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Indeed. Some of the worst software interfaces I've ever dealt with were fully "dogfooded" and that was the cause; the people writing the software did use it every day but (a) in a very idiosyncratic way and (b) in a specific, very constrained environment.

The devs did use the software, but used it in such a different way from everyone else that when the devs optimized for their own case, it made the software actively worse for everyone else.


Indeed, it's a lesson I learnt the hard way and is much like proofreading something you wrote, you don't see the errors as easily as someone else you asked to proofread it usually does (well until you hit Send then you usually see all of them instantly).

A tiny thing about Asimov's laws of robotics is, most of his stories involve cases where they don't actually work.

Spoilers for a 73 year old novel, but for instance the plot of Caves of Steel is centered on a robot with a perfectly functional 1st law abetting a murder.

"Runaround" (spoilers, 86 years) involved a robot getting stuck in a loop bouncing between the 2nd and 3rd laws, and a human having to risk their life to unstick the robot.

Et cetera.

What is harm? What is an order? How do you trade off between different kinds of harm, or deal with conflicting orders? The 3 laws are simple to state, but hard to apply consistently in real life.


It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.

Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.

Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.


Directly telling someone that you have a problem with something they did and why you think it's a problem is not "passive aggressive" by any stretch of the definition.



"God was knocking, and he wanted in bad"


I did the same (4-bit cpu, 11 instructions) in my Microprocessors class, out of 74-series logic, one GAL20V8 to handle the SLE instruction and an EPROM (not an EEPROM - one with the clear window you exposed to UV light to erase.

That was also where I learned about ground-bounce & dynamic IR-drop effects due to those long looping wires between breadboards.

That was a fun class.


Raise your hand if you still have a UV eraser at the bottom of a cabinet somewhere.


I always used the one in the school lab. Since that’s also the only place where I could program the eeprom :)


One hypothetical outcome if FTX had not been shut down when it was might have been "there was never a mass withdrawl of funds from FTX that would trigger an FTX liquidity crisis and Alemeda switched its strategy to 100% HODL, waited until exactly now before selling, thus making all the Alameda investors rich and covering the funds 'invested' by FTX so no harm, no foul".

Amother hypothetical outcome might have been "Alameda continued to make risky, over-leveraged investments, immediately rolling any gains into other over-leversged investments and using FTX's customer's money to cover losses until disaster struck".

I find the second hypothetical a bit more plausible than the first, but I probably just don't understand finance.


Ugh. Sudden flashbacks to having to switch analog output between Japanese NTSC (no pedestal) and US NTSC (with pedestal) without getting weird noise in the black regions.

But IIRC the MPEG-2 standard had luma==235 -> 100IRE for all of the analog formats (pal/ntsc-j/ntsc/secam) so I'm not sure why you say that would violate the broadcast limits?


Simply because the math works that 7.5IRE on a 120IRE scale maps to 16 8-bit that 110IRE maps itself to 235 8-bit on a simple scaling equation. To get 235 8-bit to match to 100IRE means some sort of exponential scaling. At that point, I stuck with the linear scale and moved on with the keep it simple stupid mindset


Nit: a gourmand is the opposite of a gourmet


Nit of the nit: there are multiple usages and one of them is

> One who is fond of delicate fare; a judge of good eating. (Cf. gourmet n.)

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gourmand_adj?tab=meaning_and_...


How so?


Quantity.

The original usage of Gourmand was synonymous with gluttony and excess; while a gourmet might be satisfied with exquisitely prepared micro portions tucked away within an expansive plate criss crossed by a drizzle of ??, a gourmand wants the full stack pyramided to the maximal stope angle.


> The original usage of Gourmand was synonymous with gluttony and excess; while a gourmet might be satisfied with exquisitely prepared micro portions

Even if you removed the word "might", they wouldn't be opposites. With it, they're even further from opposites.


> they're even further from opposites.

I made no claim they were opposites, read again, that was another commenter.

I answered the question as to the distinction between two words, I did not assert the two words were opposite.


> I made no claim they were opposites, read again, that was another commenter.

I didn't say you made the claim. "Read again" right back at you...?

But come on, the comment you replied to was "How so?", asking how they were opposites.

You were clearly reinforcing the claim with your answer. If you didn't want to do that, you should have started with something like "They're not, but"


2: one who is heartily interested in good food and drink

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gourmand

Been a long time since it was purely about quantity.


Well, you had to go to #2 of several definitions in an American English dictionary for that secondary devolved meaning.

