That's what it does.
What is the intent? WHY does it do this?
I'm baffled as to what the entire point of this is.
I don't get it. What's it supposed to do beyond making me repeat letters? Do you have something that actually explains the intent somewhere?
Time to break out the block cannon. Ain't no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.
This. This right here. For anybody to embrace anything they have to perceive and advantage to them to do so. If you can't persuade them of such an advantage they won't do it.
The name is a really weird one. Sounds more like a spreadsheet than a social media application.
Chrome too.
A whole lot of misdesigns are only a "small amount of brain power" to use. As your language accumulates these, however, the load builds up.
This also has the extra problem that overloading in general brings with it. What is the result of 3 + "string"
? What is the result of "string" + 3
? You have to have rules for this. These rules have to be learned. They have to be kept in mind. There is room for error. And of course the way different languages react to them will vary strongly.
For example in Rexx, Python, and Ruby these are errors (and with the latter two the error changes depending on which order). In Awk and Perl the result is 3 in both cases.
Format strings are better than +
as concatenation, to be fair, but are still not very good compared to separate concatenation operators. It's hard to make them type-safe. They separate the value from its location in the string.
Using actual concatenation operators has the advantage of format strings, but add the possibility for type safety. For example in Ada:
...
Put_Line("Distance: " & Distance_Value'Image & "km");
...
See here, &
will only concatenate string types. If you want to print something that's not a string, you have to convert it to a string. This means you can't accidentally mix types. Further, it's immediately obvious where a given value will show up in the output. Compare and contrast with the C equivalent:
...
printf("Distance: %skm\n", distance_value);
...
Not only is location of the value obfuscated—trivial to spot here, but in a complicated string it's very difficult to spot at times. And it's easy, too, to have the format code not match the value. As this example illustrates. Again, easy to spot in trivial code like this, but horrifically hard in real-world code, especially if the variable type changes.
String concatenation with +
is evil. Well-designed languages (Lua, for example, among many others—I'm not calling PHP well-designed!) doesn't do this.
Why?
Because +
, in every other context is commutative, but suddenly, in the case of concatenation, it is not. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden for no material gain.
Concatenation can be accomplished by juxtaposition (e.g. SNOBOL4, Rexx, much of the C family tree), by ..
(Lua), by .
(Perl, PHP), by ||
(PL/I, Rexx again), by &
(Ada, some BASIC dialects), etc. without this added cognitive burden of overloading +
for no good reason.
No.
ActivityPub is a protocol. It has no agency.
People can save the Internet. Perhaps with ActivityPub, perhaps with something else.
And here we see the seeds of IRC'sthe Fediverse's irrelevancy being planted and lovingly tended.
What you just said could have easily been put into the mouths of any number of IRC advocates 20 years ago. Where is IRC now? Remind me.
Because it's sometimes a ludicrous demand?
Common pattern I see in Mastodon's ... more strident, shall we call them? ... advocates:
Poster: I just took a picture of a <insert bird>. Note the red and yellow flash of plumage, in contrast to the more usual green and red. I caught this little darling hopping along the charcoal grey slate walkway I've got running through my garden, right next to the <insert flower> you can see at the right side of the frame.
<put picture here>
Strident Twit: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT!?
Or, worse:
Strident Twit Bot: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT FOR OUR BLIND USERS!?
So what, precisely (providing details), would you put into alt text that's not already in the post? Would you just copy and paste the alt text? When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.
Best for what purpose?
There's no universal "best" because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you're not into kit-bashing, though, that's not going to be "best" for you.
For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.
The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was "perfect" for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).
The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a "dreaded" cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.
For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It's an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just ... be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.
I think he's a bit over-hopeful at the fediverse's prospects, sadly. People will give up so much (like all of their privacy!) for a small amount of convenience.
It's not Twitter that Mastodon has to seize the moment from. It's all the other commercial offerings that will inevitably pop up in its place as Twitter crashes and burns.
Is there a version that's not behind a paywall?
Anything he’s gotten behind has succeeded.
Like Twitter.
This is nonsense.
I've seen more young'uns whining that it's "too hard" to choose an instance. It's the young'uns that are used to things being all in one place: one Facebook, one Twitter, one Instagram, etc. The elder Gen-X/younger-Boomer crowd are all very familiar with having to make choices in service providers (because we had choices!). We had to choose telephone service providers, Internet service providers (who weren't our telephone guys for AGES!), email service providers (often our ISPs, but not always: also our work environments, and third-party suppliers once we'd gone through the change-the-ISP-email dance often enough), etc. etc. etc.
