. Might be a good feature request

  • I have a confession to make... I code in Comic Sans
  • Friendship ended with font gatekeeping and dogpiling, accessibility is my new best friend

  • My favorite guitar I own, whats yours?
  • All mine are modern budget models. As much cool factor as there is to a vintage axe it's nice not worrying about parts and electronics (and nitrocellulose finishes!) that are older than my parents :-). In terms of sentimental value, nothing beats my first, a 2003 Squier Affinity I got for Christmas:

    Also most of mine only have four strings for some reason???

  • Shower thoughts thread
  • if the steam locomotive is also called the iron horse, then rail enthusiasts are technically a kind of horse girl

  • Whats a game that everybody seems to love that you cant stand for one reason or another?
  • RDR2 suffers heavily from the same problem as GTAV's single player mode: it's a movie posing as a video game and both aspects suffer for it.

    RDR2 would have been great if it was just the part where you wander around tracking critters and collecting flowers and playing cowboy dress-up, but the game really doesn't want you to do that. Not to belabor the point, but between how unpredictable the connection between "interact with item/character X" and "start mission with character Y" can be and the game's tendency to fail missions the second you go off-script, RDR2 often felt like it was directed by someone who actively resented the concept of player agency.

  • What are y'all's all time favourite game OSTs?
  • The soundtracks from NieR:Automata and NieR Replicant are definitely my favorite of all time.

    Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST are also very good.

  • Beans are protein-rich, sustainable, and delicious. Why doesn’t the US eat more of them?
  • Beans are good. I'm from Texas and there are a lot of people here who think chili with beans isn't real chili. They're full of shit (beans'd help with that too)

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • I'm @sjolsen@tech.lgbt. Just set it up though, so there's nothing to see yet :-)

  • so, which Big Tech company do you think is going to shit the bed next and popularize its Fediverse/FOSS equivalent in the process?
  • which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network

    Makes sense, after all matrix multiplication is O(n2).

  • Is there anything I should know before starting Hollow Knight?
  • If you're not playing hand-held, make sure your TV is set up to minimize input delay (usually called "game" mode or something like that). An extra few tens of milliseconds of lag can make a game like Hollow Knight unplayable :(

  • How many of you have pulled the plug and deleted reddit already?
  • I hadn't really actively engaged with Reddit in years, and I stopped lurking almost cold turkey when they killed off the personal homepage on the mobile web interface earlier this year. I deleted my account when the Apollo news broke (I've never even used a third-party app, but it's crystal-clear what direction the wind is blowing). I only found out about lemmy after I pulled the plug.

    Now to figure out how mastodon and all the other "fediverse" apps work :-)

  • For everyone new to Lemmy, how are you finding the experience?
  • It's weird, a little confusing, and a little janky. Love it so far. It's not a novel observation on my part but it definitely feels new and exciting the way Reddit and Tumblr did back in the day.

  • Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized]
  • My two favorite Emacs jokes:

    • What does EMACS stand for? Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
    • Emacs is a great operating system; it only lacks a decent text editor.

    Can you imagine a world where a program originally designed to manipulate documents was extended through a highly dynamic, kind of half-baked interpreted language to the point of underpinning almost every application you interact with on a daily basis and using an order of magnitude or so more resources than are actually necessary?

  • It's the opposite for me, but it doesn't make this any less relatable.
  • Me, a firmware developer, writing baby's first CSS:

  • sjolsen sjolsen @beehaw.org

    he/him but also any

    Recovering software developer, computers resenter

    I like playing the bass guitar, painting, and some other things I'm not very good at

    Mastodon @sjolsen@tech.lgbt

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