Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
Well duh. All possible questions have already been asked. There’s no need to ask any more. The world never changes and old answers never go out of date, so that’s it. StackOverflow is now the sum total of human knowledge for computer science and programming and will be so for ever more.
An ultimately doomed one that existed in Perl for a while was the pseudohash. They were regular integer-indexed arrays that could be accessed as though they were hashes (aka associative arrays / dictionaries). They even made it into the main Perl books at the time as this awesome time saving device. Except they weren’t.
I did a quick web search just now and someone did a talk about why they weren’t a great idea and they tell it better than I could; Link: https://perl.plover.com/classes/pseudohashes/
The supplied video doesn’t have great sound quality, and it might be better to just click through the slides under Outline at the bottom there.
Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.
Are you sure that’s not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost’s shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report.
Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn’t one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)
Actually yes, but I didn’t expect they’d go down the same avenues with the Pi.
I actually considered getting one of the computer-in-keyboard versions precisely because I’m of that same generation, but I couldn’t justify the expense.
Edit: It has come to my attention that it isn’t actually the people behind the Pi doing this. I really should read more rather than jumping to conclusions. There’s a few obvious rewrites I could make, but I think the prediction at the end is still valid even if the route I took wasn’t the right one.
This would appear to indicate that someone in charge of product design at Pi HQ is a Gen X-er or Boomer desperate to relive computing history through their own products.
Computer on a board. Bigger computer on a board. Computer entirely within a keyboard.
And now a computer in a PC-like case.
Prediction: The next step will be some kind of ARM-based cloud service.
Sometimes you have to.
Sometimes the intended user of a piece of software is not going to be a software engineer. The user might be intelligent, but not necessarily technically minded. They have no idea what’s possible - and importantly, what isn’t - and the software engineer closest to the subject may still not have a deep understanding of the subject, the nuances, the criteria for which the system is being written.
This is often unavoidable.
Even within the scope of the article, which seems to be about software projects for software engineers by software engineers, no group of engineers, nay, no two engineers, will have the same understanding of the field for which the software is being written.
Worse, management (at both ends) may well ensure that the only method of communication between developers and users is through them, providing a game of “telephone” in the middle.
This is all about the phrase “if you want a job done properly, do it yourself” and what you do if you can’t.
And also the tree-swing cartoons that have been around for decades at this point.
The real question might be whether the compiler was smart enough to change var++ and var-- into ++var and --var when the initial values aren’t needed.
As compiler optimisations go, it’s a fairly obvious one, but it was 1974 and putting checks like that in the compiler would increase its size and slow it down when both space and time were at a premium.
Pros: Little screens on every key!
Cons: Looks awful and costs a fortune!
Get one today!
Yeah. Right Control should be where Fn is for sure.
And as an ISO keyboard user, I need my right Shift key, so that Control has to be a Shift instead. On ISO, left Shift is small and right is large. For that and other reasons I use the right one way more than the left. And if that’s not possible for deep technical reasons, hard-wire it to the left one bypassing all of the trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time a keyboard did something like that.
… and what do you know, there’s a even little space there with no key where they could put the Fn key omitted by those changes.
Everything else I could deal with. Even the otherwise US layout. It’s been a while since I used one, but occasionally there’s a hiccup and I’ll reach for double quote or at-sign in the opposite places, so that muscle memory is still there, maybe waiting for mangling into typing on something like this.
As it stands, it doesn’t look like there is one. It appears to be a recreational mathematical toy for the creator to learn things more than it is for others to play with. It’s kind of neat nonetheless.
I think I might have made different choices for the reversal calculations, but I haven’t really thought about how I’d implement those choices, nor about nigh-insurmountable edge cases, and I’m only vaguely thinking about the “c = a OP b” case, not anything more extreme. The creator may have wanted to make the same choices but found themselves forced down a different path.
Verbatim from the creator: “it is imperfect”.
I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.
It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.
That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.
… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
In before Microsoft break out the FUD tactics and a year or two of cheap licenses.
Sigh. At this rate I can see a day where I end up switching to WebKitGTK’s MiniBrowser as my main rather than having it as a “secret” backup.
in America
And you can almost cross out “with monopolies” too because there’s a lot of tacit price-fixing in industries where there is competition.
Well, no, it wouldn’t. The bods that make these decisions still live like it’s 1950 and dream of an authoritarian future of masters and slaves.
What good is The Google or The AI when you’re sipping champagne up an ivory tower or out on the ocean being waited on hand and foot on a gleaming yacht?
So, there was this TV experiment where they served soup to a well-known scientist*, but, with his agreement, they stirred it first with an unused - and I stress unused - toilet brush.
He couldn’t bring himself to eat it.
Metaphorically speaking, our world is full of amazing things but they’re all stirred by clean toilet brushes. Sometimes, it’s worse than that and they’re used.
Do not want.
* Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he was later cancelled for being old and out of touch on women’s issues among other things, which is kind of an example of this same trope when you think about it. His opinions and reactions on soup and food disgust aren’t linked to any of that but you might be tempted to ignore the result because of it.
But then, that puts him in the same category as Louis CK and that’s what I’m responding to. Food for thought.
Fun fact: “Aluminium” is the international / official spelling. But where Brits have to take the L, or rather the F, is with “Sulphur”, because the international / official spelling of that is “Sulfur”. The others aren’t wrong, but they’re not the standard.
Anyway, I wonder if the international spelling has anything to do with it. Or maybe it just follows better from Chromium.
Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.