programmers-off-topic

[cinder karma]

Right

[safe dragon]

haskell programmers wouldn't be caught dead writing production software

[cinder karma]

Haskell needs to be used only at blackboards

With the nice chalk from Japan

[pliant snow]

haskell_xkcd.jpg

[safe dragon]

and all the parameters removed from writing due to point free programming and 12 periods, flips and $ to allow for that

[rotund violet]

Same point as TypeScript, being able to write web apps and actually catch (some) errors at compile time instead of 6 weeks after launch.

It just wasn't that great a language, whereas TypeScript had the brain power of the C#/Delphi language designers behind it.

[cinder karma]

But with a vaguely functional inspired syntax

[safe dragon]

I'll probably try typescript for real soon enough when I get to the frontend of this project...

[cinder karma]

I keep on saying I need to try Clash

Some day.

[rotund violet]

TS is inspired, it takes so many of the weaknesses of JS and makes them strengths, like dictionary key constraints.

[cinder karma]

I guess I could do something silly just to play with it

[safe dragon]

almost tempted to try some funky ass framework like leptos just to not write Javascript

Hopefully typescript is as nice as people say it is

[rotund violet]

I hardly ever do web stuff anymore but when I do, I won't even consider going back to ESWhatever from TS. If a hot new framework has sketchy TS support I just nope out of it.

[safe dragon]

I'll probably use svelte...

[rotund violet]

Yeah, Svelte is in a gray area there... it has TS support, and it mostly works, but it's got some... idiosyncracies.

[safe dragon]

I do web stuff plenty but mostly backend or asp.net webforms/blazor

I don't recommend either of those

[cinder karma]

Lol

I'm so far from web stuff haha

I get to yell at individual electrons

[safe dragon]

oh no... any recommendations not based on some current hype cycle?

[red crest]

electron? but you just said you were far from web stuff!

[rotund violet]

Has Svelte implemented signals yet? If you're going to get into Svelte for the first time, I'd wait for that (major) update. Reactivity through $$ is kind of neat at first, but gets annoying really fast when you have "dependent observables".

[rotund violet]

Svelte is a very good framework, don't get me wrong, it's just immature. Angular is more mature, but harder to use. Qwik is the new kid on the block.

[safe dragon]

they're introducing signal powered reactivity through "svelte runes" for svelte 5 which is in preview rn I believe

[red crest]

ill be honest i dont know what signals are but the newest version of svelte is doing a major changeup WRT reactivity like that that might be relevant to what you mean

[rotund violet]

And of course there's all the React/Redux based stuff.

[safe dragon]

I worked with angular roughly a decade ago for some ionic framework thing... never again

[red crest]

(Svelte_Kit_ also supports TypeScript very well)

[rotund violet]

Yes, Runes, I was trying to remember their quirky name. It looks like it'll solve all the biggest annoyances with v4. I'll probably try it out again once they release 5.

[safe dragon]

decade ago? I mean 6 years ago

[rotund violet]

The phrase "very well" is doing some heavy lifting there - I think I'd call it "good enough".

[safe dragon]

lmao

I know internally they don't even use typescript

they do use types but through some other thing

[rotund violet]

SvelteKit: It's not just good, it's good enough.

[safe dragon]

I'll probably try it

I liked it in the past but much like Blazor these frameworks have a tendency to fall apart the moment I work on a proper project

[rotund violet]

I don't really do Blazor, I was using it with Tauri and found the integration to be, again, "good enough".

[cinder karma]

Is blazer c# wasm?

[safe dragon]

yes and no

[rotund violet]

There are a few mild oddities, and a few not-so-mild annoyances occasionally turning into white-hot rage (especially around the asset/path system), but mostly I was able to get stuff working.

[safe dragon]

depends if you use client, server or hybrid

[cinder karma]

Oh boy

[safe dragon]

client is wasm

[cinder karma]

I'm running away

[safe dragon]

hybrid first hydrates with server and then wasm

[rotund violet]

lol, I'm making it sound worse than it is. It was like 90% productive work and 10% frustration, and that's not a bad rate compared to typical python/java work.

[safe dragon]

server is full server with a persistent websocket connection

[rotund violet]

Or wait, was that in response to Tauri/SvelteKit or Blazor? If it was a response to the Blazor stuff then never mind, I know nothing about that.

