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They're rarely helpful. Actually, they usually add insult to injury. But what would computing be without 'em? Herewith, a tribute to a baker's dozen of the best (or is that worst?).
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.” So goes an old quip attributed to Paul Ehrlich. He was right. One of the defining things about computers is that they–or, more specifically, the people who program them–get so many things so very wrong. Hence the need for error messages, which have been around nearly as long as computers themselves..
In theory, error messages should be painful at worst and boring at best. They tend to be cryptic; they rarely offer an apology even when one is due; they like to provide useless information like hexadecimal numbers and to withhold facts that would be useful, like plain-English explanations of how to right want went wrong. In multiple ways, most of them represent technology at its most irritating. //
- Abort, Retry, Fail? (MS-DOS)
In many ways, it remains an error message to judge other error messages by. It’s terse. (Three words.) It’s confusing. //
[UPDATE: Almost four hundred people have chimed into this discussion, and many nominated other error messages that are at least as worthy of celebration as the ones in the story. So celebrate ’em we did–please check out The 13 Other Greatest Error Messages of All Time.]
John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre
·
Charlie Munger’s formula for success is simple and perfect:
- Spend less than you earn
- Invest prudently
- Avoid toxic people and toxic activities
- Defer gratification
- Never stop learning
4:12 PM · Nov 28, 2023 //
Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital
·
Some of the best of Charlie Munger:
“Every time you hear EBITDA, just substitute it with bullshit earnings”. Absolute legend. 🐐
5:00 / 5:00
4:15 PM · Nov 28, 2023 //
My favorite from that clip? "Warren, if people weren't often so wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." //
In a 2019 interview with CNBC, Munger taught us how to lead a happy life:
You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.
And staying cheerful ... because it’s a wise thing to do. Is that so hard? And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?
A great time was had by all, and the speeches were all really quite interesting.
I learned from the doctor at HMO-NO that throwing sodium into the Charles River really is an MIT tradition, as I speculated it must be during my talk. This only serves to reinforce my point that while many have thrown sodium, few have documented or video taped it, and fewer still have been willing to submit their work to the judgement of the public in the form of a web publication with video and an admission of guilt. I seem to be the first, in fact. Odd really.
Perhaps my example will prompt someone to video tape the Harvard tradition next time. (Should such a person wish to have the video posted, with attribution or anonymously, I would be quite happy to provide the service.)
When you've gotta go, you've gotta go. In the case of a Glendale, Wisconsin, car thief, while fleeing police last Wednesday, he picked not only the wrong time and the wrong place but the wrong witnesses. //
Now, consider if you will, the structure of your basic port-a-potty. Having spent a week in Army Basic Training cleaning these receptacles while our company was on "detail week," I can safely say I'm very familiar with how they work, and the basic structure of these things has not changed since the early '80s; there is, of course, the tall plastic shell, with a door that locks from the inside, the appropriate receptacles for both setters and pointers and a tank beneath filled with chemicals into which the products of micturition and defecation are deposited. (When I was a kid back in Northeast Iowa we had the kind that just went over a hole in the ground, but the images of the port-a-potty in this case are clearly of the more modern sort.) //
With that firmly in mind, consider the likely consequences of one of these being tipped on its side, and what might happen to a person within that unit when it is tipped over. Yes, that's right; stuff that one would expect to find on the streets of San Francisco would instead be covering the fleeing felon, along with the other aforementioned chemicals and by-products. Not that I have a lot of sympathy for a car thief, even if he is dealing with a lot of crap. It is, however, appropriate to feel some sympathy for the police officers who had to transport the befouled perpetrator, covered as he almost certainly was in the stuff sometimes cast on City Hall steps as a form of protest. //
Clearly, the suspect pitted himself against the wits and willingness of the golfer, and the suspect came off Number Two. He was arrested and taken to jail, where, presumably, he was given a towel to wipe away his worries. Still, a car was stolen, and that stinks. //
Kudos to the quick-thinking golfer who knew at a glance how to deal with a sticky situation. At least the thief and his less-smelly compatriots were caught; in that, at least, everything came out all right. //
pat
2 days ago
You forgot to mention, the soup pours out of the bowl onto the backside of the now door which is the floor that the fleeing feces is now laying on, unable to stand up. I am sure when the police finally had him, he refused to come clean, though he needed to. They probably gave him the turd degree before they did the final paperwork. //
Mark-0
2 days ago
I bet I know what his first two words were.
