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11 mo. ago

  • You don't know how to do something in raw JavaScript. You're not even sure you should. You find a library / module / package / whatever-the-name-is-this-week on the Internet. You paste it into your code. Your code now works. Your code is now 1MB larger. This web app is heavy, man.

  • Yeaaah, you're gonna need to re-evaluate that cis-het label, friend. I like and respect the guy too, but if some miracle turn of events ended with he and I in the same time and place and he asked me for that, I'd politely but firmly decline. And then maybe enquire if his wife knew about this.

    I'd probably be more comfortable if she put him up to it, but it'd still be a no.

  • Henrietta Lacks hasn't managed it yet. Look her up. It's at least as bad as this if not more so.

    "Yet" being the operative word here. There's a disease in dogs that started in some very similar circumstances (although happening in nature rather than from a science accident). One slip-up from an immunocompromised tech with just the right genetic make-up and it begins.

  • There was a post on a similar subject not too long ago, and it seems the landscape shifted about 10 years ago. A whole load of alt-lifestyle folks got into Linux and sysadmin, and maybe a few previously straight-laced sysadmins came out as alt too.

    Vive les différences

  • True. I think of it more as a semantic shift. In the old days, processes would actually quit and some other process would resurrect it as necessary, but then someone had the idea of having some processes catch the HUP and do all that itself without actually bothering any other processes.

    And the implementation might actually involve an exec of the process' own executable, meaning that it actually does self-terminate, but it leaves a child in its place.

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  • Well, yes, but actually no. It's an old analogue "portable" 14" CRT TV with push button channel controls. Haven't had it switched on in probably a decade at this point, and even if I did, all TV is digital here now, so it wouldn't be able to show anything without a lot of outside help.

    There's a VCR under it that used to serve some of that purpose, but that's also analogue only, doesn't play tapes any more and the remote control is busted, so yeah, no TV.

    That said, I adopted the philosophy of the bedroom only being for the main bedroom activities a while ago. You know. Dressing, undressing, testing the mattress and sleeping. This may be your husband's line of thinking.

    I moved the computer out of there for that reason too. The TV and the trolley it's on only remained because it's in use as a clothes horse.

  • If you approach people and tell them you're normal, they won't believe you. Something similar applies to saying you're human on the Internet.

    Hello, yes, I am a human.

    Suspicious, isn't it?

  • Just an observation, but those are protocols that require a login before files can be transferred, so at a guess, it reduces the risk of accidentally transferring unnecessary client side information, but it's probably more likely to be for code maintenance reasons. Fewer supported protocols means less to manage going forward.

    HTTP(S) is fine for downloads anyway, even if it wasn't originally designed for that.

  • For most intents and purposes, they're no more dangerous than a star of the same mass in the same place.

    There's also the theory that our universe could be the inside of a black hole in a higher-order universe.

    Of course, trying to imagine the size of our universe, let alone an entire hierarchy of them where ours may just be itself an insignificant speck, might cause more doom sensation than less. Do with this information what you will.

  • Those of a vintage beyond even my own will know that it stands for "Broken Biscuit Company", which I believe originated on BBC radio with The Goon Show. Now that's not an acronym, but it is another word that's picked up an unfortunate extra meaning in recent years.

  • Can only speak for myself, but I think backspace is probably one of my most used keys, the number of typos I make. Generally, I don't miss these, but when proofreading or rewriting parts of comments I occasionally leave a word in from a previous iteration or take one out that I meant to leave in, throwing a wrench into the flow.

    I can easily imagine that for some people that goes to another level and they might be too tired or stressed to be able to even notice, let alone fix the mistakes they make. There's also some level of short attention span going on and people may not be bothered to fix it because they have to be off to the next piece of content or contributing elsewhere.

    The spell-checking red squiggly underline admittedly being something of a crutch. I've noticed an increase in the number of longer or more obscure words that I'm sure I was getting right before but now not so much. And about once a day, on average, I reckon, I reach for right-click to figure out precisely what I'm getting wrong because I can't figure it out.

    Most of the time, I've missed a letter or am woefully wrong, but very occasionally it's not in the built-in dictionary and online dictionaries basically say it's fine. And the-e-en I rewrite to avoid the word anyway. Not everyone's going to do that.

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  • For a certain set of inputs, yes. Good luck guessing what that comprises that set even if 1) there's documentation and 2) you read it.

    Worse, for all we know, double actually adds a thing to itself, which might accidentally or deliberately act on strings. Dividing by two has no such magic.

  • Perl was originally designed to carry on regardless, and that remains its blessing and curse, a bit like JavaScript which came later.

    Unlike JavaScript, if you really want it to throw a warning or even bail out completely at compiling such constructs (at least some of the time, like this one) it's pretty easy to turn that on rather than resort to an entirely different language.

    use warnings; at the top of a program and it will punt a warning to STDERR as it carries merrily along.

    Make that use warnings FATAL => "syntax"; and things that are technically valid but semantically weird like this will throw the error early and also prevent the program from running in the first place.

  • Well, you see, Perl's length is only for strings and if you want the length of an array, you use @arrayname itself in scalar context.

    Now, length happens to provide scalar context to its right hand side, so @arrayname already returns the required length. Unfortunately, at that point it hasn't been processed by length yet, and length requires a string. And so, the length of the array is coerced to be a string and then the length of that string is returned.

    A case of "don't order fries if your meal already comes with them or you'll end up with too many fries".

  • As a Perl fossil I recognise this syntax as equivalent to if(not @myarray) which does the same thing. And here I was thinking Guido had deliberately aimed to avoid Perlisms in Python.

    That said, the Perlism in question is the right* way to do it in Perl. The length operator does not do the expected thing on an array variable. (You get the length of the stringified length of the array. And a warning if those are enabled.)

    You can start a fight with modern Perl hackers with whether unless(@myarray) is better or just plain wrong, even if it works and is equivalent.