Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I’m sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it’s still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn’t changed over the years.

There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

Reminds me: long ago, one comedy website made a bunch of awards that you could put on your own website with if you didn’t get awards from anyone else. (Having a bunch of random awards was the style of the time.) One of these was the coveted Titanic Navigation Award. I don’t think it can be awarded to anyone any more, as the developers of React have been the most deserving one to receive it in recent years, for their unending efforts in making navigation more confusing for everyone.

Yay, I didn’t get spammed! …so the stuff I have on Codeberg is officially stuff nobody but me cares about. (Sadness, or an opportunity?)

Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.

Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.

Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn’t expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.

When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I’d need to close my account.

What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.

And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.

Whenever Elon speaks of programming, he just spouts the most delusional Point-Haired Boss bullshit imaginable. Truly, he has been promoted to the level of his incompetence.

(It is also highly ironic considering the Dilbert creator’s politics.)

I don’t really watch Star Wars. I’m a more of a Trekkie gal.

🖖

See, you can separate files both ways as long as it’s logical

“Linux is probably insecure. Also GPL sounds like communism.” …did I just get mysteriously whisked back to 1998? Because that was the last time I heard this shit.

“Brave Browser: Forget the Fox” absolutely reads like “Brave: Well, Fuck Those Other Guys, Right?”

…come on, Brave, do it. Change the title to that. Or someone will eventually sue you for misleading advertisements. Because this is not very brave, is it?

Well, some browsers have made User-Agent strings useless. Technically, it’s like this:

Firefox: “Mozilla based browser, Gecko engine, Firefox.”

Chromium: “We’re totally a Mozilla based browser we swear. Also KHTML, which is like Gecko basically. I guess also a bit like WebKit. Has anyone ever heard of those? No? OK. Fine, here’s some actual information then…”

I once read about Andy Warhol’s film Empire and thought it could form a decent stylistic background for a movie about your average programmer’s work day.

One continuous 8 hour shot of a programmer sitting by a computer, slowly scrolling through a code, pausing for a long time to stare at particular sections, and occasionally saying “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”

• Yes
• Yes, and also delete Electron
• That, and also make me forget I ever even heard about Electron in the first place

My hierarchy goes something like this:

• A relatively trivial configuration file? TOML
• A configuration file that needs a bit of complexity and nesting? YAML
• Is it getting so complicated and longwinded that you’re actually unlikely to touch it by hand anyway? JSON
• Have we become downright enterprisey? XML

Choosing to not use something is not a good way to learn how to use it.

In this particular instance, the lesson is to either a) use the provided database tools (e.g. pg_dumpall) for live backup, or b) bring the database cluster down before you backup the raw data folder.

Yeah, I was about to say.

Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.

This is a very cute thread. I love turtles and I like them for their vast computer science skills too.

I’m in middle of a Rust module of a course, so I’ll do some Programmer Friendly Error Messages:

Line 10: You do not need to dimension a dimensionless variable such as a standalone string variable. (This ain’t Visual Basic.)
Line 20: input doesn’t do parentheses, sorry
Line 20: Input accepts a string: Perhaps you meant prompt$?
Line 30: Concatenation is too modern, perhaps instead of + you meant ; just saying?
Line 40: Invalid syntax with play, maybe you meant play "g3c4e4"?

Well they train me in JavaScript frameworks and such. I allege this knowledge will be useless in a few decades. Or even less so, based on my meagre knowledge so far.

I’m literally on an internship training course where the Exercises Left For The Readers are implementing Number Guessing Games on the various technologies talked about on the course. I’m like “thanks, but I read about this particular exercise extensively the BASIC age. I’m not going to redo these things unless your training material will have little cartoon robots. Like, you know, in the Usborne books or something.”