How do you comment your makefiles?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    (Because this is the Internet, add a /s to the end of the previous message for full comprehension.)

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  • How do you comment your makefiles?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    What kind of a maniac comments Makefiles? It was hard to set up, so it should be hard to read and alter, dammit!

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  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
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    I made a genetic algorithm for fonts
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    That's what it does.

    What is the intent? WHY does it do this?

    I'm baffled as to what the entire point of this is.

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  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
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    I made a genetic algorithm for fonts
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    I don't get it. What's it supposed to do beyond making me repeat letters? Do you have something that actually explains the intent somewhere?

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  • "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
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    What's your favorite IDE?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 75%

    My favourite IDE is a shell, Textadept for editing, and gdb for debugging.

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  • Instagram joins the Fediverse
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    Time to break out the block cannon. Ain't no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.

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  • Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    This headline is badly punctuated. There is a period which belongs there. After "Wrong".

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  • I bet he's having more children that he's gonna neglect
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    The divorced dad energy in this one is off the charts.

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  • Why has [#Strava](https://mas.to/tags/Strava) not embraced [#ActivityPub](https://mas.to/tags/ActivityPub)? It doesn't seem like at all a stretch to have the private/followers-only/everyone model map
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    This. This right here. For anybody to embrace anything they have to perceive and advantage to them to do so. If you can't persuade them of such an advantage they won't do it.

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  • Introducing Calckey!
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    The name is a really weird one. Sounds more like a spreadsheet than a social media application.

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  • [@fediverse](https://lemmy.ml/c/fediverse) What type of social media do you feel is lacking most in the fediverse?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    A whole lot of misdesigns are only a "small amount of brain power" to use. As your language accumulates these, however, the load builds up.

    This also has the extra problem that overloading in general brings with it. What is the result of 3 + "string"? What is the result of "string" + 3? You have to have rules for this. These rules have to be learned. They have to be kept in mind. There is room for error. And of course the way different languages react to them will vary strongly.

    For example in Rexx, Python, and Ruby these are errors (and with the latter two the error changes depending on which order). In Awk and Perl the result is 3 in both cases.

    Format strings are better than + as concatenation, to be fair, but are still not very good compared to separate concatenation operators. It's hard to make them type-safe. They separate the value from its location in the string.

    Using actual concatenation operators has the advantage of format strings, but add the possibility for type safety. For example in Ada:

    ...
        Put_Line("Distance: " & Distance_Value'Image & "km");
    ...
    

    See here, & will only concatenate string types. If you want to print something that's not a string, you have to convert it to a string. This means you can't accidentally mix types. Further, it's immediately obvious where a given value will show up in the output. Compare and contrast with the C equivalent:

    ...
        printf("Distance: %skm\n", distance_value);
    ...
    

    Not only is location of the value obfuscated—trivial to spot here, but in a complicated string it's very difficult to spot at times. And it's easy, too, to have the format code not match the value. As this example illustrates. Again, easy to spot in trivial code like this, but horrifically hard in real-world code, especially if the variable type changes.

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  • [@fediverse](https://lemmy.ml/c/fediverse) What type of social media do you feel is lacking most in the fediverse?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    String concatenation with + is evil. Well-designed languages (Lua, for example, among many others—I'm not calling PHP well-designed!) doesn't do this.

    Why?

    Because +, in every other context is commutative, but suddenly, in the case of concatenation, it is not. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden for no material gain.

    Concatenation can be accomplished by juxtaposition (e.g. SNOBOL4, Rexx, much of the C family tree), by .. (Lua), by . (Perl, PHP), by || (PL/I, Rexx again), by & (Ada, some BASIC dialects), etc. without this added cognitive burden of overloading + for no good reason.

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  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 83%

    No.

    ActivityPub is a protocol. It has no agency.

    People can save the Internet. Perhaps with ActivityPub, perhaps with something else.

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  • Ariadne Conill on the history of IRC and how the fediverse is vulnerable to the 'free software reality distortion field'
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    And here we see the seeds of IRC'sthe Fediverse's irrelevancy being planted and lovingly tended.

    What you just said could have easily been put into the mouths of any number of IRC advocates 20 years ago. Where is IRC now? Remind me.

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  • Alt-text on media: Why not compulsory on some instances?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 71%

    Because it's sometimes a ludicrous demand?

    Common pattern I see in Mastodon's ... more strident, shall we call them? ... advocates:

    Poster: I just took a picture of a <insert bird>. Note the red and yellow flash of plumage, in contrast to the more usual green and red. I caught this little darling hopping along the charcoal grey slate walkway I've got running through my garden, right next to the <insert flower> you can see at the right side of the frame.

    <put picture here>

    Strident Twit: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT!?

    Or, worse:

    Strident Twit Bot: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT FOR OUR BLIND USERS!?


    So what, precisely (providing details), would you put into alt text that's not already in the post? Would you just copy and paste the alt text? When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

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  • What are the best ship-to-ship combat rules in a sci-fi game?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    Best for what purpose?

    There's no universal "best" because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you're not into kit-bashing, though, that's not going to be "best" for you.

    For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.

    The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was "perfect" for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).

    The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a "dreaded" cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.

    For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It's an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just ... be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.

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  • Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter?
  • ttmrichter ttmrichter Now 100%

    I think he's a bit over-hopeful at the fediverse's prospects, sadly. People will give up so much (like all of their privacy!) for a small amount of convenience.