[safe dragon]

lmao

the worst thing about Blazor Server is that it does not implement debounce at all

if you don't pay good attention you accidentally queue like thousands of network packets

[rotund violet]

Why debounce when it's all "local", right?

[safe dragon]

but Blazor server isn't local 😌. It's a round-trip to the server for every input

and there's stuff like @onmouseover events which in Blazor Server is basically a built in way to ddos yourself

[cinder karma]

Just buy bigger server

Or more server

Or both bigger and more server

[rotund violet]

Every problem can be solved with more RAM.

[cinder karma]

Always

When I have problems I always buy more RAM

Or a new video card

[rotund violet]

SDV actually doesn't stutter on this machine, I was amazed the first time I tried it.

[safe dragon]

we had an I think @onkeydown which was so bad that holding it down a key down would fill the websocket with so many packages queued that I ended up with 12 GB of memory usage just holding down shift for a minute

[cinder karma]

You need more ram

[safe dragon]

so that you can hold shift for longer

[cinder karma]

(I did actually have to get a new video card recently because I was blowing past 1gb of vram)

(Not stardew)

[rotund violet]

Like 50h playtime and not a single stutter that I noticed. So yes, you can play a 10-year-old game with good performance if you upgrade to the most expensive modern hardware money can buy!

[cinder karma]

(Stupid cad software)

No clue what it was doing

[safe dragon]

raytracing

[cinder karma]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was tbh

[safe dragon]

hoping svelte will actually be nice and not just look it

🙏

[rotund violet]

It just depends on how you like to build apps. Definitely go with SvelteKit and not just Svelte, though; the routing system is one of its better parts.

[safe dragon]

most of the business logic stuff is in the rust back-end so my demands shouldn't be too high...

oh yes of course

I'll probably start with the svelte 5 preview since it's pretty much guaranteed to launch while I'm in the middle of building

[rotund violet]

Out of the modern/maintained frameworks I've tried Angular, React/Redux, Svelte and Meteor, and looked extensively at Qwik (though not actually tried it) and... I honestly don't think I have a preference. They've all got their warts, I'm not convinced that any of them have really knocked it out of the park, but they're all a million times better than pure HTML/JS, or some awful Qt widget thing if you're building for Desktop under Electron/Tauri/etc.

[deep drum]

My usual stack is

• Tanstack React Query
• Tanstack Router (one of the better ones I've found, for sure better than RR)
• MobX for state management
• React / TSX
• Vite

[safe dragon]

no plans for desktop yet cause that's a nightmare I wish to avoid for now

[deep drum]

gives me the flexibility I need to make all kinds of stuff bc I'm usually building some sort of interface for a robot or microcontroller

[rotund violet]

The point of Tauri/Electron is that you (mostly) don't have to care about the desktop abstraction, you just build your web app and users run it on desktop.

[safe dragon]

in theory yeah

[rotund violet]

If you need a native look and feel and native performance then they aren't good choices, but for 95% of apps they're great.

[safe dragon]

I need web regardless so might as well start there

[rotund violet]

Well, if you use Vite as your engine like @deep drum mentioned above, then that already has a Tauri integration. So if you choose your stack carefully at the outset, you can build exclusively for web today and then add desktop support later with only minimal friction.

[safe dragon]

sveltekit uses vite so we're good there

[deep drum]

I've never heard of Tauri, I've been using vite-electron as my base dor desktop for a while

I'll have to check it out

[rotund violet]

Yeah, Tauri + Vite + SvelteKit + Svelte is the "Svelte stack for Tauri"

[safe dragon]

maybe someday though I'll probably never need it

[rotund violet]

Electron's fine too, I just prefer Rust if I want to write any glue outside the TS sandbox.

I believe Tauri's also supposed to be noticeably faster than Electron, but never actually done a side-by-side comparison.

[deep drum]

I've always wanted to try Vite's TS/Rust base, but I don't know rust lol

tbh I'd believe most things are faster than electron lol

but it's what I know

[rotund violet]

Well yeah, if you don't know Rust at all then that might not be the greatest place to start picking it up.

Mind you, Tauri doesn't really require you to learn a lot of Rust, that's only if you want to implement native queries for the web app.

