namingthingsiseasy @ namingthingsiseasy @programming.dev

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6

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294

Joined

2 yr. ago

Personally, I'm just sick and tired of modern UI design. Bring back density, put more information on the screen, eliminate the whitespace, use simple (and native!) widgets, get rid of those fucking sticky headers, and so on.

In addition to all the software freedom stuff, and so on. Also, I wish GPL were more popular too.

Then by that metric, Chinese must be incredibly easy. Simple genders, no articles, simple grammar, no verb conjugation whatsoever, very simple tenses. Probably the easiest language out there!

The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.

Software development is logical and predictable. It's (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you're doing should work every step of the way... without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.

It doesn't help that many of the governing bodies are deliberately sabotaging it as much as possible in order to push voters into that direction. Doug Ford is one of the most notorious in this respect, but there are plenty of others too

This is still on my todo list, but getting rid of std::regex in my C++ code. It's abhorrently slow.

Speedrunning the demise of cable tv!

Today we have chatbots. Yesterday we had search engines and stack overflow. Before that we had books. And before that? Well what do you know... software programming is a relatively novel field. It's almost as if nobody has perfected how it should be learned.

The most valuable knowledge comes from experience. I copied plenty of code around during my learning days as well, and I still do it today. The most important part however is trying to understand the code you're working with. If you can understand it, know when it fails, test it in the right way, etc., then sure, you could probably learn to code from chatbots. They provide the information, and you're at liberty to do what you want with it. If you just copy it and forget, you'll be a bad programmer. But it's not like you couldn't do that before either with the other sources that were available - there were plenty of bad programmers before we had these tools available too.

That said, there is a risk that these chatbots do not provide any useful context around the code that they produce. When you learned from a book or stack overflow, you were reading from a reasonably authoritative source that could explain the code that was produced. But the authority behind the code from chatbots is probably much weaker than what we have from stack overflow, which in turn was probably also weaker than what we have from books. Does it have an effect or learning? I have no clue. But I still think you can learn from chatbots if you use the output that they provide in the right way. (Disclaimer: I have never used one of them and have no experience with them.)

Basically, yeah. Dennis Ritchie wrote the C compiler because he knew exactly what her wanted to use it for and the kinds of code that he wanted to write. Then he went on to write the book that everyone used to learn the language.

This is true of probably every language, library, framework, etc. The original designer writes it because he knows what he wants to do with it and does so. Then everyone else follows. People then add more features and provide demonstrations of how to use them, and others copy them. It is extremely hard to just look at an API and use that to figure out exactly which calls should be made and in what order. Everyone just reads from the examples and adapts them as needed.

2.Google sucks at dealing with their creators. The lifeblood of the site is that it is the default platform for video content creators because its so big. Unjustified DCMA takedowns which ruin a persons livelihood and are difficult to appeal, their demonetization and essentially delisting from the algorithm of nsfw videos(which can happen if a key word is detected or a specific type of image, that recent issue with the big youtuber doxing another and getting a slap on the wrist, and the changes made to algorithms that hurt creators and shape content.

Well said. It's so hypocritical of Google to say "support our creators" when they do such a trash job of it already. Google makes hundreds of billions of dollars per year! If they cared so much about the creators, they could share more of their obscene earnings with them. Why should it be people's responsibility?!? And of course, all the things that you mentioned as well that constantly screw them over too.

It's just shameless hypocrisy. They have no moral high ground here whatsoever.

OCaml is a really interesting language. Wish I had more opportunities to try it out....

Anyway, you might want to check out https://discuss.ocaml.org/. They are a pretty active OCaml community and are pretty helpful for beginners and learners.

+1 for indie games. I really think we're living in the golden age of indie gaming with tools like Godot, Unreal, and Unity (yes, yes, I know, but Unity is probably still the most popular engine for now). As indies get empowered more and more by tools like this, and AAA studios get greedier and greedier, I can't find any reason to play anything that isn't from an indie game developer.

And most, nearly even all indie games work great on Linux, often even better than their Windows counterparts.

They pay, because at any moment they can come back as a citizen.

But that's true of pretty much every other country in the world as well. So it still doesn't explain why the US is the only one that charges tax on foreign-earned income.

And at what temperatures are C and K equal?

The fact that 99.5% of the global population uses it makes it the objectively correct choice.

The remaining .5% can keep bashing their heads against a wall if they like though

Corporations are always happy to pander to morality when it’s to their benefit

Seriously. We have fossil fuel companies knowingly and willingly destroying the planet in the name of profits. Where's the outrage over that? Or is that moral and ethical?

But when we're talking about technologies that give power to the people to break from the shackles of the content cartels, then all of a sudden, out come the morality police!

They don’t use it because there’s absolutely no need for them to do so when Windows is a fantastic OS for their needs

The issue has never been whether Windows is a good OS or not. Almost anything you can do with Linux you can also do with Windows[1]. The issue has always been the risk that Microsoft could pull the rug from under your feet and the fact that there's nothing you can do about it as long as you're on their platform. You can see all the bullshit that people have had to deal with in the past 10 years as the result of people being comfortable with taking that risk - shitty upgrades, telemetry, ads, and now this. And nobody even knows what other kinds of bullshit they'll try to pull in the future.

None of this to say that you have to choose one platform or another. Everything is a calculated risk. Use Windows if that's what you want, but by this point, it's clear that you will have to continue with putting up with more and more of this abusive behavior from Microsoft if that's the choice that you're making.

[1]: This is somewhat starting to change though. These days, for a lot of programming- and data science-related tasks, Linux is starting to pull further and further ahead and Windows is becoming more and more unusable.

Jokes aside, it was Canada that liberated the Netherlands. And they took in the Dutch royal family as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Netherlands_relations?useskin=vector

It's actually quite a beautiful story to read about, for those who are interested.

Another problem is that there is (or was, I don’t follow these things) friction between the Kernel and systemd, as systemd developers did not respect certain development philosophies.

More information on this here:

When systemd sees "debug" as part of the kernel command-line, it will spit out so much informaiton about the system that it fails to boot... The init system just collapses the system with too much information being sent to the dmesg when seeing the debug option as part of the kernel command-line parameter. Within the systemd bug report it was suggested for systemd not to look for a simple "debug" string to go into its debug mode but perhaps something like "systemd.debug" or other namespaced alternatives. The debug kernel command-line parameter has been used by upstream Linux kernel developers for many years. However, upstream systemd developers don't agree about changing their debug code detection. Kay Sievers of Red Hat wrote, "Generic terms are generic, not the first user owns them."

tl;dr: systemd parsed kernel command line information; when "debug" was present, systemd enabled logging that was so verbose that it would cause the system to become unbootable. systemd developers were notified of the issue and started acting passive aggressive instead of fixing the issue.

Or to put it more simply: if you make changes that cause Linus Torvalds' system to stop booting properly, you're probably gonna have a bad time.

Yup, it's just a way to force people to give up this right.

I wish them the best of luck with this tactic. (not)

I doubt the EU would look kindly upon this. Allowing people to opt out of personalised ads is done for a good reason, and punishing people who opt out like this sounds like a very hostage-like "or else" kind of tactic.

Should facebook go through with this, it will be interesting to see what happens.