The young'uns are the ones that flock to wherever their friends are flocking this week and have ISP choices they can count on one hand, even after a bizarre gardening accident sheared off a few fingers. Choice has been systematically removed from people in the tech sphere since I was in my teens. Fewer choices in phone configurations, fewer choices in ISPs, fewer choices in email providers, fewer choices in chat systems, fewer choices in ...
... until we have the situation where people think of social media sites instead of social media platforms.
Bitcoin and its alternatives could never have been a currency. It's eminently unsuited to that role. (It's great for Ponzi schemes, extortion schemes, and other criminal enterprises mind.) And how does "using more energy than a medium-sized nation while doing three orders of magnitude fewer transactions than even ONE payment processor" translate to "energy reform"?
Please, dude, stop being a cryptobro. It's a really bad look.
US companies not obeying laws in other countries, even when operating there, is by now just a sad cliche.
Twitter is Going Great is a project inspired by Web3 is Going Just Great to track the latest examples of how Twitter is actively falling to pieces thanks to its current owner Elon Musk (with special guests Jack Dorsey and the Saudi Arabian royal family).
In which Business Genius™ Elon Musk Ox's brilliant Soopah Dupah Business Plan® is documented for future generations to marvel over.
______________________________________________________________ This GoFundMe is no longer active.… Abc123 Defghi needs your support for ____________________
This is so capitalism at all levels that it hurts to watch.
- Corporation peddles snake oil that kills people.
- Corporation doubles down on that snake oil at a time of a global pandemic when lives are doubly on the line.
- A scientist speaking out against the technology with verified studies and measurements is sued by said corporation.
- Said scientist has to beg for money to get even the smallest chance in court in the face of the corporate juggernaut.
Ladies and gentlemen: I give you CAPITALISM!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/221845
> This is arguably one of the most important archives of computer science and engineering information available. And 50 years of it is now free. Get out there and play while educating yourself on things you didn't know were ancient history!
When last I wrote about COROS I explored the EVQ component of it with a focus on the API and some of its underlying construction. In thi...
When last I wrote about COROS I explored the EVQ component of it with a focus on the API and some of its underlying construction. In this post I will expand on that underlying construction giving reasons for some of the design decisions, as well as providing some example use cases for this.
Protests are all well and good but they're not helping the Ukrainians on the ground. Governments aren't helping Ukrainians on the ground either. Maybe it's time to help them help themselves.
In the last installment talking about COROS, I built up on various uses for coroutines, ending with a primitive scheduling tool. I then ...
With coroutines and their use cases at least reasonably well established, the event queue mechanism of COROS is introduced to tie them up into a convenient architecture.
Continuing with the description of COROS that I'd begun earlier, today's article starts applying some structure to what is, at the core, ...
The first piece of COROS explored was the coroutine system, but coroutines are not a well-understood facility in programming circles for some reason. This article builds up some use cases for coroutines and their application in preparation for the next major component of COROS.
In an earlier post I'd mentioned that I'd written an RTOS in my spare time for fun and then incorporated a (slightly reworked) version of...
The first in a series of articles that builds up a coroutine-based RTOS for use primarily in memory-constrained embedded systems. Future articles will expound on other pieces of the RTOS after which the full, production-ready source will be published under my usual choice of the WTFPL2 license.
In most programming, dynamic allocation and subsequent freeing of memory resources is normal. In embedded programming, dynamic SRAM allo...
Dynamic SRAM allocation is the device-killer …
… but it doesn't have to be.
An Open Source Embedded Real-time Operating System
Following-up to my post about LuatOS yesterday, this is the underlying RTOS that LuatOS builds upon. The English language site is not as complete and all-encompassing as the Chinese site, but it's more than enough to get a taste of the system and even put it to use.
One of the things that projects like LuatOS and RT-Thread highlight is that the days of China just consuming western technology are over. Homegrown software is rapidly spreading through the country's engineering world (RT-Thread is in a bewildering variety of products now!) and even homegrown hardware, down to home-grown ISAs like the XuanTie XT804 cores, is starting to supplant imports.
The future is looking decidedly interesting.
eLua as a project died. But from its ashes, and paired with the Chinese RT-Thread project, LuatOS has arisen.
Using this if you can't do Chinese will be a bit of a challenge, but it's not impossible.
AURA Reference Implementation Documentation
AURA is a proposed specification for a native Ada source code package management system, developed in lock-step with a reference implementation. This links to the documentation (from where the Github project and such can be easily found).
Humanity has discovered FTL travel. All trips in the direction of the galactic core vanish without a trace. Plotting the disappearances reveals two things:
- They outline a sphere.
- The sphere is expanding at the speed of light.