Additionally, "heartily interested" in English usage implies an enthusiastic excess, large amounts, etc.

Still, it appears we agree about the original and primary usage.

As does your link via #1

You're doing okay on stope angle I'm guessing.


"Going to definition #2" is an arbitrary rule that you just made up. Same with an American dictionary vs British or whatever.

The Oxford dictionary also has both definitions, with the general use going back to 1758.

> 2.1758–One who is fond of delicate fare; a judge of good eating. (Cf. gourmet n.)

[0]: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/gourmand_adj?tab=meaning_and_...


> an arbitrary rule that you just made up.

No, it's an observation that the first primary usage seemed to disagree (not that it did) and so it was observed that the second alt was used by the commenter above

OED has a lot to say about gourmand, Chesterfield in his 1758 letter that you quoted was saying that the Landgrave has a well stocked table .. good food and a lot of it, for he is a Gourmand. Following that Chesterfield example is a 1816 Coleridge extract from Statesman's Man that also about having a lot (but with no talent for preparation) - excess over taste:

  Their best cooks have no more idea of dressing a turtle than the gourmands themselves
And, again, the first 1a primary most common usage cited in the OED is:

  1. a. One who is over-fond of eating, one who eats greedily or to excess, a glutton. 
It's a usage that has morphed in recent times, sure .. but as seen in the OED for a great deal of time the emphasis has always been on the quantity of good food rather than mere quality of good food.


This really gets on my nerves. ishouldstayaway provided a perfectly valid resource to support the initial statement that gourmand isn't just about quantity anymore.

> Well, you had to go to #2

This is clearly a disparaging remark meant to discredit their comment. So what if it's #2? It's a definition in multiple dictionaries. This usage warranted its own definition.

> in an American English dictionary

Same thing here- italicizing American as if it means anything. Again, both Merriam Webster and the OED carry both definitions.

> It's a usage that has morphed in recent times, sure

"Recent" being 1758. 268 years. Long enough that it doesn't warrant a nit anymore.

> the first 1a primary

Again: the non-quantity usage warranted a dictionary definition.

> Following that Chesterfield example is a 1816 Coleridge extract

Ignoring the 1804 extract before that and the extracts after it.

All in all I find this type of interaction (needing to be "correct" instead of accepting that there are multiple usages) to be extremely distasteful, leaving a sour taste in my mouth.


> instead of accepting that there are multiple usages

Yeah, maybe slow your roll and think about that, along with everything else you've projected.

Clearly I accepted there are multiple usages, I specifically mentioned multiple definitions above.


> Clearly I accepted there are multiple usages, I specifically mentioned multiple definitions above.

You mentioned it in a way that makes #2 sound irrelevant because it's not the "original and primary definition" and diminished it with "recent times".

This is what people are taking issue with.

You're not actually accepting that definition as a proper definition. You're treating it like a minor offshoot.

And I have no idea why you think they're projecting.


I accepted it as a secondary definition (because, as numbered, it is a secondary definition) that also happens to support the primary definition;

  Additionally, "heartily interested" in English usage implies an enthusiastic excess, large amounts, etc.
I suspect the two commenters are reading more into my comments than was intended.


Let me guess: you're also the kind of insufferable (and similarly incorrect) pedant who insists that "decimate" still means "reduce by one tenth"?


No.

Try harder.

Gourmand still, in large parts of the English speaking world, carries large overtones of excessive eating under the guise of quality eating.

If I were to make a guess, I suspect that in your part of the world some of the French persuasion made frequent reference to those that overstack their plates as gourmands and it has since locally become synonymous with gourmet as the troll escaped them.


American here, only every heard it meaning someone who likes fancy food.

Never heard of it being a fat person, except in so far as the word is old fashioned enough to conjure the image of a fancy dressed fat person eating fancy food.


I have lived in the United States for all of my 59 years and have never heard or seen it used as meaning anything other than glutton.

Which is really no better evidence than you offer.


Same. "Gourmand" has always been linked to "gourmet" in my brain. However wrong according to the "dictionaries", I've seen it mean the same in colloquial use in a couple of languages I'm familiar with.


> Nit: a gourmand is the opposite of a gourmet

> The original usage of Gourmand was

Your original “well actually” is incorrect by your own admission. The correct statement is “a gourmand [was] [in some sense] the opposite of a gourmet”.

Not as punchy. I can see why you exaggerated, but as a fellow pedant I can’t approve of the misinformation.


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