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"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance
  • What a dumb article. Sounds like an old C graybeard who's never understood the point of proper type safety or readable code. None of the performance gains the author talks about actually matter, whereas the entire point of clean code is to make it easier to read and maintain by other programmers. Let's also not forget this important quote from Donald Knuth: "premature optimization is the root of all evil".

    Simply put, unless you're working in extremely resource-constrained systems, or have some code snippet being run an incredibly large number of times over a humongous amount of data, these kinds of performance optimizations simply don't matter and you get more benefit from writing the code in a way that reduces bugs and is easier to read. Heck, most of the time compiler optimizations make this entire argument moot anyway.

  • Why don't we have AAA Puzzle Games?
  • The answer is simple. Games are categorized as AAA when they're built by large teams with large budgets at large companies. Puzzle games usually don't require a team of hundreds of people and tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars to produce. The gameplay and asset scope is tiny in comparison to a typical AAA game. Most games with puzzle elements that do end up getting made by AA and AAA studios (like Portal) have the puzzle aspect merged with some other genre (like FPS, in Portal's case), and those other genres do require more resources to produce.

  • Is an "everything" app the likely end state within the Fediverse?
  • No, you're not quite understanding what ActivityPub is. The data under all the fediverse services is not the same infrastructure at all. The communication between those various services just uses the same language (ActivityPub). Those various services can interpret and store (or ignore) ActivityPub messages any way they want. Service instances add another layer to the whole thing as well.

    In order for an "everything app" to be successful (if you buy the argument that it feasibly can be), it would have to be a centralized service. Decentralization, by its very nature, encourages the opposite of that -- want to make some niche service because existing services don't satisfy some fringe need you have, but still want to interact with others on other platforms? You can do that with the fediverse. But that also means your new service isn't part of an "everything app"... it just can potentially talk to one that might exist.

  • Is there a way to fix Kbin's formatting not working on Lemmy? this is in the mag bio. (see pic attached)
  • This looks like a Lemmy issue, not a /kbin one. Perhaps find a Lemmy development community somewhere to ask.

  • Twitter aka X changes ad labels, makes promoted tweets less obvious
  • is there a firefox app on iPhone?

    Not really. There's something called Firefox available and it's published by Mozilla, but Mozilla has to deal with Apple's restrictions on web browsers by using the webkit rendering engine and Apple's proprietary plugin system. So it's not real Firefox.

  • The Fall of Stack Overflow
  • Try chatgpt 4 premium. I have heard it automatically auto correct itself with code.

    I regularly use gpt-4 for coding since it's the backend behind github copilot, and my company has approved use of copilot (and I have copilot plugins installed for vscode and vs2022). It's useful for autocompleting boilerplate code, but gets things wrong all the time about anything more complicated.

  • Wouldn't the Everything App Be the Last Thing We Would Want?
  • That's a good point, but I'm fairly sure culture plays a part as well. It's likely some combination.

  • Wouldn't the Everything App Be the Last Thing We Would Want?
  • Yep. Musk is basing his idea about having an "everything app" on WeChat's success in China, which basically does what he's talking about. The problem is that he doesn't seem to understand that there are cultural differences at play between Chinese users and western users that prevent mass-adoption of a single app to do everything in the west, and that WeChat already exists and isn't popular in the west at all.

  • Could popular forums implement ActivityPub and connect to the Fediverse?
  • Sure. Just look at Wordpress... it's a blogging platform rather than a forum, but it has an ActivityPub plugin available that allows federation of blog posts and comments. ActivityPub is a standard published by the W3C (the same organization that oversees the HTML standard, among many others). Anyone can implement the standard in their software if they want to.

  • The Fall of Stack Overflow
  • ChatGPT and Bard?

    Doubtful, considering ChatGPT has only been public since late last year, and Bard's even newer. I also really hope those aren't a large factor, since most coding examples I've seen from ChatGPT only deal with questions of a really rudimentary nature and have given useless or wrong information about anything more nuanced or complicated.

  • Why is it called Fediverse / Federation?
  • You're applying the political science definition of 'federation' and not the computer science definition. They are different. Federation in CompSci terms has to do with networking providers using standardization to interoperate, which is exactly what the fediverse does.

