Regex feels distinctly eldritch to me. Like, a lot of computing knowledge feels like magic, but regex feels like the kind of magic you get by consorting with dark forces

Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

They were never going to let this man be Prime Minister

You might enjoy Freya Holmér’s videos - I mostly know her for her excellent mathsy video essays, but she has loads of videos about “maths for game Devs” that might be useful.

Something that I’ve wanted from a dictionary app for a while is the ability to add custom definitions for words that I may not have a dictionary for.

For example, I am told by a friend that the Finnish word “pimahtaa” means “to go ape shit”. I don’t plan on learning Finnish, so I don’t need a whole Finnish dictionary.

Another less isolated example is how when I was learning Attic Greek, I wanted to build my own personal dictionary from the ground up, where the only words in it would be what I had learned and added myself, also allowing me to add new words.

It feels like a fairly simple problem to solve, but I’m not sure what to search for, I wonder if you have any advice, OP?

Fuckin’ savage.

I think the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo” dot has an implicit catchment area around it, which includes people who don’t technically fit that description, but they’re close. I’ve used neither Jekyll nor Hugo, but the fact I understood that archetype meant I felt pulled in by the gravity of that point.

That’s a hilarious reply, and I can’t think of a witty response to match it

I mean, racism has as much reason to exist now as it ever did. “I’ll protect me and what’s mine” has been the dividing line between species for thousands of years, and we have to choose whether we’ll continue it. A “Kill or be killed” mindset might keep you safe, but you’ll never know if the person you killed did indeed mean you harm, or if you could’ve instead lived without killing, and broke bread with a rival. The logic still applies

Yup. We’re least safe when we most think we’re safe. Architects of self fulfilling prophecies

I always experience a weird sense of sonder^[1] when I see spam bots, because even if it’s a huge, highly automated network of bots, there’s at least one human involved if you could trace the bots back to their source.

I wonder what kind of person they are, and how the hell they make a profit from the spam. They surely must have a non-zero return rate, but how well does it work? Are they making bank from the task, or barely scraping by? Are they surviving on the scam income, or is it just a bit extra on top of a regular job? Do they enjoy the work, or are they as much of a wage-slave as I am, just in a different way. Were they themselves a victim of some scam, perhaps? I’ll never know, hence the sonder.

[1]: Sonder, noun, neologism. “The feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles” (dictionary.com)

The thing is that that was how Google became so big in the first place. PageRank was a cool way of trying to filter out the garbage and it worked real well. Even my non techy friends have been getting frustrated with search not working like it used to (even before all this Gemini stuff was added)

This post and the discussion on it made me think of Moon Duchin’s essay "The Sexual Politics of Genius

It’s a long read, at 34 pages, but is easier to read than the title might suggest, possibly because Duchin is a mathematician, which I speculate contributes to her pretty straightforward prose.

I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.

Neat idea, I hope I’ll remember this when I’m setting up my next server.

(RTFM = Read the Fucking Manual)

Adding this because I only learned this acronym just last week, and wish to share the knowledge with anyone else like me)

Oh man, Clockwork mod, that takes me back. Although I had my android phone for a while before I built up the courage to root it, in part due to stories like yours

Not got any computer related stories from my messed up family, but I can relate to many of the vibes here. Solidarity on the family front.

Oh no, that’s horrifying.

Man, that’s a really dumb story that I find really relatable despite not having had any experiences like that. It feels like it’d be very in character for me though. Thanks for sharing, it helps me feel less silly in the various times where I’ve messed up (of which I am struggling to recall specific examples, but whatever brain part is responsible for embarrassment can remember, apparently)