• 8 Posts
  • 344 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I imagine, you guys might be measuring with two different scales. Early Windows versions were fine, but even back then, a switch to Linux would give you so much more customizability to actually make it yours.

    This is a dumb anecdote, but I switched to Linux from Windows 8, and pretty much the first thing I did, was to figure out how to hide the window titlebars. Mostly because I realized, I could, but they also just took screen space away on my laptop.


  • There can also be circumstances where you have to offer people a natural-looking key for general consumption. You can’t put UUID’s on car plates for example.

    Often times, the first section of the UUID is unique enough. With certain UI design choices, one can encourage users to normally work with that, while having the full UUID available in a detail view or from a copy-button.

    Another strategy I quite like, is to have the UUID as the definitely-always-unique identifier, and then have a separate name, which either the users can enter or we generate something like random adjective+animal.

    But yes, neither of those strategies would work for car plates.


  • Hmm, interesting idea, to ask the user to provide the overall intent by making them edit/write the plan, since the LLM can’t do intent.

    But man, we’ve recently had a number of programming beginners join us in our relatively large codebase, and I’ve basically had to write such a plan, i.e. step-by-step instructions, for them many times.

    It just means that I go through the whole codebase and have to think everything through, without doing it myself.
    It often took similarly long do that, and formulate instructions, as it would have taken me to write the code myself. Because obviously we’re using a high-level programming language, so there’s not many detail problems which are easier to describe in a natural language.

    It’s also incredibly difficult to provide correct instructions that way, since I don’t get to read the existing code while I write the code.
    And reviewing their code to figure out what came from it, that binds even more time.

    So, yeah, it really doesn’t sound like this LLM thing would save me time either…


  • I am 100% on board with people doing with their body whatever they want. Restricting that is just ridiculous.
    But that also necessarily means, they can decide to do immoral things with their body, which I do not need to be a fan of. And that’s where I’m still somewhat undecided on how to think of the whole sex work industry.

    As you say, to some degree, it is simply mental care for those customers. I do think, the offering should exist.
    But it’s also all too easy for it to become extremely exploitative.

    I’m thinking, in some far-off, progressive future (not sure, if we get there before work stops really being a thing), there would be self-help groups or simply therapy offerings, for those who spend their life earnings on getting sex work done.


  • Wow, I’ve definitely seen that before, but I never realized how wild that is. So many companies will start drooling like a dumbass when anything contains the GPL.

    So, it’s not like they can’t ever use GPL software, most do use Linux knowingly or unknowingly. But if you use GPL software in a way the legal department hasn’t seen before, they’ll always feel uneasy about it.

    Frankly, I’m surprised that Java gained any traction in the corporate world at all, then.


  • You can write any conditions you want into a license.

    That’s what actually differentiates proprietary licenses from open-source licenses.
    Open-source licenses follow certain rules, and you usually select an existing license, so therefore they can be reasoned about, collectively. People often implicitly mean “OSI-approved license”, when they talk of “open-source licenses”.
    Proprietary licenses, on the other hand, can contain whatever bullcrap you want.

    Having said that, I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine, if you also called your license “GNU General Public License”, then a case could probably be made in court, that your license is deliberately confusing.



  • Hmm, do you mean in the web console?

    I know Firefox has a bit of a reputation for being rather precise in how it handles web standards compliance. So, it’ll show comparatively many warnings and errors, if you don’t keep to the web standards.

    This is actually quite useful for web devs, because it means, if Firefox is happy with your implementation, then it’s relatively likely to run correctly on all browsers.



  • The aim is to offer the speed of C or C++ while retaining the user-friendly feel of Python itself.

    These kind of claims always annoy me. Like, sure, there’s some room for interpretation there, but at the end of the day, C, C++ and also Rust achieve their speed by having handling baked into the semantics for:

    • non-GC memory management
    • passing by-reference vs. by-value
    • and in the case of Rust, also for handling multi-threaded processing.

    Unless he comes up with a revolutionary new memory management strategy, or achieves a massive jump in static analysis to replace human intelligence, then you simply can’t achieve similar speed while keeping the semantics of Python.





  • I see you’re also from Germany, so I understand your roommate not knowing this is an option, but bidets are cheaper and do a better job cleaning.

    Like, I bought a dumb travel bidet a while ago and even that’s a solid upgrade from scrubbing with toilet paper.