This reminded me of another story.

We used to know this incredibly talented software programmer that was an artist, a genius, a visionary, and very strongly opinionated. He was ahead of his time. 1/
He truly created beautiful universes out of thin air in the computer, and this was back in 1997 or so when computers were slower, had fewer resources, and were very constrained.

He made magic happen on those old clunkers 2/
He loved programming in C, and was not very good at housekeeping. For those that do not know, C is a language where 90% of your time is spent being a pedantic accountant and performing housekeeping duties. 2/
His programming style was also unique. It got the job done but had an aesthetic that only a mother could love. So he drove a lot of collaborators crazy 3/
The code was often a source of memory leaks, and security holes. We had just accepted that someone would go and do a cleanup job afterwards 4/
One day, in those early Linux days, some memory debugger became available, and we started to actively fix memory leaks introduced by our general lack of hygiene and housekeeping duties. But his code, his code was the worst offender, it was going to take months to fix 5/
Yet the very day that we reported the issue, he fixed every single memory leak. Nobody could believe this, but the tool did not lie.

We could not believe it, because housekeeping in C, often requires a careful review and a balancing act, which took time to check. 6/
Anyways, we cracked open the fix, and we found what he had done.

He implemented a wrapper to the memory allocator. It merely kept track of every allocation in a list, and he freed all the objects before his code terminated, ensuring there would be no leaks reported. end/

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More from @migueldeicaza

6 Apr
The way AI transformers work reminds me of the 1990's.

Back in the 90s in Gnome-land, PNG was not in wide use yet, and we needed some sort of transparency for images. So we used a library that faked it by using an uncommon color to mean "transparent" 1/
The uncommon color was some sort of magenta, and the idea was "nobody in their right mind would ever use magenta on an icon".

So magenta became the color to indicate "this pixel should be transparent".

This worked with all existing paint programs 2/
You could tell immediately there was a coding mistake when you saw an icon on the desktop with magenta on it. It was a clever hack that serves us for a few years until alpha channels became pervasive.
Read 5 tweets
8 Sep 20
Apple today filed their juicy bits, recap of where we are at:

* Epic Lawsuit 8/13
* Epic Motion for Temp Restraining Order (MTRO) 8/17
* Apple response to MTRO 8/21
* Apple Response to the 8/13 Lawsuit 9/8

1/
Apple's response is here:

courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

You might want to reference the original document when you get to their responses. It starts in page 4 of this document:

courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Wasn’t aware of this. An interesting bit on Apple’s response to Epic:
Read 5 tweets
19 Apr 20
The Andreessen Horowitz article making the rounds is rich.

This coming from the guy that funded all Republican Turds in Congress, and funds those nasty PACs you have seen me tweet about and then like Trump points the finger at others:
Here is a bold idea for the concerned VCs: Perhaps don’t get those turds that hate government and want to wipe out government funded. And let people that believe in science, regulation and social fairness run the show.
Should have read: “all those republican turds”
Read 8 tweets
21 Jan 20
When the Snowden spying scandal broke, I came up with a joke app idea: Patriot Chat would be a secure chat app that would encrypt all communications using peer to peer protocols, with a twist 1/
The twist was that it would also encrypt the messages with a set of trusted keys, from the NSA so the government could easily spy on you. 2/
The idea was to pitch this parody on Colbertian terms and pretending there was nothing wrong with it and it was your patriotic duty to use it. 3/
Read 14 tweets

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