I mean, you’re free to continue using your crescent wrench as a hammer if you find it drives nails for you decently well and you are comfortable using it that way. But it was neither designed with that purpose in mind, nor does anyone expect you to use it that way, so no one will be writing how-to guides on it.

I just got home from a 12 hour day of work. This has been my entire week.

Help.

1. Decide your budget
2. Go to logicalincrements.com
3. Find the tier that matches your budget
4. Buy that
5. Enjoy your PC

Once you get a feel for building and owning, then you can start making more informed choices about what you really need.

it’d be poor style to put more than one statement on a line

Unlike Python, most languages do not endorse a specific concept of style. You’re free to dabble in all the bad style choices you like, on the off chance that once in a blue moon they prove to be situationally useful.

The only difference between a novice and a professional is that a professional checks what they are copying to understand it first before allowing it into their codebase.

Novices copy code to avoid having to understand it. Professionals copy code to avoid reinventing the wheel.

I replied to that thread.

OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.

Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.

mean: <2 eyes

median: 2 eyes

mode: 2 eyes

They use a fuser unit to cook the toner and bind it to the paper. It’s not exactly burning the paper itself per se, but high heat is definitely involved.

Source: repaired a laser printer with a damaged fuser unit that was actually burning paper.

Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

They mutually imply one another.

If something was private, but not secure, well, that implies there are ways to breach the privacy, which isn’t very private at all.

If it’s secure, but not private, that implies it’s readable by someone other than the consenting conversational parties, which makes it insecure.

Nvidia and AMD broadly cover the same use cases. Nvidia cards are not intrinsically better to my knowledge, Nvidia simply offers ultra high-performance cards that AMD doesn’t.

If you just need nonspecific games to run decently, a card from either brand will do it. If you need to run the most intensive games there are on unbelievable settings, that’s when Nvidia should be edging out.

ML dabbling may complicate things. Many (most?) tools are written for CUDA, which is a proprietary Nvidia technology. I think AMD offers a counterpart but I do not have details. You will need to do more research on this.

I am going to continue to tell people “just get an AMD card”, but only if they have indicated to me that they are shopping for new parts and haven’t committed to any yet.

Giving that advice to someone who already has an Nvidia card is just as useless as those StackOverflow answers that suggest you dump your whole project architecture and stuff some big dumb library into your build to solve a simple problem.

No one said it was shameful?

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don’t hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn’t do anything.

In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you’ve declared. You don’t query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.

HTML ““has state””, as in it has a DOM, but it doesn’t do anything with it. You don’t mutate the DOM after it’s built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren’t trivially evident from the state you declared.

You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.

Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.

The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.

You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.

HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.

The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.

This is almost word for word what I said in another friend group today. Protecting individuals is literally why LLCs exist. It’s what “LLC” stands for.

Nintendo Hyper Beam’d them into oblivion but they got a Substitute up first. The defense strategy was smart. The strategy that put them in the position of needing to use the defense strategy was idiotic, yes, but the defense was smart.

Short of Nintendo doing nothing at all, this is probably the best outcome that could have realistically happened.

There are really only three licenses you should ever consider when making a new project in earnest: GPL if you want it to stay free forever, MIT if you don’t care. Put an L in front of GPL if your project is a library. The end.

Any CC license including CC0 looks fine on paper, and they are court-tested, but anyone with a legal department won’t risk dealing with one in the context of software, because CC licenses are for creative works and scientific research, not software. The main thing they’re missing is a warranty release.

The Unlicense feels like an earnest attempt to fill the void that CC0 fails to fill, but it isn’t a tested license. Everyone with a lawyer won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole because they don’t want to be the ones to find out how enforceable it really is. Besides, the only thing it gains you over the MIT is the ability to go uncredited. Which is nice feature; if people didn’t want this we wouldn’t have so many attempts to make a license that has it. But I feel like of all the features of a free software license one should be concerned about, explicit lack of credit is a pretty low-rung one.

Direct public domain insertion is good and effective, but is not global. Many places in the world have no formal legal system to do this (Germany is a famous example). PD dedication without a permissive fallback license makes your code completely unusable in these places. It’s exactly why the CC0 and Unlicense exist in the first place.

Every single other license is either a meme license not worth the toilet paper it’s written on, a weaker version of the GPL/MIT, or the GPL/MIT with extra steps.

In a rather unorthodox way, yes.

Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.

The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.