Everyone does cringey things sometimes but it takes a great person to admit their mistakes

Yes, their actual argument is excellent, but this remark gives me instant /r/iamverysmart vibes

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy’s recent popularity is that people are fed up with the “if something is free, you aren’t the user, you are the product” situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).

Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy - I’m surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the “chicken and egg” problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don’t care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.

I personally like this instance very much, and I’ve been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn’t hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.

EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse

someone watching you code in a google doc

I’ve had nightmares less terrifying than this

You can put spoilers in posts or comments this way:

::: spoiler Title
Secret
:::

Here is how it renders:

(AFAIK apps don’t render these correctly, only the website)

Fair enough, I can understand the emphasis on mod autonomy after the recent Reddit events. I really like this instance and appreciate the work you and the other admins do to make this a great place.

First, I’d like to thank @Ategon for their work on these icons and also for running this poll to determine what people who care about the issue want.

It’s no secret that I vastly preferred the “All Unified” option - the coherent visual identity would not only help recognition across different instances, but it would also strengthen the community and the sense of belonging on this instance.

With this in mind, I find myself somewhat puzzled by the this remark in the post:

Community mods though have the final say in what their community icon looks like and can choose not to follow this result if they want

While the question of icons might seem minor (maybe even trivial), allowing this would set a precedent that undermines the effectiveness of such polls in the future. Everyone who cared about the issue had the opportunity to vote for an entire week, and the “All Unified” option won by an overwhelming majority.

If even one mod disregarded this result, it would run counter to the result of the poll, effectively making the end state undesirable for the supporters of any of the options: the icons wouldn’t be “all unified”, the “general unified” option wouldn’t happen either because at least some language-specific communities would also have the unified icon, and obviously, “no unified style” voters would be dissatisfied too.

Here is your Lemmy Gold:

YAML is extremely complex for a configuration format and it has many really weird edge cases:

https://noyaml.com/

The problem is IMHO made worse because it looks so friendly at first glance.

You can also use it as a PWA, it will be just like a normal app

This describes 99% of AI startups.

The company I work for was considering using Mendable for AI-powered documentation search. I built a prototype using OpenAI embeddings and GPT-3.5 that was just as good as their product in a day. They didn’t buy Mendable :)

Good humor is based on reality

This is frighteningly realistic

This is an excellent explanation of hashing, and the interactive animations make it very enjoyable and easy to follow.

So you mean deadly effective?

I’m firmly in the print statement / console.log camp but this article convinced me to try using a debugger.

I absolutely agree. But:

• sometimes you need to modify existing code and you can’t add the types necessary without a giant refactoring
• you can’t express units with types in:
  • JSON/YAML object keys
  • XML tag or attribute names
  • environment variable names
  • CLI switch names
  • database column names
  • HTTP query parameters
  • programming languages without a strong type system

Obviously as a Hungarian I have a soft spot for Hungarian notation :) But in these cases I think it’s warranted.

I understand what you mean, and I even agree with it, but just to be a little pedantic, variable names are code, or at least they are more code than comments or docs.

But yes, encoding units into the type system is a much better solution. It doesn’t work however for config options, environment variables or CLI switches.

Related: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

TL;DR: there is good and bad Hungarian notation. Encoding types (like string or int) in variable names is bad. Encoding information that cannot be expressed in the type system is good. (Though with the development of type systems, more and more of those concepts can be moved into the types, keeping variable names clean.)

But as a Hungarian, I’m obviously a little biased :)

In that case I would call the variable fileSizeWithUnit and also document what the possible units are. I wouldn’t say that documentation is categorically more important than good naming. Both are different aspects of good software development.