On 18/03/2022 00:07, Colin Percival wrote:
On 3/17/22 08:17, Arthur Chance wrote:
Is it possible to invalidate an existing tarsnap key so it cannot be
used in future. I have a key for a decommissioned machine so it's no
longer needed and hypothetically it could be used for DoS attack (by
creating bogus archives and draining the account funds). Obviously this
is impossible unless the key leaks somehow, but operational paranoia
would suggest invalidating it would be a good idea.The API for disabling keys is "send Colin an email". ;-)
So API = Application Programmer's Initiative. :-)
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the tulip fields, now we see that Dutch authorities are warning us of a venomous African green mamba that escaped from its owner in the town of Tilburg. //
The African green mamba has a nasty neurotoxin venom, and its bite can be extremely dangerous, but authorities--while urging caution--no doubt wish to avoid panic; it won't help for the Dutch populace to become hissterical. In the cold climate of the Dutch winter, the tropical snake is unlikely to be viperactive. In fact, it may well still be in the owner's house; it's not as though the snake could commandeer a vehicle and flee, not even an ana-Honda. And it's likewise certain that the snake won't be boarding an aircraft back to Africa, which would transform it from a Green Mamba to a Boeing Constrictor. //
Back to snakes. I could rattle off a few good snake stories myself; in the northeast Iowa hills where I grew up, venomous rattlesnakes were common, some growing up to 72 inches in length--you have to measure them in inches because they don't have feet--and while their skins made great hatbands, which one could show off at the local boa-ling alley, they weren't bad eating, either. You just had to be careful to stay away from the sharp end, and the residents of Dutch Tilburg would be well-advised to do the same.
Samuel L. Jackson was unavailable for comment. //
Anne in Rockwall Texas
6 hours ago
Dear Mr. Clark.
Thank you. I laughed so hard, I moved that d*** kidney stone. Greetings from Texas Presbyterian Hospital. I'm going to read it again and maybe I'll be out of here in the morning! You sure can write. //
Ward Clark Kenamy
7 hours ago
Are you saying I should scale it back some?
Domino Ward Clark
5 hours ago
On a sssliding ssscale, about two notchessss.
Chris Rose @ArchRose90
·
A satire show in Israel deservedly mocks the BBC again and the disingenuous calls for ceasefire. Wait until the end, it’s worth it. 😂
3:23 / 3:23
4:29 PM · Nov 14, 2023
Plus, the size of Wales in cubic furlongs
I am a software engineer, and have been for most of my life.
One afternoon I was thinking about my tendency to obsess over minor technical details. I'm not alone in this tendency, but I have no doubt that many others — even some in my profession — view it as a peculiar form of madness. What metaphor, I wondered, could possibly convey why it was so difficult to let go of seemingly-trivial issues?
As it happens, I'd recently been discussing Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach with a friend. It was that book which introduced me to Zen kōans.
Thoughts collided, and the first of these pseudo-kōans was born. Consider it an experiment: an attempt at merging vocation and avocation. //
Although the title of this collection is a rather obvious play on The Gateless Gate (a historically important collection of Zen kōans), please note that the offerings here are not Zen kōans, nor do I intend any disrespect to practicioners of Zen Buddhism.
The jingling of the door-bell announced four arrivals: a blast of cold December wind; a spray of fine snowflakes borne upon it; the sound of horses clopping up the cobbled street; and two gentlemen. They were good portly fellows, pleasant to behold. The younger of the pair doffed his top hat and shook fresh snow from the brim as the elder consulted a list.
“Cratchit,” read the old gentleman. “Ware-housing, Pawn-brokering, Business Loans.” He looked up to find the sole occupant of the establishment seated behind a large wooden desk: a slight, sandy-haired young man of twenty-odd years with a genial expression. The gentleman adjusted his spectacles. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. P. Cratchit?”
Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software: //
As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, //
But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.
One of the source code files, for example, is called
BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE
We report a retrospective case series of exposures to iocane powder, a deadly, odorless, tasteless, and absolutely fictional poison [1]. A 10-year review of an imaginary Sicilian Poison Center database revealed 32 exposures, coincidentally all ingestions from wine goblets. There were 29 (90.6 %) patients with no clinical effects, 2 (6.3 %) with minor effects, 1 (3.1 %) with a moderate effect and 0 with major effects. No deaths occurred and no patient suffered permanent sequelae. These data show that iocane exposure is not universally fatal, as previously thought. Given the apparent relative safety, with less than 10 % of patients experiencing clinical effects, poison centers may choose to allow asymptomatic exposed patients to be observed at home.
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