[safe dragon]

my backend is already an axum server(rust) which I'm quite happy with

[deep drum]

it's on my list, I just have no argument to get it into my workflow at work, it's all pretty solidly in C and I'd have to make a big argument to convert any of it to Rust

either that or I'd have to learn it on my own, and I have no projects I want to tackle with rust rn

[safe dragon]

at work I have no argument for anything other than C#

[rotund violet]

You could always use Google's argument, that it will (and did) eliminate about 90% of security vulnerabilities and 50-60% of other memory-safety bugs.

[deep drum]

can't eliminate memory safety bugs if you don't have any smh 💪 😤

[safe dragon]

my company would shit their pants at the concept of using anything that isn't owned by Microsoft

[rotund violet]

Really, you've got a C codebase and have no memory safety bugs? I think that just means they haven't been discovered yet.

[deep drum]

I'm simply built different (please don't look at my valgrind output)

[safe dragon]

can't have memory safety bugs if they're features

[cinder karma]

I'm reminded of a stupid joke

[rotund violet]

Buffer overflow exploit is a feature! What if I need to fix an issue remotely on a client's server!?

[cinder karma]

Missile has a memory leak that will cause the controller to malfunction after 4 min

Luckily, missile will have exploded by then

[safe dragon]

missile doesn't work over 500 miles

[rotund violet]

As long as it's not an ICBM, you're golden.

[safe dragon]

I have no such fears for memory safety I just like rust

axum is nice

[rotund violet]

I do too, but just liking rust isn't an argument for using it at work (as opposed to personal projects).

[safe dragon]

for my work rust would have to be bought by Microsoft to be considered

[rotund violet]

I can totally see that happening... when hell freezes over.

[safe dragon]

very entrenched in the .NET world

there's already a rule against anything open source that isn't owned by a giant company

we had to fight just to use AWS cause it's not Microsoft

[rotund violet]

Funny, my last place of work would not touch anything that is owned by Microsoft.

[safe dragon]

we had to answer "but what if AWS goes down"

the internet explodes idk man

[ivory shadow]

If AWS goes down the entire internet will be on fire anyway

So who cares lol

[safe dragon]

our login flow is the least of our problems if AWS goes down

[rain apex]

what if azure explodes

[rotund violet]

Yeah, that's a bit like asking what if Cloudflare goes down. ("Well, then you're royally screwed, sir.")

[ivory shadow]

I mean I can see some people needing a plan for "but what if AWS goes down" but only like government system. Medical dispatch. Infrastructure.

And you own your own hardware already in that situation

Or should anyways

[cinder karma]

Sorry can't hear you

Building this 911 dispatch center on a combination of Azure and AwS

[rotund violet]

You can be Cloud, or Not-Cloud, but if you choose to be Cloud, then worrying about AWS going down is a moot point.

[cinder karma]

And one server in my basement

[rotund violet]

If you go Cloud then you've already delegated your uptime to someone else.

[cinder karma]

Oh, we also need to get skylink involved somehow

All these are required

[safe dragon]

they demanded we built a local fallback for when AWS goes down(this is for authentication, AWS cognito). But I mean our passwords before that change weren't even case sensitive let alone hashed so I'm sure even with a fallback it'd have been a big improvement

[rotund violet]

Ahhh, corporate life, always pennywise and pound-foolish.

[ivory shadow]

Crumble was this your boss

[safe dragon]

we did eventually get it through

yes

spitting image

[ivory shadow]

(I get so much use out of that image)

[safe dragon]

he sold the company now it's all good now we just have a holding company fucking everything up instead

[ivory shadow]

Having a local backup for an authentication system honestly doesn't sound like a bad thing at least.

[safe dragon]

we do have one ultimately

not for when AWS goes down though

for when we want to stop using cognito

company politics

hate it

just let me write code

[rotund violet]

You'll have to leave the JojaMart job if you want that.

[safe dragon]

click clack the keyboard

when my hobby project I don't even intend to make accessible without a VPN takes off and I become rich

[ivory shadow]

Yeah move to a farm where you can grow organic code and sell it at the local market

(Wish my hobby projects would take off. I could stand becoming rich)

[safe dragon]

I'll just hop from startup to startup as they all die

revolutionize some industry

with AI

and NFTs

and big data

[ivory shadow]

Maybe if you mix them all together. Invent Big Artificial Tokens or something

[rotund violet]

https://tenor.com/view/nathan-fillion-no-words-speechless-mal-firefly-gif-11786332

Seriously though, it is a metaphor, whether you're growing crops or writing code.

