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I'm Not Participating in This Year's Advent of Code For Very Good Reasons
  • I feel like all the points you raise could be replied by : if you do not like it, no one is forcing you into doing it.

    It is my understanding that people do this for fun - to take the occasion to get into a new language and/or exercise their problem resolution skills.

    Personally, although I love coding (it is a passion), after a whole day of coding I do not feel the energy to partake in a coding event. And during holidays I am busy doing other stuff. So I do not participate in the Advent of Code. But I am still glad that the event exists for people who enjoy it and have the time for it

  • Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police
  • I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.

    Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.

    Let's assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search.. Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that's much more complicated than what this post says.

  • How are you all playing these insanely complex games?
  • For a first time don't try to get the strongest character possible. It's a time sink to do that. Usually the main campaign of games are beatable even if you screw up something. The worst that can happen is you backtracking a bit and spending time to level up before doing the next quest.

    When you played the game once and got used to the mechanics you can make a 2nd char and plan it more deeply ahead if you wish. You know what mechanics you like so the prospect of finding what to invest in what is worth etc.. becomes more streamlined. But you don't have to. You can just be happy to have finished the game and call it a day.

    That's what I did for Diablo 4. After the main campaign I did not feel like venturing more into the game or making another character so I started playing another game. If you really want to 100% a game it does require a ton of time and planning but you don't have to

  • 280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles
  • On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans, and trucks.

    But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers on the road last year

    There are about 20x more e-bikes than electric cars. Of course its going to demand more oil.

    The real question is what is best in terms of oil demand between electric cars and e-bikes

  • Push Ifs Up And Fors Down
  • Agreed that some people can find it easier with explicit names - however some people find it easier with short meaningless names as it makes them focus on the abstraction rather than the naming. There is no right or wrong here. It all depends on the reader.

  • What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech?
  • A specialized architecture will always be better than a general purpose processor no matter how advanced the tech gets.

    So you will always need a GPU as a GPU is quite literally a Graphical Programming Unit, that is a specialised architecture for Graphical computations

  • What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech?
  • A friend of mine got asked if she had a boyfriend. She asked back "why that question". It was to know whether she would be likely to get pregnant and miss work.

    What a horrifying mentality some companies have

  • Pour ceux qui ont parfois besoin de visualiser le concept d'exponentielle
  • Ouais mais les calculs sont un peu faux, non ?

    A l'année 1 on a 12 chats capables de procréer. J'imagine que leur calcul c'est dire 12x12 = 144 chats. Sauf que chaque couple peut faire 12 chats par an donc le vrai nombre c'est plutôt 6x12 = 72 chats.

    La progression est donc sensée être : 2 -> 12 -> 72 -> 6 * 72 = 432 -> 6 * 432 = 2596

    Soit un facteur 10 de différence

  • [Discussion] Des gens dans votre entourage dont le métier a vraiment du sens?
  • Il parait que c'est très difficile pour les métiers du social, des fois ils sont obligés de refuser les demandes malgré eux... Ils voient des vies se briser en cas de refus mais ils ne peuvent rien y faire. Il parait qu'il y a un gros turn-over dans ces genres de métiers à cause de ça.

  • Franc-maçonnerie : 250 ans d’histoire du Grand Orient de France
  • C'est une secte oui.

    De ce que j'ai compris, les Francs-Maçons encouragent le travail sur soi même ; n'importe qui peut y aller, la seule condition c'est de vouloir améliorer l'humanité (au sens large) et de vouloir travailler sur soi (accepter qu'on est imparfait et qu'on peut déjà s'améliorer soi-même). Ils partent du principe qu'il est toujours possible d'améliorer les choses : je pense que c'est plutôt un courant perfectionniste.

    Ils promeuvent l'écoute des autres ce qui n'est pas vraiment le cas des réseaux sociaux en vogue aujourd'hui. Par exemple ils ont des règles en place pour ne pas couper la parôle et entendre ce que chacun a à dire.

  • Why Git is hard
  • Hot take: Git is hard for people who do not know how to read a documentation.

    The Git book is very easy to read and only takes a couple of hours to read the most significant chapters. That's how I learnt it myself.

    Git is meant for developers, i.e. people who are supposed to be good at looking up online how stuff works.

  • [Blog] Can Rust prevent logic errors?
  • There are techniques like abstract interpretation that can deduce lower and upper bounds that a value can take. I know there is an analysis in LLVM called ValueAnalysis that does that too - the compiler can use it to help dead code elimination (deducing that a given branch will never be taken because the value will never satisfy the condition so you can get rid of the branch).

    But I think these techniques do not work in all use cases. Although you could theoretically invent some syntax to say "I would like this value to be in that range", the compiler would not be able to tell in all cases whether it's satisfied.