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  • This picture (among others) has been circulating around WeChat and other social media today. Thousands of retirees protested in Hankou today, the second such protest since the one performed one week ago, over the government's sudden and arbitrary reduction in health benefits. ~~You can tell this is a protest in China because of the violence as the authoritarian state grinds those who dare speak out against its policies under tank treads and truncheon blows in clouds of tear gas and worse.~~ Oddly missing from this picture, given the image people have of Chinese governance: - Tear gas. - Truncheons. - Tanks. Oddly missing too from this picture for those who are familiar with protests of equivalent size in the USA or the UK or other such places: - Protestor violence. ~~You have to give credit to the survivors of the February 8th carnage. It must take some serious courage to come back a week later to be ground under tank treads and smashed under truncheon blows again.~~

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    twitterisgoinggreat.com

    In which Business Genius™ Elon Musk Ox's brilliant Soopah Dupah Business Plan® is documented for future generations to marvel over.

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    Back in 2017 I stumbled over [this](https://zhongchou.modian.com/item/7857.html) on the Chinese crowdfunding site [Modian](https://modian.com/). They were asking for 50,000RMB (~US$7000 today) to translate the FATE Core rulebook into Chinese. They got over 215,000RMB (~US$30,000). As a result of this almost all of the then-extent supplements for FATE were translated and published in China. FATE, as a result, is now actually quite a popular game in China: about #3, from eyeballing Taobao. (#1 is Call of Cthulhu, of all games, and #2 is D&D/Pathfinder.) This is exciting all by itself already, as far as I'm concerned, but even more exciting to me is this: ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/4ff63d5d-738f-4788-b559-d16f67b9079a.png) ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/15312bc4-53db-4c8e-acbd-559fc3cbb228.png) ![](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6c31c766-80d5-423b-ad7f-6d5bc8b5cc38.png) There is a native ecosystem of FATE world books and adventures that seems to be popping up. (I'm assuming these aren't translations because "Bilibili" isn't a thing outside of China as far as I know, and the other two are about a very Chinese semi-mythical figure that most people outside of China won't have heard of.)

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    www.gofundme.com

    This is so capitalism at all levels that it hurts to watch. - Corporation peddles snake oil that kills people. - Corporation doubles down on that snake oil at a time of a global pandemic when lives are doubly on the line. - A scientist speaking out against the technology with verified studies and measurements is sued by said corporation. - Said scientist has to beg for money to get even the smallest chance in court in the face of the corporate juggernaut. Ladies and gentlemen: I give you ***CAPITALISM!***

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
    This is about right
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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearEL
    This is a development and a half (if true).
    https://twitter.com/KnowNothingTV/status/1538783473640546304?s=20&t=kh6I2e630uH6SmjqCmSs6Q

    Elon Musk's child wants a legal gender change for reasons of gender identity *and* because he's embarrassed by his father.

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearEL
    Elon Musk deep fakes promote new BitVex cryptocurrency scam
    www.bleepingcomputer.com

    Too good not to share! My two favourite scams: Elon Musk and Bitcoin, merged together into a joint scam!

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    www.acm.org

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/221845 > This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!

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    www.acm.org

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/221845 > This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
    ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile
    www.acm.org

    This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
    COROS IIa: A Series of Tubes
    personaljournal.ca

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/209328 > When last I wrote about COROS I explored the EVQ component of it with a focus on the API and some of its underlying construction. In this post I will expand on that underlying construction giving reasons for some of the design decisions, as well as providing some example use cases for this.

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    personaljournal.ca

    When last I wrote about COROS I explored the EVQ component of it with a focus on the API and some of its underlying construction. In this post I will expand on that underlying construction giving reasons for some of the design decisions, as well as providing some example use cases for this.

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    mastodon.world

    Protests are all well and good but they're not helping the Ukrainians on the ground. Governments aren't helping Ukrainians on the ground either. Maybe it's time to help them help themselves.

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
    The "Shoemaker's Children" Problem
    personaljournal.ca

    Software has a problem. OK, it has many problems. I've already highlighted one of them. But this is another important one. The problem is that software—all software, with no exceptions—sucks. The reason for this is multifaceted and we could spend years and years arguing about who has the larger list of reasons, but in the end it boils down to the proverbial shoemaker's children: Our development tools are the worst of the worst in software.

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    https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1725449210636072615

    You'll probably need your favourite translation engine of choice, but long story short, COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. Ten known cases with prospects for more. A lot of buildings have been locked down and the city is back on location tracking and mitigation measures. There's a decent chance I'm facing lockdown again for the first time since March 2020. Fuck.

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
    COROS II: Blood and Bone
    personaljournal.ca

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/176003 > With coroutines and their use cases at least reasonably well established, the event queue mechanism of COROS is introduced to tie them up into a convenient architecture.

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    personaljournal.ca

    With coroutines and their use cases at least reasonably well established, the event queue mechanism of COROS is introduced to tie them up into a convenient architecture.

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    "Initials" by "Florian Körner", licensed under "CC0 1.0". / Remix of the original. - Created with dicebear.comInitialsFlorian Körnerhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearPR
    COROS Ia: My Heart Must Go On
    personaljournal.ca

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/175976 > The first piece of COROS explored was the coroutine system, but coroutines are not a well-understood facility in programming circles for some reason. This article builds up some use cases for coroutines and their application in preparation for the next major component of COROS.

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    personaljournal.ca

    The first piece of COROS explored was the coroutine system, but coroutines are not a well-understood facility in programming circles for some reason. This article builds up some use cases for coroutines and their application in preparation for the next major component of COROS.

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    ttmrichter Now
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    ttmrichter

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