(Some people do both!)

[safe dragon]

be like the guy who built neofetch

I think it used to say goose farming

I see geese didn't work out

[rotund violet]

Maybe it did work out and he just expanded?

[safe dragon]

from neofetch to farming conglomerate

[rotund violet]

Stranger things have happened.

[lethal walrus]

no goose farming was from some linkedin profile that was going around

[hoary estuary]

Noob question, What are the different uses of Python?

[strange copper]

I like python most for scripting and data analysis stuff personally but you can do anything with it

[hoary estuary]

Can you recommend free resources to learn Python?

[lethal walrus]

contributing to governor /s

[pliant snow]

god forbid

[strange copper]

Do you just want python basics or do you want to learn python for a specific usecase?

[lethal walrus]

that's why i learnt python lol

i had dabbled before but properly learnt it for governor

[strange copper]

I'm not the best person to ask cause I learned python when I was like 11 (not clean python but I wrote small things with it) and then formally learned "correct python" like how to type stuff at least in school cause I took a class for fun

[cinder karma]

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

[supple mountain]

yet another R plug

[hoary estuary]

I want to learn Python as a complete beginner in programming

[strange copper]

Swear I've heard of this

[supple mountain]

this

[strange copper]

But the 1 based indexing:/

[cinder karma]

It's a great 101 book!

It's free too

[strange copper]

Aight then listen to atra lol

[supple mountain]

going +1 or -1 to indexing is a pretty easy mental switch to make imo

[strange copper]

I feel like all my programming knowledge is a hodgepodge of random things I learned just by building stuff and doing random online courses and then it got straightened out with practice and formal education

I never know how to tell people where to start

[supple mountain]

i guess another question is if "complete beginner in programming" includes "also need to learn basic programmming logic"

[strange copper]

I think the book atra linked teaches the basic logic

[hoary estuary]

thanks yall

[strange copper]

Python is always my favorite when I webscrape too

[cinder karma]

Yeah if you already knew to program reading the learnxiny for python is sufficient

[hoary estuary]

its about data right

web scraping

[rain apex]

CLRS my beloved

[strange copper]

It's just making your program pretend to be a person and get data from web pages cause you want it for whatever reason

(I have the entire MAL website in json format)

[rain apex]

i think its easier to learn something if you have a thing you want to achieve

[strange copper]

Web scraping is a fun puzzle I really enjoy it

(Until there's a captcha or rate limit. Then I'm sad)

[hoary estuary]

That is true, but is it okay to learn something and learn what you want to achieve?

[rain apex]

yea i mean some ppl can make obtain skill the goal

im bad at that though i need a end product as motivation

[hoary estuary]

im bad at both 💀

im a procrastinator

[strange copper]

Having a curriculum like a book was good for me at the start because they usually have exercises to practice

[cinder karma]

One reason why I like that book is that it has a lot of hands on cose

While I can now learn new language by literally reading the docs on my phone, that sure wouldn't have worked for my first language

[hoary estuary]

Thanks for the recommendation

I'll start tommorow

[cinder karma]

Procrastination!

[hoary estuary]

you see its alr 3am here

[gaunt wadi]

oh shit the latest plasma update has fixed the problem where all of my monitors were locked to the refresh rate of the lowest one

ty plasma wayland

[pliant snow]

✨

weird that that was an issue on wayland tho

[gaunt wadi]

nvidia + wayland specifically

the release notes say they fixed nvidia wayland flickering, but it also works now ✨

[pliant snow]

oh it might be the explicit sync thing

[gaunt wadi]

ty plasma devs

[lone iris]

It is a general-purpose language, so you can basically do anything with it. As for uses for python in the job setting, it is mainly used for data science, data analysis, complex math, machine learning, things like that.

[safe dragon]

it's used a lot by fields that are generally not conventional programming but require programming to do

at least from what I tend to see, python projects tend to more be "scripts" than full programs

though idk how exactly to define what that means

anything is possible with it though...

build discord bots...

