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  • 80 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Those tests are worth more than four years of college?

    Yes a test to figure out if you can perform your job is significantly more valuable than a collage degree, this doesn’t mean that college has no value, mind you, it just means that knowing how to do the job and knowing that you fit in with the company culture is vastly more important.

    Go get a bunch of I.T. certifications. Get your CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ Get a Microsoft MCP or MCSA

    Those certifications are useless, they look good on your resume because managers love showcasing their staff’s “certifications”, as many companies that don’t understand IT put value on the certifications more than anything else, but they don’t actually provide you any value in of themselves. Sure it might be interesting how many network switches you can daisy chain according to the standards, but it has no real value most of the time, if that’s information you need in your job it’s something you can just look up, HOWEVER, asking you random questions that pertain to the job during the interview IS a good way to understand if you’re a good candidate, and, often, the actual response doesn’t matter as much as your reasoning for getting to that response.

    When an interviewer at google asks you how many pennys it would take to make a structure as tall as the empire state building, it doesn’t matter what the answer is, truly, even if you got the exact number of pennys, just saying the number would mean you don’t pass the interview, your answer would be worth less than an answer that gets it wrong by 75% but is well reasoned, what they care about is how you come up to the conclusion that you come up with, the solution is useless.




  • there is nothing wrong to make money from their hard work

    I assume you didn’t read my parent comment or perhaps you extrapolated on my beliefs without asking. I even proposed a direct way to ask users to pay.

    you cannot and should not force developers to work for free if they don’t want to.

    My word, of course not! Where did you get the impression that I want that from? I would NEVER propose something like that, as it stands against everything I believe in; in fact if you read through my history on lemmy I am certain that you’re gonna find plenty of proof of that.

    I stand by the original meaning of the word when I say FOSS. It does NOT mean gratis; the misuse of the term FOSS as gratis is my biggest pet peeve. I don’t care how much you charge for your software, if I like the software I will pay for it, exactly how much you’re asking, without a problem.

    The F in FOSS stands for Freedom, not price. I have paid for most FOSS software I use on a regular basis and I’m a HUGE proponent of paid FOSS and I have, multiple times, asked FOSS developers that release gratis software to PLEASE open up donations; I do this constantly and I think I may even have done it here on lemmy once or twice.

    If you want free software then there are FOSS options out there and nobody forces you to use Boost.

    Indeed. My preferred client at the moment is the web ui on desktop and jerboa on mobile. Those are FOSS and developed by the developers of lemmy themselves (to whom I HAVE donated to). But I was thinking about switching client, which is why I asked for the code for Boost to see if it’s software I would be willing to run on my device (and pay for!).

    In fact I will even go as far as to say that it is your RESPONSIBILITY as a user of FOSS applications to donate if you can.


    To me if software is not FOSS it signals one thing: they are doing something they don’t want me to know about, sometimes this is acceptable (tho never preferred), but that’s the exception, not the rule.

    Being able to decide what software runs on your machine should never be a point of contention. Non FOSS software is always a trade off, and for most things (including lemmy clients), it’s not one I’m willing to make, nor should you!








  • In general I agree with you. I find that most FOSS software is more polished than proprietary software, and it is generally more powerful.

    However, I think that one problem that people somehow overlook in my opinion is that the financial side of the issue is also extremely important. I want more people to work on quality FOSS software, and I want it to become socially acceptable to work on FOSS as your main job. For that one thing is needed in my opinion: we as users of FOSS software need to give developers the financial incentives to work on what they love the whole time. In fact I want it to reach the point where immoral, non FOSS companies struggle to find developers because they’re all working on FOSS.


  • in this case the instruction set is extremely small (and includes open source verilog, so you could even fab it yourself)

    quote from the website:

    The CPU of the TKey is a modified version of PicoRV32, 32-bit RISC-V running at 18 MHz. Modifications includes a fast 32x32 multiplier implemented using the multiplier blocks in the iCE40 DSPs as well as a HW trap function.

    The supported instruction set supported by the CPU is a subset of RV32I. Specifically it includes compressed instructions, but excludes instructions for:

    • Counters
    • System
    • Synch
    • CSR access
    • Change level
    • Trap redirect
    • Interrupt
    • MMU

    The instruction set implemented by the CPU also includes multiplication instructions from the RV32IC_Zmmul (-march=rv32iczmmul) extension. Division is not supported.

    Any illegal, unsupported instruction will halt the CPU. The halted CPU is detected by the hardware, which will blink the RGB LED with red to indicate the error state. There is no way for the CPU to exit the trap state besides a power cycle of the device.

    Note that the CPU has no support for interrupts. No instructions, ports or logic.









  • The concept of competition among tech companies has done a complete 180 on its original meaning. It’s no longer predominantly about crafting superior products; rather, it’s become a race to secure the largest amount of investor funding.

    In this transformed landscape, the product itself and revenue generation often take a backseat, or at best, hold a tertiary importance. The heart of customer-centric ethos, especially crucial elements like data security, are now distressingly overlooked. What matters is getting the next investment to become the next “unicorn” and be acquired for billions of dollars. Silicon Valley Companies want the easy way out, do only a fraction of the work for an exponential amount of the benefits.

    Don’t get me wrong, there are reasons to seek investment, getting a good product built is actually complex and you actually need a lot of different people working on it. The alternative is losing years of your life on a sisyphean ordeal of soul-crushing, hundred-hour work weeks (and that’s real work, not “let me check twitter” work), making you question your life choices and whether you should just throw it all away, abandon technology, become a hermit and move to a shed in the mountains.

    The problem is that the EXPECTATION today is that you’re gonna build a third of a product, care about 1% of the actual business behind it and then pivoting exclusively to the pursuit of investment, letting everything else rot


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