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An assault charge is likely relevant for most positions.

If I hire a convicted felon with a track record of assault and they end up assaulting another employee or customer, I’d feel responsible.

The victim would probably hold me legally responsible.

I’d feel more comfortable hiring someone with a 100% track record of never having been convicted of assault.

If you disagree, is there any number of assault convictions that would change your mind? Or do you mentally wipe the slate clean no matter what?


I think it really depends. Someone who had an a assault conviction at say 18 and is now 40, is a different situation from someone who very recently assaulted someone (but also how could you expect someone to change if they're never given a chance).

There's also the negative case of someone who has assaulted someone but was never caught, you can't safely eliminate that because there's no record of it.


Assault is also not always what you might imagine. It doesn't require physical harm or even contact. Just putting someone in fear of harm can be assault. E.g. a disagreement getting heated and someone saying "I'm going to kick your ass" is technically assault. As is brandishing a weapon or making other threatening gestures even without physical contact or harm.


Technically, sure. But you're not going to sit in prison for years such "technical" cases. So, somebody who did sit must supposedly have done more than that.

Second, I rather not have colleagues who are making threatening gestures or threaten to kick someones ass. I'm slightly appalled by the normalization of this kind of behavior.


Based on your response you most likely are not using Assault in the legal sense but in the Common Sense, but given the topic is legal in nature we should be using legal definitions.

Assault act of causing someone to reasonably fear imminent harm, what most people think of Assault they actually mean what the law calls battery which is actually causing physical harm.

Further I am not sure why we are focusing on Assault or battery, the OP said that was not the charge they were convicted of, and a Felony by definition is any crime punishable by more than 1 year of imprisonment which given the "Tough on crime" provision starting in the 90 makes a HUGE number if non-violent offenses felonies, as something a simple a playing your music too loud could be in some circumstances classified as a felony (often charged as " Nuisances" which is many states is a low level felony)

Most people have "felon" associated with violent crime, or serious crime, but unfortunately in our over criminalized society most people commit as many as 3 felonies a day not even knowing it.


> Further I am not sure why we are focusing on Assault or battery, the OP said that was not the charge they were convicted of

The OP is inconsistent with their information as they write that they were literally released on assault charges:

> I have been looking for work since I was released for an assault charge in November 2022.


Legal definition of both assault as well as battery is state dependent.


Criminals who don't reoffend (even for things like assault) within 5 years are almost always statistically a better risk than the public at large.

I won't say that it's almost tautological, but it's pretty close.

If you can surpass conviction and probation, you are remarkably self-disciplined. Probation conditions are much more problematic than an actual job, and the penalty for failure is going back to jail.

A person who can pass that kind of environment is absolutely the kind of person you want working for you.


I can't believe anyone would do a study about this for two reasons.

First, well, duh. Don't need a study to tell you this.

Second, was this done for someone to explain why they're not successful? A lot of people want to justify a lack of effort because the chips are stacked against them. All any of us are supposed to do though is be the best version of ourselves we can be.

There will always be someone smarter, taller, better looking. Who cares? Do your best.


I've programmed in 6502 Assembly for decades and your skepticism is right on.

These comparisons have so many variables that they are extremely hard to make accurately.

FTA - I would have guessed that the 8088 is much faster at about the same clock speed, because it has more 16-bit operations and does multiplication and division in hardware.

Does the compiler of the compiler make use of these extra 16-bit operations? How many layers of abstraction does it go through for each of the environments? Does it use DOS interrupts when running on DOS and optimized machine code on CP/M?

These comparisons are strange thought experiments.


The compiler uses the same level of optimization on both DOS and CP/M. It is self-compiled on both platforms. It uses DOS interrupts on DOS and BDOS functions on CP/M, but I/O is really not a big issue here. The DOS compiler does make use of the extra 16-bit operations.

Is it still an inaccurate comparison? Sure. But I expected something dramatically different, so I asked.