    If you are interested in a language that has subrange checks at runtime, Ada language can do that. But it does come at a performance cost - if your program is compute bound it can be a problem

  • [Blog] Can Rust prevent logic errors?
  • Why would you have to choose between tests and compiler checks? You can have both. The more you have the less chance of finding bugs.

    I would also add that tests cannot possibly be exhaustive. I am thinking in particular of concurrency problems - even with fuzzing you can still come across special cases where it goes wrong because you forgot a mutex somewhere. Extra static checks are complementary to tests.

    I think you can write "unsafe" code in Rust that bypass most of the extra checks so you do have the flexibility if you really need it.

  • Emmanuel Macron tacle l’écriture inclusive lors de l’inauguration de la Cité de la francophonie
  • Ben le iel est proposé, mais la résistance est forte, et assez peu argumentée amha.

    Je vois deux problèmes :

    • iel se comprend comme "quelqu'un qui est soit homme soit femme" et non juste "quelqu'un". Même si c'est un pas en avant pour résoudre les inégalités hommes/femmes, ça continue de mettre des gens dans des cases. Mais c'est quand même un pas en avant donc peut-être que c'est mieux que rien faire du tout
    • ça fait vraiment bizarre à prononcer. On n'a pas beaucoup de mot qui commence par un son 'y' en français. Mais peut-être que c'est juste un manque d'habitude et qu'une fois que l'oreille est habitué à entendre ça, ça passe.

    Est-ce qu'il y a une forme COD de iel ? Par exemple pour l'anglais c'est them.

    En fait, ce n’est pas la raison, la raison on la connaît, elle est dans les grammaires les plus anciennes: « Le genre masculin est réputé plus noble que le féminin à cause de la supériorité du mâle sur la femelle » article WP. La règle étant explicitement sexiste, je trouve légitime les appels à la changer.

    L'existence de la raison historique n'empêche pas que j'ai une préférence personnelle à rédiger au masculin pour des raisons de brièveté

    Je suis complètement OK pour changer la règle en la règle de la brièveté de mon côté.

    Le sexisme n’est pas de marquer une différence, c’est de transformer la différence en hiérarchie.

    Dans ce cas on pourrait décréter de pouvoir utiliser le genre que l'on veut à valeur de neutre, c'est à dire que l'auteur pourrait, au choix, dire "les étudiants" ou "les étudiantes".

    Concrètement, ça voudrait dire que le masculin et le féminin pourraient être utilisés à valeur de neutre.

    Comme ça la différence existe, mais il n'y a plus de hiérarchie. Grammaticalement en tout cas.

  • [Blog] Can Rust prevent logic errors?

    Cross-posting this here as I saw some misconceptions about Rust language

    I think that blog describes well the pros of using a strongly-typed language like Rust is. You may fight the compiler and get slower build times but you get less bugs because of the restrictions the language imposes you.

    The biggest con of Rust is that it requires learning to be used, even for someone who has already programmed before. It's not like Python or Ruby where you can just dive in a code base and learn on the go. You really need to read the Rust book (or skim through it) to get through the notions. So it has a higher entry level, with all the misunderstandings that come with it.

    4
    Le dentifrice c'est cher

    Et je suis content que notre héros national soit compréhensif à ce sujet. Ça fait plusieurs mois que, à cause de l'inflation, je n'ai pas utilisé de dentifrice. Mon haleine commence à sentir.

    J'ai hâte que des lois passent pour baisser le prix du dentifrice. Il en va de ma santé.

    PS : je ne peux que louer les actes anti-violence de notre héros

    9
    Say I want to make an app on my phone for personal use. How to begin?

    Hello there,

    I am an experienced programmer. I can do C/C++/Rust/assembly/Ruby/Perl/Python/ etc.. The language itself is not a barrier.

    The barrier to me is that I have never coded a single web or android application. I guess it must be surprising but I am more of a low-level programmer in my job (I develop a compiler backend) and I never really had the opportunity or idea to work on an app.

    What would be a good starting point for making an android application?

    A quick search got me this: https://google-developer-training.github.io/android-developer-fundamentals-course-concepts-v2/unit-1-get-started/lesson-1-build-your-first-app/1-1-c-your-first-android-app/1-1-c-your-first-android-app.html

    Would it be a good starting point?

    Side note: my app will not have to interact with any service. If I were to code it as a command-line program, it would not take me more than a day or two. The actual app would involve (for now) no more than a text field, a button, some logic attached to it - the hard part for me being to choose a framework to build it, "upload it" to my phone and use it.

    24
    Should we create a community for programming help?

    I used to be a lurker of r/C_programming where people would ask questions and get answers. It mostly consisted of students wanting to get a human answer to their problem.

    I liked chiming in there and answering from time to time. Although you always had that one student who ordered to do the homework for them, there were some nice and helpful interactions in that subreddit.

    Would people be interested in a community focused around helping each others in programming? Or would this very community do the job already?

    15
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PO
    potterman28wxcv @beehaw.org
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