When I go to that URL on a stock, direct FF install, I still see that notice.

Since you seem earnest, probably play_my_game or possibly gamedev.

I reserve further comments until I know whether you posted this in this community: a) deliberately but seriously, b) deliberately and sarcastically, or c) by accident.

I think I can appreciate where you’re coming from, but in the context of the article it was legitimately necessary to address the topic somehow; it’s not like it was written apropos of nothing as a commentary on transsexuality. As a CIS person, I also have a “percieved gender” with which I identify.

Would “post-transition gender” be a more sensitive term, or less?

Any time I need to learn something about JS, I go to W3Schools to wrap my head around the basics, then over to MDN for current best practice.

Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.

Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.

That was my first take as well, coming back to C++ in recent years after a long hiatus. But once I really got into it I realized that those pointer types still exist (conceptually) in C, but they’re undeclared and mostly unmanaged by the compiler. The little bit of automagic management that does happen is hidden from the programmer.

I feel like most of the complex overhead in modern C++ is actually just explaining in extra detail about what you think is happening. Where a C compiler would make your code work in any way possible, which may or may not be what you intended, a C++ compiler will kick out errors and let you know where you got it wrong. I think it may be a bit like JavaScript vs TypeScript: the issues were always there, we just introduced mechanisms to point them out.

You’re also mostly free to use those C-style pointers in C++. It’s just generally considered bad practice.

Every time I see yet another obscure game/platform article or video, I realise that I’ve once again forgotten how little most people delve into the history of their creative media. I’m teaching myself about Soviet clones and niche Japanese systems that came out before I was born, and some 20-something self-proclaimed video game historian is releasing a video titled “The most obscure game that NO-ONE remembers” and it’s about Legacy of Kain or Space Quest or Sly Cooper or some other million-selling franchise that just hasn’t had a new release in the last 5-10 years.

I’m waiting for these guys to get old enough to start seeing “world’s most obscure game” videos about Minecraft and Fortnite.

AIX is pretty obscure as a gaming platform, though, I’ll give you that.

As someone who has often been asked for help or advice by other programmers, I know with 100% certainty that I went to university and worked professionally with people who did this, for real.

“Hey, can you take a look at my code and help me find this bug?”
(Finding a chunk of code that has a sudden style-shift) “What is this section doing?”
“Oh that’s doing XYZ.”
“How does it work?”
“It calculates XYZ and (does whatever with the result).”
(Continuing to read and seeing that it actually doesn’t appear to do that) “Yes, but how is it calculating XYZ?”
“I’m not 100% sure. I found it in the textbook/this ‘teach yourself’ book/on the PQR website.”

Most people use the term “Hungarian Notation” to mean only adding an indicator of type to a variable or function name. While this is one of the ways in which it has been used (and actually made sense in certain old environments, although those days are long, long behind us now), it’s not the only way that it can be used.

We can use the same concept (prepending or appending an indicator from a standard selection) to denote other, more useful categories that the environment won’t keep straight for us, or won’t warn us about in easy-to-understand ways. In my own projects I usually append a single letter to the ends of my variable names to indicate scope, which helps me stay more modular, and also allows me to choose sensible variable names without fear of clashing with something else I’ve forgotten about.

“If you were making food, would you use onion powder?”

It’s definitely bad design, but in a pinch it is readable in landscape mode for me. Alternatively, if your browser has a “force desktop mode” option, that often makes badly-written websites useable, if annoying.

As a half-joking response to this half-joking admission, I got started with the Usborne programming books as a kid, and they laid some excellent foundations for my later study. They’re all available online for free these days, so grab an emulator and user manual for your 80s 8-bit home computer of choice, and dive in!

Thr34dN3cr0 wrote (14:12 5/17/2019):

Does anyone have a way to fix this in the latest version? I’ve been looking all day but none of the answers I’ve found work.

Thr34dN3cr0 wrote (14:48 5/17/2019):

nvm figured it out.

“If you wish to be a writer, write.”

Epictetus delivered this burn over 1900 years ago.

Re: the Acceptance stage.

Years ago I worked at a family-run business with a good working environment. The staff were once told a story of how, earlier in the company’s history, a manager made a mistake that caused the company a substantial monetary loss.

The manager immediately offered their resignation, but the owner said to them, “Why would I let you go now? I’ve just spent all this money so you could learn a valuable lesson!”

So yeah, generally, most managers’ reaction to accidentally deleting vital data from production is going to be to fire the developer as a knee-jerk “retaliation”, but if you think about it, the best response is to keep that developer; your data isn’t coming back either way, but this developer has just learned to be a lot more careful in the future. Why would you send them to a potential competitor?

Yes, I think that most of us realized from some of the self-aware wording that this is a parody. But like many parodies it’s a real trope taken to a silly extreme, so we’re talking about users who fit that trope (including ourselves, sometimes!).

Oh hell, you gave me a PTSD flashback!

It’s the late 90s. My mother suddenly discovers File Explorer on her refurbished commodity Wintel box and decides that all this messy clutter has to go. Never mind that the drive was 80% empty when delivered and I didn’t expect her to come close to filling it before it was replaced. Fortunately I had already backed up everything that looked important or interesting.

One day she calls from the office, “I don’t need this ‘Windows’ any more, do I?”

“What? Wait! Don’t do anything!” I walk in and she’s got C:/Windows highlighted and the cursor is hovering over “Delete”.

“I already have Windows installed on this computer, so I don’t need this any more, do I?” Spoken more as a statement than a question. It took several minutes of forced calm explanation to get her to accept that this “Windows” directory WAS the Windows that’s installed on the machine. She still wasn’t happy that she could see it in File Explorer, though. So untidy!

That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would’ve been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.

What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn’t see a single person saying, “How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?”, even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, “How can we wrest this code out of this guy’s hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I’m too busy) so we don’t have a single point of failure?”

It’s a persistent dynamic memory allocation that’s accessed by multiple processes! :)