They did. But that was back in the 2000s, when nobody really understood the nuance. Today, calling someone a “hacker” to mean “computer criminal” almost feels like a boomer move. We’ve got way better language now: white hat, black hat, script kiddie, scammer (and all its lovely subgenres—pig butchering, refund scammers), phisher, etc. Not to mention whatever we’re calling the folks running dark net markets these days.
And while the general public might not know the fine distinctions between these, I think society does get that there’s a whole spectrum of actors now. That wasn’t true in 2000—the landscape of online crime (and white hat work) hadn’t evolved yet.
Honestly, I’m just glad the debate’s over. “Cracker” always sounded goofy, and RMS pushing it felt like peak pedantry… par for course.
That said, this whole “vibe coding” thing feels like we’re at the beginning of a similar arc. It’s a broad, fuzzy label right now, and the LLM landscape hasn’t had time to split and specialize yet. Eventually I predict we’ll get more precise terms for all the ways people build software with LLM’s. Not just describing the process but the people behind the scenes too.
I mean, perhaps the term “script kiddie” will get a second life?
Being able to start a process, have it run for a bit to, say, read in initialization data, populating dynamic data structures along the way, and then interrupt the process and save the whole state as a new executable, was a feature built into DEC’s Tops10 and Tops20 operating systems / standard runtimes, along with related custom systems like Waits, under which TeX was developed. It took just two lines of code for TeX to implement its side of this feature on those first platforms.
It came as a bit of a shock at the time that all the Unix-y systems had no such native concept, and that fragile, non-portable user-space schemes were required to mimic this functionality.
The speaker’s claim that it’s hard to find a two-character name that hasn’t already been used for a CPU architecture seems ridiculous on its face. And his tone seems to indicate that he knows that (to me, anyway).
I programmed the real F8 back in the day, so I’m quite defensive about it. It’s most charming quirk: doing a long jump clobbers the accumulator.
Wasn't quite as strong a match for "G8", but G[n] does show up in a lot of product descriptions to indicate what generation of the product is involved.
LG also put out a phone named the G8 Thinq in 2019.
I would generally agree with the speaker that it's hard not to collide when using a 2 character name. The "for a CPU architecture" narrows the collision space substantially, which does affect the full accuracy of the statement. But the spirit of "2 char IDs are collision prone" is true.
Oh, wow...never heard of the E8 or Andes, but I guess RISC-V startups are thick on the ground these days. And I can't imagine searching for G8 and not getting carpet bombed with hits for HP servers. But the fundamental question is still "why would you even want a 2 character ID in a world where searching for it (even without the massive historical name collision with F8) will make it fruitless to search for".
You are implementing a closed hash table with linear probing. You need tombstones to mark deleted items, or better, move other items to replace deleted items [1]. Currently your library doesn't have either mechanism.
Yes, in the US, Bell Telephone White Pages absolutely showed your house address by default. How else would you know which John A. Smith was the one you were trying to look up? By the 1980's I recall being able to pay to remove your address from your listing (or pay even more to remove your listing entirely, as noted elsewhere). The excuse that Bell Telephone gave, by the way, for charging these fees is that you were decreasing the net worth of the network by not being listed.
Fun Fact: The Stanford Computer Science Department was (mostly) housed in Margaret Jacks Hall from 1980 - 1996, and if you went down to the basement where the department's mainframes and Arpanet IMP and phototypesetters lived, just around the corner were the "cells" where the Prison Experiment took place. Creepy.
:( This is even worse considering that the prison experiments turned out to be highly influenced by Zimbardo and eventually his wife put a stop to him more or less telling the guards to abuse the prisoners
UPS trucks are custom designed for UPS; they used to have a nice documentary about it. New Amazon trucks around where I live are clearly custom (and also not very pretty, if you ask me).
I saw a Rivian mobile service van for the first time about two weeks ago. I was behind it in traffic. It’s exactly the same design as Amazon, just different paint.
All I could think of was “they repainted an Amazon van“.
I know Rivian makes them all. But seeing so many Amazon vans has changed who “owns“ the design in my mind.
Perhaps the next generation of UPS trucks will have large windows like the new USPS trucks. If it seems to be a useful feature, others will adopt it eventually.
That's basically what it is, but for some reason it took some time for the folks at Jp Morgan to figure it out. Probably because the person involved died years ago? I dunno....
reply