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4 months agoMy favorite is “and there was some kind of error message.” There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?
monotremata
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023
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It looks to me like they did it this way so that it could have natural-language names in many languages. So, the function Z10096 is called “is palindrome” in English, but if you’re coding in Japanese you can call it “回文の判定”. I don’t think the idea is for people to refer primarily to the alphanumeric soup version; I think that’s just the unique identifier for the database.
It does look like it’s leading to some issues, though. E.g., someone added a test for the “is palindrome” function which uses a somewhat common example: “Straw? No, too stupid. I put soot on warts.” Now, a human would probably say that this is a palindrome, because it’s got the same letters forwards and backwards, but most of the implementations disagree, because they consider the spaces, capitalization, and punctuation to be part of the string; that is, they test whether the input string and its reverse are equal. So someone (possibly the same person) has added a second python implementation which ignores spaces, capitalization, and punctuation, and mentions that in its name on the page.
Fundamentally this function is solving a different problem than the others (as demonstrated by the differing results on the relevant test), so should it get its own number and page? should there be a “palindrome disambiguation” page? This seems like something the site will have to figure out how to handle.
2·7 months agoputting the “ad” in “advent calendar”
Turbo Pascal was the first language in which I had serious classes (I had tutoring in Applesoft Basic earlier on, but that language has a lot of limitations), and I used it for years afterwards. You could write auxiliary functions in Turbo Assembler and link them in; I used that to write a library that allowed access to the 320x200 256-color VGA mode (the built-in graphics only did EGA and were super slow), and other libraries for mouse and joystick control. I tried to control the soundblaster for FM synthesis, but it was too complicated for me to figure out how to do anything useful without better access to documentation (this was before the world wide web). The experience also taught me a lot about assembly language basics, function calling conventions for C and Pascal, stack manipulation, and so forth, which gave me a huge head start in my compilers courses at university.
On the whole I would still recommend C over Pascal as an early language–it gives you much better insight into memory layout and so forth, where Pascal kind of obfuscates such things, and C just generally kind of acts like both Pascal and Assembler rolled together. But Turbo Pascal definitely gave me a good foundation.
It really sounds like you’re describing Make (or LLVM). Is there something you need it to do that those can’t handle?
The only real objection I have to this as a term is that it’s too easy to confuse with “rubber ducking”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
I do a lot of this stuff with the HP48 Units menu (albeit at this point via an emulator on my phone).
Shaders are terrific fun. I highly recommend ShaderToy if you want to experiment with them; it makes the loop between changing the code and seeing the effect very tight. I also recommend the YouTube channel “Art of Code” for good examples, well-explained.
I dunno, I prefer swipe typing and this doesn’t seem like it would work with that.
To me the biggest barriers to long-form typing on the phone are that so many websites screw up form handling for long-form content, and that the cursor maneuvering is still pretty broken.
Websites do weird things when you’re typing. Sometimes the input field won’t scroll, so you can’t see what you’re typing. Other times it’ll force-scroll to put the current line you’re working on at the very top of the screen, so you can’t see anything you wrote previously. At least they finally fixed the weird behavior where if you deleted more than a few characters it would start jumping around in the text and duplicating huge sections of it–I think it was around Android 9 that they finally fixed that.
As for moving the cursor, the “swipe on the space bar to move the cursor left and right” works, but trying to go back further, like going up a few lines, is very, very difficult. The cursor will scroll the text box if you move to the edge, but there’s no delay in the scrolling, so instead of scrolling a couple of lines and then pausing briefly to give you a chance to stop there, it just immediately scrolls again on the next frame of rendering, so effectively your choices are “scroll within the few lines of text still visible” or “jump all the way to the beginning of your text.” Anything else you need to scrub through character by character using the space bar control, which is very slow.
Basically, I don’t think the issue is the keyboard itself. I think the issue is that Android has never prioritized long-form text entry, and so it’s just very buggy.
Honestly, Google killing this will probably be the best outcome for it, because otherwise they’ll try to monetize it, and that could be a nightmare. Just a straight-up conversation partner that tries to wheedle personal information out of you for their advertising profiles. Even their example question about what you like to do for fun is a little uncomfortable in that context.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…
Specifically, the 8 pro has a 5x telephoto 48mp sensor that the base model lacks, a 48MP wide angle sensor compared to 12MP on the base model, a thermometer the base model lacks, 12GB of ram vs 8 on the base model, and a slightly larger and brighter display and slightly larger battery (though the gain in battery is probably roughly offset by the increased power draw of the screen). I believe those are the only hardware difference.
Gluten kicks ass. It’s easily the best fake meat base. I remember in college cooking a meal for my roommates and them saying afterwards “wait, aren’t you vegetarian? did you cook this just for us and not eat any?” and having to explain that no, that wasn’t beef, it was wheat gluten and mushrooms and miso. They were dubious, saying, “well, to me this is just really tender beef.”
So yeah. I’m also disappointed that gluten has gotten such a bad rap. I’m waiting for this knowledge to trickle back into the convenience foods sector so I can buy this stuff and not have to make it by hand every time, and it seems like I’ll be waiting a long time.
I mean TVs have volume buttons but also a mute. It’s nice to be able to use volume to set a specific level but then also quickly toggle between that perfect level and silent.
It’s not something you strictly need a physical button for, but the way they implemented it on old iPhones was nice. It was a physical switch rather than a button, and it looked different in the two positions–the slider under the switch was red on one side and black on the other. (or maybe silver, i forget, but it didn’t stand out the way the red did.) So you could tell at a glance if it was muted as well without turning on the screen.
The new button seems like a step back from that to me, but if you don’t use the silencing feature then a reprogrammable button is maybe more useful to you.
The tech behind the s-pen is made by Wacom, and they’re in the USI, so I don’t think it’s totally impossible. Pens are just pretty niche right now, partly because the android tablet market is so lousy. I think the tech has improved a bit–supposedly they’re down to a 0.7mm tip now, which is in the range where handwriting on a phone starts to make sense again. So maybe we’ll see more uptake of these, especially if the foldables market grows.
The use cases I really want to see for this tech are things like an advanced calculator that lets you handwrite an integral and then gives you the closed form solution if it exists, or a graph, etc. if it doesn’t; and a nice pen-driven CAD program. Those would be amazing things to have in your pocket all the time, but they’re a little too intricate to work well with fat fingers on a phone.
But for now I don’t think the tech is really quite good enough for phones. It’s good enough for my brother-in-law, who is an animator, to use it to doodle all the time, but that’s kinda it. On the iPad Pro he can do a lot more with the Apple Pencil, but that has more to do with the Apple tablet software ecosystem than with the pen itself, and Google has neglected that aspect of Android. On phones the pens just seem pretty limited.
Even with wired headphones, the volume setting didn’t directly correspond to a decibel level. High quality headphones often have a higher impedance than cheaper ones, which makes them much quieter (unless you use an external amp). The automatic volume reducer thing was just always pretty frustrating in the past.
38·11 months agoDoes the software have an option for closing the session? Some burning software lets you leave the session open so that you can burn additional files to the disc later if it’s not completely full yet, but many dedicated DVD players will only actually play the disc if the session is closed.
(This knowledge pulled from the dim recesses of my memory, which, like DVD, isn’t what it used to be, so bear with me if I’m mistaken.)
Or it won’t happen when you’re watching, because then they’re thinking about what they’re doing and they don’t make the same unconscious mistake they did that brought up the error message. Then they get mad that “it never happens when you’re around. Why do you have to see the problem anyway? I described it to you.”