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I wrote recently asking for advice about how to help a newbie tactfully.

I have been very surprised since then about some of the things our newbie has asked me and what I have had to explain to him. Is it a "young people today" thing, am I completely out of touch?

The first thing is when code reviewing this young guy's C. As you probably know, when you are working in a programming team there are certain things you have to agree on, such as the format of the code. It may sound trivial, but if different people format the code differently, it makes tools like diff harder to use, and it makes it harder to spot structural and functional changes on the code. We use spaces for indentation. Tabs were creeping in!

More seriously, though, I found out that he didn't know about git diff. I found out from someone else that he didn't know about branching in git. I would have thought a trivial search online would have given some clues?

Function prototypes are there for a reason. They define the public interface to functions in a source module. That's why they go in a separate header, and if your program wants to call the functions in the other module, you #include that header. I found redefined function prototypes in the program source (not the module where the functions were implemented) and they had the wrong argument lists for the functions! Why?

The other strange thing was I had to explain the difference between ASCII and binary. I had to explain, with an ASCII chart (which he didn't understand), that NUL has code 0. I also had to explain why editing binary data in a text editor was not a great idea.

Also, you don't need to terminate a binary array with '\0'. Certainly not outside the array bounds.

I've tried to keep it polite, professional and helpful, but the other day he informed me that he is only used to getting one or two code review comments and they're only about "the functionality."

Kids today? He has nearly 10 years of experience. Am I too harsh? It's a lot of code, so it's got a steep learning curve, and it's for an important job.

DC police chief offers simple solution to get homicide rates down: 'Keep violent people in jail'
The D.C. Council Chairman just pulled legislation Monday that would have reduced maximum penalties and abolished minimum penalties for various crimes

Metropolitan Police Chief Robert Contee gave a simple solution for what Washington, D.C., can do differently to get homicides down Monday: "Keep violent people in jail."

Contee was speaking along with Mayor Muriel Bowser at Mayoral Public Safety Media Availability to discuss crime in the District. He responded to a reporter's question about how to address increased homicides rates in the city.

"What we got to do, if we really want to see homicides go down, is keep bad guys with guns in jail. Because when they're in jail, they can't be in communities shooting people. So when people talk about what we gonna do different, or what we should do different, what we need to do different, that’s the thing that we need to do different," Contee said.

"We need to keep violent people in jail. Right now, the average homicide suspect has been arrested eleven times prior to them committing a homicide," the chief continued. "That is a problem. That is a problem."

Repeat offenders are a problem in the nation's capital. Last month, Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., called out the city's elected officials over their soft on crime policies after she was assaulted by a homeless man. She was his thirteenth victim.

"I got attacked by someone who the District of Columbia has not prosecuted fully over the course of almost a decade, over the course of 12 assaults before mine that morning," Craig said at the time. "I mean, it wasn’t even in every instance that he got 10 days or 30 days. Many times, the charges were completely dropped before any justice was achieved at all."

Last year, D.C. hit 200 murders in consecutive years for the first time since 2003.

Among the topics covered during Monday's press conference included the apparent defeat of the D.C. City Council's attempt to soften penalties on violent crimes through revisions to the criminal code.

The crime bill would have reduced maximum penalties for violent crimes such as burglaries, robberies and carjackings, along with abolishing minimum sentences for most crimes. It faced backlash even from some liberals with Bowser vetoing it in January, though the city council overrode her veto.

Monday, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson pulled the controversial crime bill after the U.S. House voted to block it and President Biden said he would not veto Congress' decision.

The U.S. Senate may still vote on the legislation with the potential for up to 20 Democrats to side with Republicans in voting against the bill. However, it is unclear if the Senate still can vote on the bill as a symbolic gesture given that it was pulled by the chairman.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/dc-police-chief-offers-simple-solution-get-homicide-rates-keep-violent-people-jail

Anyone have any experience with this?

I want to hook up PC to a TV, have a simple webpage on it with a 10-foot style user interface, and navigate the page mainly using the up/down/left/right/OK buttons on the remote. HDMI-CEC can allow my TV remote to communicate with a computer, e.g. a Raspberry Pi with LibreELEC on it. But I want to try a desktop OS with a web browser open.

I looked at the tabindex attribute. That allows you to tab and shift-tab forward and back through a series of elements and use the :focus pseudo-class to style the "selected" one, but it isn't going to allow up/down on a grid.

Worst case scenario, I use event listeners and do whatever I need to do to highlight the correct elements using arrow keys, such as detecting and comparing the x/y positions of all the elements to choose which one to jump to. Even then I might have to find a way to override the default behavior of the TV remote to make sure it can replace the keyboard input. I was wondering if there were any standards related to handling TV remote input, but I didn't see any.

What are the requirements? How can I implement one?

Have at ye!

