I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?
I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?
Most recently? My wife was wfh and out of the kindness of my heart I brought her a coke. She was on a zoom call with her entire team. I was pantsless.
literally good for you
I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it’s good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.
I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict
key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)
Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct
with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};
. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.
Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.
If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.
I guess the MAC address guy is up next. 48 bits may not go so far if every light bulb is going to want its own.
Imagine if you were the guy who made the call on IPv4 addresses…
Falsehoods About Time
Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.
Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.
Falsehoods About Text
I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!
Fair, though I guess my interpretation was that void*
is kind of like a black hole in that anything can fall into it in an unsettling way that loses information about what it was?
We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.
I’m with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won’t you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.
What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that’s what I’ll be remembering on the way home.
I think I could get very nervous coding for the military, depending on what sort of application I was working on. If it were some sort of administrative database, that doesn’t sound so bad. If it were a missile guidance system, on man! A single bug and there goes a village full of civilians. Even something without direct human casualties could be nerve-wracking. Like if it were your code which bricked a billion-dollar military satellite.
Speaking of missile guidance systems, I once met someone who worked a stint for a military contractor. He told me a story about a junior dev who discovered an egregious memory leak in a cruise missile’s software. The senior dev then told him “Yeah, I know about that one. But the memory leak would take an hour before it brings the system down and the missile’s maximum flight time is less than that, so no problem!” I think coding like that would just drive me into some OCD hell.
I have only written potentially life-threatening code once in my life. It had to do with voltage/current regulation in the firmware of a high-powered instrument used by field workers at the company where I work. It was a white-knuckled week I spent on just a single page of code, checking and re-checking it countless times and unit testing it in every conceivable way I could imagine.
Several years ago, I went under the knife and the whole day from the point they put me under is a total blank. It’s unsettling because I am told I carried on conversations with the doctor, family members, etc. after initially coming to from anaesthesia, but it’s only starting the following morning when I woke up in a regular hospital bed that I could start remembering again.
Yeah that tracks. I don’t see a lot of 3rd ring people running a soup kitchen. It’s 2nd ring people who aren’t out there to proselytize.
Based on my personal observations, there are sort of like 3 rings to a religion. The outermost contains the vast majority of adherents who are pretty casual in their faith. If they are of some Christian denomination say, they’ll show up for Christmas or Easter services and go their separate ways otherwise. The 2nd ring contains people who attend services regularly but are non-evangelical. They are devout in their faith but not pushy about it.
Then finally, there is this innermost ring of evangelicals who make it their mission to tell you how great it is to find God and can be pushy enough to make a priest cringe. People from the outer rings generally try to avoid this group, but they tend to be the most active online. I guess maybe lemmy has yet to be overrun by them?
I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.
So you’re saying the comments themselves get cached on the local instance where the user is registered before being synced with the remote community-hosting instance?
I honestly don’t know how these things work internally, but had assumed the comments needed to go straight to the remote instance given the way you can’t comment once said instance goes down? You can still read the cached content though.
When I first heard the term “fediverse”, it immediately made me think of some sort of vast interplanetary network. And let’s face it: a fediverse-like model is really what you would need if you had settlements scattered throughout the solar system. A monolithic, centralized service would be awful, given the reality of communication lag and likely limited bandwidth.
So let’s say lemmy (or more generally activitypub) were to go interplanetary. How would that work out? You set up your first instance on Mars. Any content that’s posted there will be immediately available to your fellow Martians. Earthlings who subscribe may also be able to view it as their instances cache the content, albeit after some delay.
But the trouble starts when Earthlings want to start contributing to the discussion. If they have to wait the better part of an hour to get a single comment lodged, it’s going to get old fast.
So you would need to allow the Earth side to branch off to some extent from what’s happening on Mars. Then eventually, something like a git merge would try to bring it all back together? I wonder if that would work?
The city where I live has a musical instrument lending library. I don’t know how common these are? Ours started when a cherished local musician passed away and his eclectic collection became the library. Over the years, more people have donated instruments and there is an annual festival to raise funds for their upkeep. (As a local musician, I’m actually playing at said festival today.)
Anyway, it works just like a regular library. You get your library card and check out an instrument and it doesn’t cost you a penny. And there are all kinds of videos online these days to give you pointers on how to play. I guess if you get really serious, you’ll probably want some one-on-one tutoring, but if you’re just doing it for kicks and don’t have any plans to join a band or whatever, you can just have some fun and see how far you can get on your own?
I watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.