[sand frost]

It’s like a Swiss Army knife, it can do a lot of different things but it’s not necessarily the best at most of them

Or I guess it’s also like idk the analogy but because it’s easy to use it gets used a lot

[lone iris]

Basically, Python is a jack of all trades master of none lol

[sand frost]

Because sometimes it’s important for it to be easy to pick up

[safe dragon]

absolutely abysmal at some

[sand frost]

Python is the language of choice for some things

[safe dragon]

operating system development in python

python seems to dominate for AI and data science/analysis

which idk how much that is actually because of python or just because it has the libraries you'd want

which are all written in C/C++

[supple mountain]

python's relative dominance is so interesting. i've gotten the sense over the years that people who use python for data analysis are usually people who don't have formal training in, specifically, data analysis

which is like, fine. depends on what you are analyzing and why

[safe dragon]

my course in data analysis in uni wasn't even considered to be part of the comp sci major

[supple mountain]

my alma mater moved the statistics department from the engineering school to the liberal arts school halfway through my freshman year

created transcript-related issues for literally the rest of undergrad

[lone iris]

Yeah, I believe Python is not the best choice for those things, I think people just choose to use it for the libraries.

[safe dragon]

python dominates in the industries where the users are often not ones with a background in comp sci but more often math, statistics, physics etc

probably just because it's very simple and forgiving

to the dismay of many people who do have a comp sci degree sometimes

looks at python ignoring scope

[supple mountain]

i guess i only have a sample size of 2 with regards to semi-recent statistics degrees, but at no point in my academic career have i been even remotely encouraged to use python, and the people i've worked with who use python mostly came from a business background

[safe dragon]

my comp sci degree was almost entirely in C# which I know is also not the standard

the only course I ever used python for in uni was some AI q-learning project thing

even though we weren't allowed to use any of the AI libraries to do it

[supple mountain]

it is pretty funny that the only reason SAS still has the dominance it does is because the FDA wants clinical trial analysis to be done specifically in SAS. usually

[safe dragon]

I have never heard of SAS

[supple mountain]

this comment seems about right to me

[safe dragon]

I like how their examples of general purpose programming are web scraping and NLP

two things I have never done in my life

[lone iris]

Yeah me neither lmao

[safe dragon]

I imagine the question had to do with data science/AI

[lone iris]

Is that considered general purpose?

[supple mountain]

maybe speaks to how much python has become associated with AI

nah, this came from r/statistics

[heavy dagger]

https://reddit.com/r/statistics

[supple mountain]

thanks, maru

[safe dragon]

ah

thanks uber

[supple mountain]

the OP was just asking what statistical programming language they should focus on in their graduate program (between sas, r, python)

[safe dragon]

well a statistics subreddit scares me as someone who failed statistics in uni so badly that he decided to give up after the midterm

[supple mountain]

SAS is the industry standard for clinical trials. it's like the dinosaur defense contractor of medical R&D

[safe dragon]

I've used R. It didn't really feel like I was programming I was just calling a bunch of funky statistical functions in a row

[supple mountain]

it's extremely reliable but it's not very flexible, it's not fun to look at as a programmer, and it's not fun to look at as someone reading the output

yeah, you can use R that way

you can also build more robust things in there if you want or need to for whatever reason

[safe dragon]

that data analysis course was incredibly easy despite me having a very poor understanding of any field that has to do with data analysis

it seemed to be treated as some introduction to programming for people in the math major

[supple mountain]

yeah, i don't like to gatekeep but "data analysis" coming from a non-statistician tends to raise huge red flags for career statisticians

nate silver can do some very cool things with statistical programming but he's also constantly spouting nonsense based on it

[safe dragon]

let me query together a whole database if you want data but analysis ain't something I should ever be allowed to do

[supple mountain]

my sister did a basic comp sci degree and made fun of me the semester she was taking intro stats because she thought it was so easy

[safe dragon]

I know SQL very well but I barely understand what the word stochastic means

[supple mountain]

like, well, it gets way more difficult and esoteric if you go beyond "this is how you perform a two-sample t-test"

there's getting the numbers, there's knowing what the hell the numbers mean, and there's knowing how to effectively explain the meaning to people who have no background in any of it. three very different skills

[safe dragon]

she did not take the same stats course I did then... Though the stats course I did was essentially the statistics course for the entire math bachelor's degree.
It went from basic shit like binomials to the most arcane mathematics I'd ever seen in my life

[supple mountain]

oof

[safe dragon]

my mom taught statistics at a college for years and she had no idea what I was even talking about after a while

[supple mountain]

did your university not have an actual statistics degree?