Memory safe languages are coming back into fashion nowadays.

Back into fashion? They're not new?

That raises the question as to why the world's software is built on memory unsafe languages such as C and C++.

In a word, efficiency. If we look back in history a bit to where high level languages were becoming common, we can see why.

My experience with programming begins in the 1980s, so I have no direct experience of how things were prior to that, but I did start out on 8-bit microcomputers with BASIC interpreters.

To give you some context, these machines had CISC CPUs that ran at a few MHz (1 to 4 usually) and took several clock cycles to complete a single machine instruction. The primitive BASIC interpreter lived in a few kB of ROM and was written in machine code.

Those BASIC interpreters were slow, but they were fairly user-friendly. When you declared or even just used a new variable (integer, floating-point or string) for the first time it would be initialised. When you concatenated strings, it happened as if by magic. You could insert and delete substrings. You could take input from the user in strings of arbitrary length that would adjust dynamically. There was no such thing as overflow. Array bounds were checked. The program would stop with an error code if you tried to read or write out out bounds.

In previous decades, compiled languages were developed to run on mainframe and minicomputers. A typical 1970s vintage minicomputer was about as big (RAM) and powerful (speed) as a 1980s home microcomputer. Compilers were always complex and notoriously arcane, unreliable and generally mysterious. They were usually buggy and not to be trusted, apart from in some very specialised and expensive cases.

Along came languages like C and Pascal. Pascal was nice but considered a "toy." It needed extensions to be useful. However, in the 1970s C came along. It was simple and powerful. A C compiler could run on a relatively small machine (a few tens of k or RAM) and produce usefully efficient machine code, fast enough that writing in plain machine code or assembly language wasn't really worth it any more. There was also the advantage of portability. The compiler could target different architectures so one piece of source code could compile and run on very different hardware.

This simplicity and efficiency came at a price. The language and the compiler did not support such things as array bounds checking, variables were not automatically initialised and strings were effectively static, not dynamic. Library routines were provided to supply some of that functionality.

The run-time checking (and safety) was eliminated in favour of the programmer being all knowing and all seeing and infallible.

With hindsight, better choices might have been made but remember that the machines of the day were so small and slow that it was the only way to get efficient enough software out the door in a reasonable timeframe.

Most computers were not networked. The Internet wasn't even a thing. Security wasn't so important. A lot of the shortcomings in the languages and their libraries weren't that much of an issue.

Other things did come along but the "good enough" solutions had become entrenched. Ada was one such alternative. It didn't catch on because compilers were expensive (to call a compiler Ada it had to go through an expensive validation process) and there was a bit of a reaction against "strict" languages (for all the wrong reasons).

Programming languages are there to express mathematical concepts. They need to be precise and unambiguous. The human brain is neither. Experience tells us that we should chose languages and compilers that help us reduce ambiguity and express with greater precision that which we wish to achieve.

There is no perfect programming language. It always used to be that you would use your programming language to build up a framework of "subroutines" to help you solve your problem. FORTH was great fun for doing this. LISP looks eveen better, and is indeed the essence of programming it seems.

Back to my original point: memory safety got sidelined for efficiency. Efficiency was important because forty years ago hardware was so slow and primitive. I haven't been on a slow computer in over ten years. I have computers from over ten years ago that aren't slow.

Efficiency, in compilers or in the runtime, is not a problem any more. Why are we not programming with memory safe languages as a matter of course? What wheels is Rust reinventing?

We hired a new person at work at a fairly junior level. He's about 20 years younger than me and worked for one of those body shop companies doing embedded development. We interviewed several, but this guy had a bit of a spark, was genuinely interested in what he was doing and despite being very junior, recognised this and is keen to learn.

We got a new PHB some months ago who is not an embedded developer, to free me up from PHB duties to do Other Things. Since then I have been doing all sorts of Other Things and very few of them in my job description.

I was asked to write some C code as a bit of an emergency (the company doesn't believe in proper analysis, requirements and communication) which was relatively straight-forward for me (I can churn out a few thousand lines of code in a week if I have to).

Other projects needed my assistance urgently too so the PHB gave my code to the new guy to finish off. There are "just a few bits" that need doing but they involved having a sufficient level of understanding and a measured approach to implementation to ensure that they don't end up full of terrible bugs. I wrote my code with (to me at least) nice clear, simple unit tests in a TDD fashion and with some scripted regression tests, all run automatically.

The poor young new guy has just had the entire company induction reading to go through and a bunch of training courses, is in a new industry sector with all that implies and has been given 3k lines of code written by me "to finish off" with, at least to begin with, a ludicrous deadline.

Fortunately after putting thumb screws on other PHBs and enlightening them as to various common existing command-line utilities, the deadline has vanished, which is good.

