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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • NixOS. Gentoo gets into trouble when you need multiple versions of the same library at the same time. Also while the infrastructure supports it it’s annoying that gentoo doesn’t provide pre-built binaries, like yes some people might want to have reason to build their own bash but I think I’ll be fine with a standard build. NixOS? If you install something usually it’s going to be pre-built. Change a couple of configuration flags? May or may not be pre-built. You want to apply a custom patch? It’s going to seamlessly build from source.


  • Not really, they’d clash all the time. 8080 is the default port for a non-privileged webserver, that is, web server, something you put your own stuff on, not applications/daemons that happen to have a web interface. E.g. ComfyUI uses 8188 for its web interface, deluge 8112, neither will serve your index.html.



  • 255, generally, because null termination. ZFS does 1023, the argument not being “people should have long filenames” but “unicode exists”, ReiserFS 4032, Reiser4 3976. Not that anyone uses Reiser, any more. Also Linux’ PATH_MAX of 4096 still applies. Though that’s in the end just a POSIX define, I’m not sure whether that limit is actually enforced by open(2)… man page speaks of ENAMETOOLONG but doesn’t give a maximum.

    It’s not like filesystems couldn’t support it it’s that FS people consider it pointless. ZFS does, in principle, support gigantic file metadata but using it would break use cases like having a separate vdev for your volume’s metadata. What’s the point of having (effectively) separate index drives when your data drives are empty.




  • The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery.

    It’s brilliant actually. I mean it’s still arguably a shitshow, but Steam is very good at letting shovelware sink to the bottom of their algorithms.

    1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago.

    Not bad for a story-focussed adventure.

    Sifu sold 3m, Baba is You about half a million. The game may be brilliant, the GOTY award may be perfectly deserved, still ain’t going to play it because it’s not my genre. “Story-focussed adventure” is like a quarter of a step above walking simulator when it comes to ludological complexity I’d rather read a book. That’s of course just me, for the general audience… well, it’s niche.

    Also btw young people never drove sales. The reason is simple: They’re broke.


  • The large initial percentage of female coders was due to computer having been a female job, because secretary was. Their role within companies didn’t change, what changed is that they were using machines to do the computing instead of doing it by hand.

    We’re kinda lucky to have the woke trifecta (Ada, Grace, Alan) (first programmer (woman), inventor of compilers (woman), absolute unit (gay)) to keep the chuds at bay. Even if we weren’t all socially inept nerds (or pretending to be so to bosses) there’s only so much you can do, culturally, if the population is growing exponentially. Uncle Bob (yes I know he’s a chud) did the maths at some point IIRC it was something like the number of programmers doubling every two years. Which also means that at any one point in time roughly 2/3rds of programmers have no idea what they’re doing, which explains the javascript ecosystem.



  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

    …and of course JS made it into the examples, how could it not:

    A programming language’s standard library usually provides a function similar to the pseudocode ParseInteger(string, radix), which creates a machine-readable integer from a string of human-readable digits. The radix conventionally defaults to 10, meaning the string is interpreted as decimal (base 10). This function usually supports other bases, like binary (base 2) and octal (base 8), but only when they are specified explicitly. In a departure from this convention, JavaScript originally defaulted to base 8 for strings beginning with “0”, causing developer confusion and software bugs. This was discouraged in ECMAScript 3 and dropped in ECMAScript 5.


  • I was talking about the foundation itself, not foundation+subsidiaries. And yes ever since the writing was on the wall wrt. google funds they’ve been putting more and more money in investments to make sure they can survive, as opposed to grants. Still keeping with the foundation’s mandate, though, e.g. all their VC investments into AI are the polar opposite of what the likes of OpenAI are doing. Kinda sceptical e.g. huggingface will ever turn a profit, much less a significant one, but it’s important to have them.








  • If you want a really advanced build system there’s shake, which can deal with things like building things that generates dependency information for things that build things. In a nutshell: It’s strictly more powerful than make because (a single invocation of) make operates on a fixed dependency graph while shake can discover dependencies as it goes.

    Mostly though you should use whatever comes with the language you’re using, and if you’re doing something simple use make. That includes “link a multi-language project where the components are generated by language-specific systems”. It notably doesn’t include multi-stage compiler builds. GHC switched from recursive make, which is a bad idea, to non-recursive make, which was… arcane, but at least you didn’t have to make clean to get a correct build, to shake. Here’s the build system it’s a whole project to itself.


  • Would it baffle you to know I might consider this “critique” to be art where the image itself is not? I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

    Not in the slightest. Also, how kind of you.

    Do I just take your word for it that these critics have nothing to say?

    Nah I’m just not into the high-falutin’ stuff myself. At least not in the “write an essay to accompany the work” way. Part of the craft of art, for me, is to actually express stuff in the artwork, and not as a combination of artwork+essay. I very much rather leave the thing open to interpretation, see what happens. That’s entering a dialogue with whoever the audience may be instead of preaching from the pulpit, it’s horizontal, not hierarchical, it does not privilege the perception of the author over that of the audience.

    Their sole motivation is salvaging gen AI’s reputation.

    Yes and no? My actual stance on gen AI is simple: It’s pretty much like photography. Tons of slop photographs and AI gens exist because it’s so accessible, doesn’t mean you cannot create art using it. Like with photography, using gen AI you have to deal with its limitations: You can’t control the weather, you can’t control how the AI will interpret certain things. It’s limitations you have to work within, work around, with photography more physical, with AI you’re putting your lens into a very weird conceptual kind of space. In either case, as an artist, you’re making lots of choices, turn lots of knobs, to increase your odds but ultimately still rely on chance and throw away tons of shots which aren’t quite right. It’s quite a different process than drawing which is why I think so much of the critique comes from… painters. That was the case back in the days when photography was new, and it’s the same now, modulo people now using graphics tablets of which I have one connected to my PC mind you just make this clear even if I can’t draw for shit I’m not half-bad at sculpting. I wouldn’t really dream of doing something serious with gen AI that doesn’t have at least a depth map as input, there’s just not enough control without that kind of thing.


  • I’m not talking about reinterpretation, I’m talking about faithful recreation. Archaeologists do that kind of thing, and it’s valuable, why not art historians?

    And judging by your reaction my suggestion indeed is the right kind of transgression to recreate the thing.

    If you want it a bit more pedestrian, just in case you happen to be a museum director: Ask the janitor to go into a hardware store, and buy a urinal they like. Then tell them to write “The real Duchamp” on it, and position it on a pedestal. Attach a standard museum plaque, crediting the work to the janitor.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@programming.devExcel logic
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    1 month ago

    With some time passed, I actually have the high-brow answer you so desire:

    The talking glass, which might only be spotted on a second take as the human mind first glances over the inconsistency, focussed on reading the text, challenges us to emphasise with Excel’s own problems deriving meaning from the input it’s given. Just as we mislooked, assumed context, so does Excel assume context, and January 17th.

    barsoap is reaching for the stars here to justify something they know is bullshit.

    That’s where flowers grow that’s why it’s beautiful. You may dismiss it, others might quote Bob Ross and call it a happy accident, yet others might jerk off to it, talking about Jung, how the human behind the generation, in their chuckle, might not have been aware of the context of what they were producing, but channelled the collective unconsciousness’ understanding of it and then wax on about the chuckle as the self-portrait, archetype, of hunches.

    If you think that’s BS then you should read some of the explanations that come with modern academic works of art. As in the stuff you’re producing when you study art. I’m fucking holding back here, they seem to be grading by unintelligibility and length of the justification.

    Is that BS? I am quite sympathetic to that notion. But that doesn’t challenge its status as art.