I’m wondering how far I can get learning to play the cajon from YouTube tutorials?

I’d say I kind of suck at this point, but I’m having a good time and it’s early days still.

I’ve actually been having more trouble with Apple Maps lately.

My last trip was to perform at a country fair type thing and it couldn’t locate the venue. So I thought maybe if I put on the satellite view, I could spot it and drop a pin? But the whole area was behind a cloud. Wow.

Then later, when we were returning, it tried to send me on a shortcut through a mall parking into an overgrown field.

When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I’m guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There’s a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.

This could be why Obiwan wound up a hermit? (Programmers of my generation at least talk about “Obiwan errors” because his name sounds like “off-by-one”.)

Was it red by any chance? The only red car I have ever owned got rear-ended 3 times.

Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I’m having none of it.

One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It’s now or never, curse!

Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.

So it’s not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmm…

Ah fair enough. I guess I only learned about it in the 2020s when I read some expose on it and it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It’s such a wasteful abomination that we don’t need right now.

king mierdas

I’ve heard a lot of nicknames for that man, but that one fits so perfectly, even going all the way back to his casino empire days.

Was playing Civ6 the other day and can confirm: wine is a luxury resource.

mocktails and marijuana

I’m liking this as a potential album name.

There were breaking changes between C and C++ (and some divergent evolution since the initial split) as well as breaking changes between different releases of C++ itself. I am not saying these never happened, but the powers that be controlling the standard have worked hard to minimize these for better or worse.

If I took one of my earliest ANSI C programs from the 80s and ran it through a C++23 compiler, I would probably need to remove a bunch of register statements and maybe check if an assumption of 16-bit int is going to land me in some trouble, but otherwise, I think it would build as long as it’s not linking in any 3rd party libraries.

I think the thing with C++ is they have tried to maintain backward compatibility from Day 1. You can take a C++ program from the 80s (or heck, even a straight up C program), and there’s a good chance it will compile as-is, which is rather astonishing considering modern C++ feels like a different language.

But I think this is what leads to a lot of the complexity as it stands? By contrast, I started Python in the Python 2 era, and when they switched to 3, I was like “Wow, did they just break hello world?” It’s a different philosophy and has its trade-offs. By reinventing itself, it can get rid of the legacy cruft that never worked well or required hacky workarounds, but old code will not simply run under the new interpreter. You have to hope your migration tools are up to the task.

This reminds me of when I had to roll my own dynamic memory allocator for an obscure platform. (Something I never want to do again!) I stuck metadata in the negative space just before the returned pointer like you say. In my case, it was complicated by the fact that you had to worry about the memory alignment of the returned pointer to make sure it works with SIMD and all that. Ugh. But I guess with strings (or at least 8-bit-encoded strings), alignment should not be an issue.

Oh, so you’re talking about text representation in an editor or something along those lines? That’s kind of a separate problem isn’t it?

At the lowest level though, I suppose you still need to consider whether to use null-terminated segments. I think I’d still be going length + data, though I wouldn’t worry about packing down the length representation like with serialization formats. Your code will need to be highly cognizant of the length of strings and managing dynamic memory allocation all over the place, so it’s good to have those lengths quickly accessible at all times.

Better in what sense? I put some thought into this when designing an object serialization library modelled like a binary JSON.

When it got to string-encoding, I had to decide whether to go null-terminated vs length + data? The former is very space-efficient, particularly when you have a huge number of short strings. And let’s face it, that’s a common enough scenario. But it’s nice to have the length beforehand when you are parsing the string out of a stream.

What I did in the end was come up with a variable-length integer encoding that somewhat resembles what they do in UTF-8. It means for strings < 128 chrs, the length is a single byte. Longer than that and more bytes get used as necessary.

I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!

Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.

Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.

I have mixed feelings on this. I grew up in a secular setting as my father had long ago given up on religion and my mother seemed ambivalent about it.

As an adult, I moved to a new city with my wife who is religious, though non-evangelical. She never tried to push me into it but would disappear every Sunday morning. But after a decade or so of feeling like a stranger in my adopted city, I attended a service where I discovered they were in desperate need for musicians. So I wound up volunteering some time and in the process, met a lot of people, and one thing led to another. Today, I do have friends in the city, play in various bands around town, etc.

Yet I still haven’t really bought into religion. I guess the value to me is that it gets my introverted ass out of the house and meeting people irl. As a community institution, it brings together people of varying ages and demographics. But it comes with a huge amount of baggage which I could frankly do without?

I just hope that if religion fades away, there will still be something at the community level that gathers together people regularly from all walks of life. There are all sorts of special interest groups, but many of these do not necessarily attract a wide cross-section of society.

Whatever the case, when a church closes as a religious institution, I hope that it can be repurposed to some other activity that is still community-building?

Interesting. The article suggests the car would photograph others speeding rather than reporting itself.

Personally, I don’t mind speeders so much except when they’re weaving between traffic recklessly. I do really hate tailgaters though. So a rear-facing camera maybe?