However, I'm doing the hand-holding and advising. When I was similarly young I was fortunate to be in a great team who were very helpful most of the time and quite patient. I want to be like that.

Here's my problem. This guy has worked for a very large company doing a very specific job. All of his C coding has been done in a proprietary IDE using a proprietary compiler. Now he is faced with git, gcc and GNU Make (and watching me code using vim). He's trying very hard to get stuff done but doesn't know what he doesn't know. I think this is the first time he has seen TDD. He has put all sorts of debugging code in the main source file that really isn't necessary if you understand the unit tests.

I would like to say, "Go away and read the fine manual." However, I want to do it politely without sounding too condescending or critical. I Need to introduce the gcc command line options for compiling and linking. I could just give him a URL to the gcc manual but that would be pretty tactless.

Then of course, I'm very busy with all the other nonsense going on at work so my frame of mind isn't always the right one when he asks for help and it's difficult to change modes.

The news: https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/chicago-man-suspected-burglar-home/?intcid=CNM-00-10abd1h

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Only on 2: A father detained a suspected burglar in his own garage.

His wife and two-year-old daughter are inside the house as this all happened. He is speaking exclusively with CBS 2's Sabrina Franza, reporting from Wrigleyville.

"Went into the garage and I just followed him into the garage."

Niko Kara was the only person standing between, he said, a suspected burglar and his family. His two-year-old daughter was sound asleep upstairs when Kara said a man broke into the garage.

"It happened quick. I just followed the guy. I didn't want him to cause anymore harm."

Kara first learned the man was there when he tried getting into the front entrance. His Ring camera caught someone moving.

"It was a surprise for all of us."

He and his wife realized the man got into the garage behind the house. Kara followed and found him going through boxes as his wife called 911.

Kara, a concealed carry permit holder, and that suspect, stood still behind this garage door. He raised his weapon but did not fire. He waited for police to show.

"He was quick to show me his hands and drop whatever he was holding in his hands."

Which was a phone and a water bottle.

"They were here in about 45 seconds and he couldn't get out of the garage. I was standing in the door," Kara said.

A Ring camera from across the alley caught the garage door opening as police stood outside. The suspect ran but didn't make it far. Chicago police took him into custody shortly after.

"You know what, I'm really happy that I spent last night at my home, in bed, and everybody was safe. The bad guy got arrested."

Both Kara and his wife are very shaken up by this, but are both doing ok. His two-year-old daughter slept through the entire thing.

Charges against the man they say broke in are still pending.

What the newsies didn't tell us:

The Declining Value of Higher Education: Burglar With Gender Studies Degree Held At Gunpoint by Chicago Resident

While they may be highly prized in ivory tower universities, out here in the real world, gender and women’s studies degrees don’t take you far or open many doors to high-paying jobs. Bringing nothing but a gender studies degree to a gunfight also seems like a good way of proving its worthlessness. A Monday evening break-in in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighborhood was the perfect case for proving that hypothesis.

A homeowner with a surveillance camera system noticed a prowler lurking outside his home. Mr. Homeowner, the proud holder of a carry license, then checked his attached garage. That’s where police say he found 31-year-old Tyler Hamlin.

The armed homeowner held Hamlin — on probation and wanted under two active felony warrants — at gunpoint until police arrived. Given Mr. Hamlin’s history of serial criminal activity and violence, the gun proved a wise decision.

The homeowner, identified as Niko Kara by CBS2 in Chicago said he was the only thing standing between the intruder and Kara’s wife and 2-year-old daughter.

Here’s the story from CWB Chicago . . .
The concealed carry holder received a security alert showing someone was on his porch with a flashlight in the 3500 block of North Fremont in Wrigleyville around 8:30 p.m. Monday…

“[The police] were here in about 45 seconds, and he couldn’t get out of the garage. I was standing in the door,” the homeowner told CBS2 before charges were filed.

A Ring camera from across the alley caught the garage door opening as police stood outside. The suspect ran but didn't make it far. Chicago police took him into custody shortly after.

"You know what, I'm really happy that I spent last night at my home, in bed, and everybody was safe. The bad guy got arrested."

Both Kara and his wife are very shaken up by this, but are both doing ok. His two-year-old daughter slept through the entire thing.

Charges against the man they say broke in are still pending.

The concealed carry holder received a security alert showing someone was on his porch with a flashlight in the 3500 block of North Fremont in Wrigleyville around 8:30 p.m. Monday…

“[The police] were here in about 45 seconds, and he couldn’t get out of the garage. I was standing in the door,” the homeowner told CBS2 before charges were filed.

Hamlin’s lawyer apparently thought this fact would attest to what a fine, upstanding person his client is . . .

Hamlin’s defense attorney said he has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and gender and women’s studies from UIC. He’s unhoused and unemployed.