very insane to not have Statistical Theory™ separated from intro stats

bc fr it is extremely different from normal calculus

even if it superficially looks the same

[safe dragon]

there's bachelors in data science but I haven't heard of a statistics degree

I mean I'm sure it's a specialization

[supple mountain]

it's more often a masters or doctoral level degree, but in that case the department is likely responsible for the undergrad-level stats classes

[safe dragon]

idk what my university offered exactly I just know that statistics course was of the math branch of my university. I even had to go to a whole different part of the city for my exams

now I'm just a web developer

a basic bitch

[supple mountain]

i took a class out of the psych department for a very specific type of modeling that no one in my own department knew how to do last spring

it was in a different part of campus in a much older building that had faulty ventilation

i fainted in class once lol

[safe dragon]

oh that's fun

my uni had two campuses. A "science" campus and then another campus in the city center

the science campus was way fancier in most ways

[supple mountain]

my current institution is relatively small for a public university, but the parking situation is so dire that i do far more walking than i ever did at my much larger and much more spread out undergrad uni

exercise is good, exercise when the heat index is 110 and you're traveling uphill less so

[safe dragon]

I don't think anyone I know ever drove to university... You take the bus or tram or cycle there

[supple mountain]

no public transport here

i mean, it exists, but it sucks

i live too far out to cycle. no trails, heat index 110, etc etc

[safe dragon]

it didn't have one when I studied there but my uni has a dedicated tram line that pretty much just exists just to serve it and a football stadium

[supple mountain]

yeah my undergrad university had good shuttle service and student discounts on the city's public transport

i usually took the bus to campus and it was fine

[safe dragon]

all public transport is free for students in the netherlands

[supple mountain]

ah

i am in the united states lol

probably explains a lot

[safe dragon]

probably

though from what I understand universities tend to be on the better end as far as public transport goes there

[supple mountain]

i am in the united states...... in the bible belt

[safe dragon]

jesus personally takes the wheel to get you to campus

[supple mountain]

our tax money seems to go mostly to the cops

when i get to the interviewing stage ahead of graduation i'm going to be very forthright that you cannot expect me to show up on time if i don't have reliable parking

[safe dragon]

I am technically from the dutch bible belt but that honestly doesn't really mean that much since we're working with a different "normal" to compare a bible belt to

[supple mountain]

alabama constantly pushes the boundaries of what judges can get away with legislating

currently the answer seems to be "just about anything"

[safe dragon]

bible belt mostly just ends up meaning that there's more christian schools and the christian politicial parties get almost all their votes from those towns

[supple mountain]

anyway, yes, public transportation sucks here because it's the american south

[safe dragon]

[supple mountain]

and there's no parking because the city wasn't planned for this

[safe dragon]

I will probably never visit because I do not have a driver's license nor any plans to get one

[supple mountain]

you could have a fun time in like atlanta or new orleans without renting a car

[safe dragon]

I live essentially across the street from an intercity train station

[supple mountain]

atlanta is actually worse if you do have a car lol

[safe dragon]

I'd probably start with nyc or seattle since I have friends there

[supple mountain]

the superboss of city driving

[cinder karma]

Enjoy driving in nyc

(You might die)

[safe dragon]

you don't drive in nyc, you stand still while inside a car in nyc

I will experience the apparently high quality nasty ass metro system

tbh a lot of major cities seem to have very nasty metros

[cinder karma]

Yes

[supple mountain]

believe it or not this circles back to how much of our tax money goes to the cops

[safe dragon]

🙏

tbh I'm trying to think if I've been on a metro system that wasn't nasty in some way

oh yes

stockholm metro

[supple mountain]

if you're a foodie and can handle spicy, new orleans is great if you are with friends and stay safe

[sand frost]

I feel like public transit is generally dirty because to keep it clean requires so so so much work and we barely keep them running as it is

[supple mountain]

cajun food is (in my subjective opinion) the best cuisine to come out of the US

[safe dragon]

nothing inspires confidence in a city quite like being told to stay safe

[sand frost]

I’m allergic to nuts so I don’t think New Orleans is the city for me

[supple mountain]

yeah, requires a lot of tax money to keep the trains clean

[sand frost]

I’ve been to Atlanta and it’s fine. I liked the Korean bbq I had.