  • universal IDs for threadiverse items (re kbin-core #635)
  • The impractical/implausible reason is likely because different groups of people are writing the different fediverse software and have different opinions about how objects are identified in their software. ActivityPub already requires objects to have unique IDs, so this isn't a protocol issue. But good luck getting every single developer for every single fediverse application to agree on one way to internally represent data in their apps. That's just never going to happen for a variety of reasons.

  • lets advertise lemmy on r/place
  • Sounds like someone doesn't understand what the fediverse is about.

  • Is AI the 'biggest bubble of all time'? Stability AI CEO thinks so
  • High interest in something isn't the same as bubble. Where's the overvalued assets that are out of touch with reality? The guy quoted in the article even referenced Google losing value after the lackluster launch of Bard, which is kind of the opposite of a bubble. The dotcom bubble wasn't a bubble because everyone was talking about the Internet... it was a bubble because companies were severely overvalued for putting literally anything on the web without having functional business models. The businesses were the bubble, not the Internet.

    Could AI become a bubble? Possibly. But we're nowhere near anything like that at this point in time. It's just got mindshare, not overvalued assets.

  • People say “I have nothing to hide” until you them to unlock their phone and give it to you. Chances are, you’ll quickly find out they have things they’d like to hide.
  • Some of us use our phones for work and letting other people have access to work content would violate NDAs.

  • List of subs people may find familiar
  • It works from a Lemmy instance to see a /kbin magazine. It does not work the other way (from /kbin to see a Lemmy community).

  • Share your network naming conventions!
  • My network mostly uses NPC and summon names from Final Fantasy XI, because I played that game for many, many years and can associate the personalities of those characters with specific roles the host needs to have. I've also considered using Pokemon names for similar reasons, and with over 1000 current Pokemon species it'd be hard to max out in a home environment.

  • List of subs people may find familiar
  • Using !community notation is a Lemmy-only thing. Not everybody is reading this from Lemmy, and this particular community and the OP are both on /kbin. Providing direct URLs is a more generally useful way of linking to communities in the fediverse.

  • moving to Seattle
  • Just saw your edit and comments to others and something really doesn't make sense. "East Seattle near I-90" is basically either Mount Baker or Leschi. Both of those are primarily neighborhoods without much in the way of businesses and mostly comprised of houses rather than apartments. It's also a rather expensive area, since it's in central-Seattle and right on the lakefront. I have a hard time believing that there's a company in that part of town that's big enough to relocate a candidate. Did you perhaps mean the Eastside instead? That's a very different thing. The Eastside is everything east of Lake Washington and is outside of the Seattle city limits. The Eastside near I-90 would be south-central Bellevue (Factoria and Eastgate area) and Issaquah. There are large companies and quite a lot of places to live near there. Recommendations for where to rent on the Eastside near I-90 will be very different than recommendations for where to rent in Central (or East) Seattle. The Seattle metro area is split in two by Lake Washington, and while it's possible to bike across the I-90 floating bridge (I have a coworker who does), it's probably not going to be done in less than 45 minutes and is probably going to be rather unpleasant for part of the year.

    It really would be helpful if you gave us a better idea of where you'll be commuting to (like, the cross-streets, or the name of the neighborhood, or a nearby landmark, or the name of the company if you're willing to reveal that info -- lots of us in this area have worked for the major tech companies or have friends who have, and know where all their campus buildings are), as well as what your budget is. Budget is really crucial since rent varies a lot based on location. For instance, doing a quick search it looks like average rent in Factoria is about $1800 per month. Average rent in Lake Union (where Amazon is) is almost double that at about $3200 per month. And if you think even $1800/mo is expensive then I've got some bad news for you about your desire to not commute by car for longer than 1.5 hours.

  • moving to Seattle
  • Idk. I was told to avoid it, unless I like to hear gunshots.

    People who say that tend to be people who don't ever visit Tacoma and don't know what they're talking about.
    A counterpoint is this article that came out yesterday, listing Tacoma as the third-best place to live in the country (according to Bankrate.com): https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/tacoma/tacoma-named-best-places-live/281-53273688-2959-4ea0-ad45-46a48331084e

    Every big city has crime. The Seattle metro area is safer than most.

  • www.king5.com Theo Chocolate shuttering factory after 18 years in Seattle

    Theo will be merging with the Indiana-based American Licorice Company.

    Theo Chocolate shuttering factory after 18 years in Seattle

    I hope the workers can find other work quickly.

    1
    trynn trynn @kbin.social

    Professional software developer and all-around geek in Seattle.

    Posts 1
    Comments 70