OK imagine you have $500 million in revenue and $154 million in losses.

That means you've been selling $1.00 for 70 cents.

Not sustainable. If their customers don't like what they're doing, it's not surprising. Because anyone buying $1.00 for 70 cents is going to be angry when it ends.

If their developers don't like what they're doing, it's not surprising. Anyone benefiting from a company paying them more than they can afford is going to be angry when it ends.


Who will pay for Stack Overflow servers and maintenance if OpenAI is just going to scrape their content and stop people from going to Stack Overflow?


Generally my view is that if we change the way IP works, the world would adapt just fine. Instead of large centralized services we might see smaller federated services. For example something like stack overflow could be hosted on an activity-pub based federated system. The way the fediverse currently works is that a large number of enthusiasts support their little corner of the fediverse with server expenses probably in the hundreds of dollars per year. So instead of one big site with hundreds of thousands of dollars in server costs per year you would have thousands of federated servers with costs in the hundreds of dollars per year. What’s great is that as the user base grows so can the number of servers and the number of enthusiast server operators interested in running their own server.

We might also see people start to break down barriers to server costs, for example by lobbying for legal rights to serve content from home with no ISP restrictions related to servers on home internet service. A big company like stack overflow can simply spare the cost of a dedicated business line but thousands of home users might really want to serve content from home.

My point is that when you really think it through, you realize that people will find ways to share the information they want. What’s also cool is that for things like the fediverse there generally are no ads. That’s something big central services fail at.

And then there’s sites like Wikipedia. I guess I don’t know their license but they simply ask people for what amounts to over a hundred million dollars a year in donations and they get it. So centralized models can work on pure donations if they are appreciated by a large number of users.


If LLMs can't find the answer then people will go ask it on SO. If SO is liable to shut down because the majority of their business got wiped out then somebody with a vested interest (like say, MSFT/OpenAI) will step in and bail them out (or create a clone, or something functionally equivalent).


Sounds like you support IP then, including stopping piracy.


I knew the embarrassment level was going to be turned up to 11 when your link was to archive.org.


One of the most rewarding things I have done in the past few years is learned component-level repair on Commodore 64s.

Take a dead 64 showing nothing but a black screen, try the dead test cartridge, follow its lead or start desoldering, socketing and replacing chips.

And suddenly you have a working forty year old Commodore 64.


Definitely.

I fixed our two C64s that had been stored broken for 30+ years. Black screen to full working condition.

Last time I had seen them working I was about 5 years old. Very satisfying and nostalgic.


Do you remember what the failures were? What did you end up replacing?


Black screen both. Removed SIDs as they are unneeded for boot.

Some RAM chips were getting hot, so I socketed and replaced these. No progress otherwise, so I got myself a dead test cartridge.

One of the C64s had video capture card blink the screen on power on, the other not even that.

From this I correctly guessed dead VIC-II. Moving the working one to the other machine made that machine show the memory error blinks from the test cartridge. Swapping the other PLA finally allowed the memory test to end, and the display to show up.

I also had to replace a 74-series logic chip in one of the RAM rows, not sure which computer, do not remember how I figured that out. A color SRAM was also bad.

The remaining machine, I found that 6510 clock output was missing, from which I deduced dead 6510, which a swap confirmed.

Oh, and one of the two sids caused errors, so I had to replace that too.


Oh wow, seems like you encountered all the possible problems! Good thing you had two C64 so you could swap components. Do you have an idea why so many things had failed? Bad power supply blowing up chips maybe?


There is a voltage regulator in the standard Commodore 64 power supply that fails catastrophically. Specifically, it sends > 5 volts down the 5 volt line.

When this happens, depending on how long it's on it can fry every chip on that line.

That's why everyone advises not to use the original power supplies even for a quick test. Even if it tests 5 volts before you plug it into the computer it can fail at any moment.


It was the power supply, no doubt.

