skisnow @ skisnow @lemmy.ca

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Joined

4 mo. ago

For real. You can tell how good a programmer someone is, by how good they think an LLM is at programming.

Yup. I once decided to spend an afternoon answering questions on a framework I was expert in, as a kind of profile-building exercise to help with job hunting, and after around the third smug self-satisfied comment picking me up on some piece of irrelevant bullshit I deleted my account.

It's even worse than that - they don't just "do absolutely nothing to change that", they actively whip each other into line by loudly blaming third party voters for not giving them the votes that they somehow owe to their big money party.

My LinkedIn has recently become flooded with Suggested Posts from 3rd degree connections who have "Vibe Coding Guru" listed as their job and post lots of stuff saying "people who mock Vibe Coding just don't get it, and you too will be left behind if you don't subscribe to my newsletter (which ChatGPT writes for me)"

I got into a long debate with someone who wouldn't accept my claim that pi is 3.

My reasoning was that 3 is accurate to the number of decimal places it's quoted to, which is all you ever can say of any given value of pi. Like, pi might not be exactly 3, but it's not 3.14159265358979323846 either, because both values still have infinity digits missing.

You may

Big burgers should just be two burgers

Everyone has that one moment when they realize just how expensive a good box is if you need to go out and actually buy one with money.

Western expats in Japan are notorious for hating every other Western expat in Japan. It's even got a name, "My Japan Syndrome".

What's more, Windows S Mode proved perfectly that you could offer the "safe" functionality that Apple claim they need to protect their customers, without fucking things up for people who wanted to take responsibility for vetting applications themselves.

I’m currently in the long tedious process of replacing all my details for every website and service with an email address at a domain I actually own, before some AI bot at Google decides that some random shit violates their TOC and deletes my Gmail.

That one wasn't the one I had issues with, since the concept is essentially the same across all languages. We say it's false because we can't conclusively say that it's true. Same as the reason why null != null in SQL.

The code is a set of preprocessor macros to stuff loads of booleans into one int (or similar), in this case named 'myFlags'. The preprocessor is a simple (some argue too simple) step at the start of compilation that modifies the source code on its way to the real compiler by substituting #defines, prepending #include'd files, etc.

If myFlags is equal to, e.g. 67, that's 01000011, meaning that BV00, BV01, and BV07 are all TRUE and the others are FALSE.

The first part is just for convenience and readability. BV00 represents the 0th bit, BV01 is the first etc. (1 << 3) means 00000001, bit shifted left three times so it becomes 00001000 (aka 8).

The middle chunk defines macros to make bit operations more human-readable.

SET_BIT(myFlags, MY_FIRST_BOOLEAN) gets turned into ((myFlags) |= ((1 << 0))) , which could be simplified as myFlags = myFlags | 00000001 . (Ignore the flood of parentheses, they're there for safety due to the loaded shotgun nature of the preprocessor.)

Back in the day when it mattered, we did it like

    
#define BV00		(1 <<  0)
#define BV01		(1 <<  1)
#define BV02		(1 <<  2)
#define BV03		(1 <<  3)
...etc

#define IS_SET(flag, bit)	((flag) & (bit))
#define SET_BIT(var, bit)	((var) |= (bit))
#define REMOVE_BIT(var, bit)	((var) &= ~(bit))
#define TOGGLE_BIT(var, bit)	((var) ^= (bit))

....then...
#define MY_FIRST_BOOLEAN BV00
SET_BIT(myFlags, MY_FIRST_BOOLEAN)


  

It's such an insane story that I wonder what the other side of it is. It's easy to imagine the guy just having got out of a meeting ten minutes earlier with "if you don't get Julia Roberts into a movie by the end of the week, I'll see you never work in this town again!" ringing in his ears.

Yes. This is basically the core of why capitalism eats itself.

You don't have to be evil or short-sighted to be a CEO, but if you don't do evil and short-sighted shit to pump the share price there's a high probability the board will replace you with someone who will.

This is why I believe the government should hold stock and sit on the boards of any company that gets publicly listed. Much easier than tying yourself in knots with an adversarial system of complex regulations.

The terrifying thing is that this is just a temporary technical misstep.

Musk's response to this won't be to pack that shit in, it'll be to order his goons to figure out how to make it more subtle.

Sure, but they have a crazy large amount of data and an army of Data Science PhDs who sat down and calculated they'd make more money increasing their margins on people who'll put up with it, than they'd lose pissing the rest of their customers off.

All the rest of us can do is leave our Torrents running and keep our ratios up...

Yeah, I was hoping I'd see less of that moving away from Reddit to a non-US site, but eh, what can you do.

When my parents bought in the UK in the early 80s, the average family house was £20k. But mortgage rates at the time were ~20%, meaning you had to pay £4k per year just to cover the interest alone, and the average salary was below £6k.

Yes, interest came back down after a few years, but a lot of people learned about Negative Equity during those years.