[supple mountain]

i mean, that applies anywhere in the us. people carry guns here

[sand frost]

But Atlanta is so big that there’s parts you can get to with public transit but like 80% of it you kind of just can’t.

[safe dragon]

trains, buses and trams tend to be pretty clean here. We don't have very many metros because our ground is literally just mushy plant matter and a terrible fit for building a metro in

the one in rotterdam can be pretty nasty though

[supple mountain]

my dad used to take business trips to amsterdam a few times a year

[safe dragon]

he's been to amsterdam more times than me then

[sand frost]

I’ve never been to Amsterdam, I hear they get too many tourists

[safe dragon]

have you heard of the ad campaign by amsterdam asking british tourists not to go there

[supple mountain]

df;laksjdf;lajdskf

[safe dragon]

specifically british youth

[supple mountain]

"please take your tourism money and spend it somewhere else"

[safe dragon]

apparently british youths go to amsterdam cause they've heard about the red light district and the "coffee shops" and then wander the streets there drunk vandalizing shit and being loud

from what I can tell they cost the city more than they gain from them

[pliant snow]

what if I go there expecting windmills and bicylists

[safe dragon]

well please go out of amsterdam for a proper experience of both of those

[supple mountain]

ah, yes... the "coffee shops"

[safe dragon]

for a windmill you can pretty much go to any dutch city though

my city has 3 I think

4?

maybe 4

[sand frost]

Stroopwafels

That’s what I would go to see

[safe dragon]

my city also has several stalls for stroopwafels

[supple mountain]

dutch chocolate

[safe dragon]

both fresh warm ones and packaged ones

[supple mountain]

my dad would bring us back stroopwafels when he went

[safe dragon]

sickening things they upset my stomach

[supple mountain]

they are very sweet

[safe dragon]

my city is mostly known for cheese

[supple mountain]

https://tenor.com/view/cheese-sweet-dreams-eurythmics-annie-lennox-misheard-lyrics-gif-16188561

[safe dragon]

in fact almost everyone in this server will know the name of my city even though the vast majority of them will not know it's a city

[supple mountain]

my city is mostly known for.......... uh, racism

[safe dragon]

tha'ts not a particularly defining trait for a city

[supple mountain]

moreso than usual

[safe dragon]

that's an expectation!

damn

my city... yeah idk it's gouda it's known for cheese and stroopwafels

[supple mountain]

it comes more from the state government in the modern era though

as is the case everywhere in the south

[safe dragon]

tbh by some people's expectations it's probably not considered a city since it has like 75k people

[supple mountain]

that's like a large suburb

[cinder karma]

I mean stardew is a town apparently

Smaller than a cul de sac

[rain apex]

stardew has 30smth humans and 10k junimos

[safe dragon]

but can you cycle across an entire large suburb in like 15 minutes

[supple mountain]

video game towns are always like "this city has all of the infrastructure you'd expect from real-life municipality!" and then there are 5 buildings and 10 people

[rotund violet]

Who remembers when python was the hotness, the super exciting new language that all the smart people were using, spawning gushing blog posts and xkcd strips everywhere?

My theory on why it's popular with the extreme left-brained crowd is "lack of syntax noise" - you don't have braces, semicolons, "end" blocks and such everywhere, so it feels more like just scribbling equations on a whiteboard than learning a bizarre new language.

[supple mountain]

that sounds likely, yeah

[supple ether]

I hate working with python. whitespace-as-syntax is terrible to work with and the lack of proper loop constructs is awful. Also debugging it and doing multi-file projects is just really clunky and irritating even with an IDE

I do still use it for task automation because as bad as it is, it's still leagues better than windows batch scripting

[rotund violet]

I'm not a fan myself, but I think the things you hate about it are the things that the popular python fields (science, math, AI, etc.) like about it. It comes down to whether your mental model is fundamentally linguistic/symbolic vs... algebraic, almost? Probably not the right word, but something along those lines.

I suspect a good deal of python users actually have trouble with any kind of complex control flow and don't really want it. Sets and sequences, on the other hand, are purely mathematical.

[supple mountain]

when it comes to statistics/data analysis i appreciate the ability to "scribble on the whiteboard"

sometimes it's just faster to get the work done that way

[rotund violet]

I wasn't using it as a pejorative, not really. That's just what math disciplines are like a lot of the time.