Back at the time, we (little me and my family) already knew it was bad. But we weren't aware of its failure modes. All we observed when measured was low voltage, and that it "sometimes worked".

That's why so many C64s were damaged, and still are, when people connect their old supply without the knowledge (or against warnings) of such a nasty design flaw.


Easily 90%+ of the faults on Commodore 64s, especially the early models.

My Christmas 1982 model died with a faulty PLA well within the warranty period.


How did Apple become so successful making high-end CPU chips on their own so quickly?


Bring in people with expertise, buy outside expertise where you can, focus on the product you actually want instead of the product that will appeal to every possible use case for every possible customer that the chip marketing team can imagine, don't sweat where you can put the margin line between chip and system integrator, because they are both you.

I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.


Apple acquired PA Semi in 2008 then Intrinsity in 2010. They have been using their own ARM cores since 2012 with the A6 SoC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6


They've been designing the A-series chips in iPhone and iPad since the A4 in 2010.


A4 was still using ARM cores from Samsung. A6 was the first SoC with Apple cores.


20 years ago, Palo Alto Semiconductor was founded, and 15 years ago, Apple bought them in order to start building their own CPUs.


The iPhone chip was seriously competitive with laptops 2-3 years before the M1, it's just that due to the software environment few people noticed what was going on.

The real question is why Apple left it so long. They clearly wanted the first generation to be a clear success, but they could have probably pulled this off faster had they wanted to.


It wasn’t that quickly if you consider the years of iPhone chips leading up to it.


They've been doing this for years. It was just mobile only at first.


So quickly 10 years in the making.


Not quickly. People have been predicting this since the PA Semi purchase.


They first spent 10 years making their own mobile chips.


Probably billions of dollars in R&D and extremely clear executive guidance?


What is "quickly" for you?

They don't "make" them, they design it.


I don't think we're comparing apples to apples here (excuse the pun). These chips have something like 10% of the instructions that a typical x86 chip does. Once the big CPU players start producing the same kind of chips, I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc.


> I greatly expect Apple's power to performance advantage to drop significantly, if not be overtaken by the likes of AMD, etc

Nope. Apple and AMD both use TSMC for manufacturing. It's all made by the same factory. AMD does not have the advantage there. Apple buys the most capacity on the most advanced process nodes since they place much bigger orders (Apple also has 10x more cash than AMD).


I reviewed a programming book on Amazon must've been 15+ years ago.

The author posted a review of me on his blog. Not a review of my review. Of me and everything he could find out about me on the public Internet.


I’m sorry but that’s objectively hilarious. Were you offended?


The author posted a review of you shortly after your review or fifteen years later? Both are bizarre and messed up, I'm not even sure which one would be worse.


He posted his review within a day or two of me posting my review.


You need to heavily cite this person’s review of you everywhere.

Shit, I’d put that on my resume probably.


goodness, what did you do to the poor man to give him such obsessive focus?


I... gave an honest and reasonable assessment of the book. I think I gave it 3 stars.


How many stars did he give you?


This is why I've moved away from arguing with people on the internet, because there are too many people out there today who are absolutely deranged and will make it literally their life's mission to stalk you through every means at their disposal.

Also - mostly thanks to discord - it's trivial to summon an army of kids who are under the age of criminal responsibility who will do almost anything (online) if you kick them a few robux.


Imagine if you'd given him 1 star :-D


it may not have elicited quite the extreme reaction. a 3 can be harsher than a 1.

while an “unredeemable moron” might leave one star, that may not meet the bar for a response. while fighting with idiots on the internet is a past time, it is typically one entertained by… idiots.

a three star review, on the other hand. no, this takes thought. a thinker left that harsh judgement. a foolish thinker, but a thinker. thoughtful, but wrong, incorrect. flawed. no mere idiot, so it must be an asshole. and we can’t have that. justice must be preserved.

with a counter-review.


Let us know the book, please.


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