The “unhoused” Mr. Hamlin — that’s newspeak for homeless — has quite the criminal history. In 2020, he allegedly tried to skip out on a cab fare, eventually battering the cabbie and an Illinois State Trooper before being arrested. Unfortunately for him, that infraction took place in Will County, south of Chicago where they actually prosecute criminals.

Hamlin blew off his court date on that case and forfeited his bond, resulting in a warrant on the case per the Will County Circuit Court Clerk.

Meanwhile, Cook County prosecutors gave him probation when he pled down an aggravated arson charge — a Class X felony (6 to 30 years in prison) — to a criminal damage to property charge (potentially just a misdemeanor).

And there’s another battery charge in Chicago from April, 2022.

Hamlin is currently being held without bail on the outstanding warrants. How long that will last is anyone’s guess in Chicago’s revolving door criminal justice system. In the mean time, he can regale his cellmates with the finer points he picked up while earning the gender and women’s studies degrees that helped make him the man he is today.

Almost makes you regret that you never took gender studies, don't it?

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/the-declining-value-of-higher-education-burglar-with-gender-studies-degree-held-at-gunpoint-by-chicago-resident/

https://assets.nationbuilder.com/firearmspolicyfoundation/pages/3970/attachments/original/1675361904/United_States_v_Rahimi_Opinion.pdf

Before Jones, Ho, and Wilson, Circuit Judges.
Cory T. Wilson, Circuit Judge:
The question presented in this case is not whether prohibiting the
possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining
order is a laudable policy goal. The question is whether 18 U.S.C.
§ 922(g)(8), a specific statute that does so, is constitutional under the Second
Amendment of the United States Constitution. In the light of N.Y. State Rifle
& Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022), it is not.

That paragraph sums it up pretty nicely, but I encourage you to read the entire decision.

Mr. Rahimi seems a proper scoundrel, and I hate that such a person might be made an icon for 2nd amendment rights - but he challenged an unjust law, and the court decided in his favor.

Red flag laws are hardly any different than the issue decided here. Just like a jealous ex can get a restraining order on a whim, the same jealous ex can pick up the phone and make up a story about you being suicidal, or threatening, or whatever. In short, anyone can strip you of your rights, just to be vindictive if they only get the restraining order, or cite a red flag law.

Moving forward, I expect to see more due process before people are stripped of their 2A rights. Sure, a lot of fools bargain, and surrender their rights. But, you'll still see more due process in the coming years.

From my email. Yeah, it's a wall of text. Read it or not, your choice.

Conservative Inc And The Deal With The Daily Wire Devil

This week Steven Crowder made headlines for turning down a 50 million dollar term sheet offered by The Daily Wire. The term sheet, which would have forced Steven to sign over his email list, social media accounts, and revenue streams from his Mug Club, among other things from his life’s work, raised concerns about censorship and the gatekeeping of content creators by large conservative media companies and their owners.

The point of this article is to open your eyes to why your favorite conservative media outlets are not on our side and help you understand that they exist to keep you from discussing ideas that threaten the power of the Regime. These types of exploitative gatekeeping deals are not the outlier; they are the norm. Unlike most of the talking heads I have no gatekeeping contracts and thus can speak freely on these matters and tell you the unfortunate truth that you need to hear.

The Daily Wire is currently trying to gaslight Crowder and make this issue about money or greed when anyone paying attention knows that is not the case. This is a projection on their part because money is indeed what they care about here and in general. They can’t imagine that someone would reject that much money, and it “offends” them. They cry out in pain as they strike Crowder with a terrible one-sided deal for his soul.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling the narrative.

Toss out the religious bits if you like, the message remains the same. The Establishment wants to censor all opposing views.

Oh - Torba supplies a link to his blog, where he wrote the same thing: https://news.gab.com/2023/01/conservative-inc-and-the-deal-with-the-daily-wire-devil/

Micron (Crucial) is launching 24 GB and 48 GB DDR5-5600 RAM for both desktops and laptops:

Desktop
Laptop

Micron Unveils 24GB and 48GB DDR5 Memory Modules
Crucial Now Has 24 GB & 48 GB DDR5 Memory Options For Desktop & Laptop PCs

Presumably, some 4-slot systems will be able to support 192 GB of RAM, but ARK currently lists 128 GB maximum for recent Intel desktop parts. They have put inaccurate memory information on ARK before, so YMMV.

Memory speeds could suffer if you use 4 modules:

https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-7950x

2x1R DDR5-5200
2x2R DDR5-5200
4x1R DDR5-3600
4x2R DDR5-3600

With just 2 modules, you can have 96 GB and likely higher speeds/better overclocking potential. Not bad.

Previously: 24 GB and 48 GB DDR5 Modules?
Non-binary DDR5 is Finally Coming to Save Your Wallet