[supple mountain]

i need to build some simulations for sample size estimation and that's going to have to have more of a standard control flow

yeah, we're all good here. there's different use cases for different things

[rotund violet]

The efficiency of the work is part of it too; building/testing/proving a mathematical model (whether it's pure math, or stats, or AI training data, or whatever) is usually a one-time process. It's literally throwaway work, the code is not meant to be "maintained".

So you get a lot of unmaintainable code in python because the only reason it ever got checked in in the first place was so that other people could check and replicate their work academically.

[supple mountain]

often the case, yeah

there are areas in statistics where you want very reliable and well-maintained code, but if you're in one of those fields you likely have to use SAS anyway

[rotund violet]

(I'm sure there are cases where the models do need to get formalized and productionized, but that's much later in the process)

[supple mountain]

part of the reason i tend to write in frankenR (base R + tidyverse, instead of the much more pleasant tidyverse) is that base R doesn't, like, change every 6 months

but with the way base R works, if you're doing anything complex you're likely to have lines that are like x(y(z(a)), b(c(d(e, f))), g(5))

which is just not fun to read lol. tidyverse piping is great

[rotund violet]

Yeah... which looks perfectly fine as an equation, and perfectly terrible as a computer program.

I never used tidyverse so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[supple mountain]

a little piece of a shiny app i built for grocery lists that still works

  bullet_bill <- reactive({
    lapply(split(filtered_recs(),seq(nrow(filtered_recs()))), function(x) {
         tagList(tags$li(a(as.character(x$Recipe.Name)),
                         href = x$URL,
                         " - total prep/cook time ",
                         x$Total.Time..Minutes.,
                         " minutes"))

[rotund violet]

I'm less offended by the syntax or structure as I am by the fact that it's spitting out HTML using concatenation.

Or at least that's how it appears to me, maybe it's only concatenating the link text.

[supple mountain]

it's generating the text on the top left

the hyperlinks don't work anymore but that's not necessarily shiny's fault. the links could just be dead

[rotund violet]

Well, at least it's not concatenating javascript and spitting that out.

Personally, I just use Paprika, but sometimes it's fun to DIY.

[supple mountain]

yeah i made this when i still had a car loan and my grocery budget was extremely low

i much prefer my notion setup to search recipes and then just write grocery list like a normal person

crying at what the cost of eggs was five years ago

[rotund violet]

Quality's gone down too. Almost have to get pastured these days if you want eggs that look and taste like... well, eggs.

[supple mountain]

i have only been eating aldi eggs for the duration of grad school but i am excited to be able to switch to better quality (and maybe more ethically produced, certs mean very little) eggs once this is over

[rotund violet]

I don't really think about ethics ("cage-free" stuff is meh, pretty much the same as the cheap stuff), but crack a pastured egg and a regular cheap egg side by side and you can quite literally see the difference.

One's an extremely pale yellow, almost white; the other is almost orange by comparison.

[supple mountain]

yep

[rotund violet]

Still, budget ingredients are far better than the Ramen diet, which is what most grad students I used to know were on.

(Not that I've checked, but I'll bet the price of that has gone up too)

[supple mountain]

i'm sure the big cases are still cheap but i see individual servings of instant soup go for $1 a pop now

or more, if it's "fancy" instant ramen

[rotund violet]

With some nice shrinkflation tacked on just for the hell of it?

"Fancy" instant Ramen = they toss in a few dehydrated carrots instead of just plastic noodles and a packet of maltodextrin?

[supple mountain]

sometimes there's a tiny packet of oil

[rotund violet]

That is fancy. I'll bet it's only the highest quality soybean oil.

[supple mountain]

i live close to a chinese supermarket so i usually buy like a 2 lb package of noodles and the mix-ins and make it myself

i also eat.... a lot of beans

beans, grains

the landscape for grad student diets has changed somewhat in the past ~15 years. broader recognition that eating nothing but instant noodles and pasta makes you sick, the greater number of campus food pantries, being "less responsible" with your money in the pursuit of getting adequate nutrition

but after covid my institution (and many others, i'd guess) really cut back on catering so you can't rely on getting free lunch anymore

[rotund violet]

Catered lunches is definitely new for academia... they certainly had campus cafeterias in my day but I gave up on them after freshman year.

[supple mountain]

not catered lunches so much as "come to this seminar and you can have a taco"

[rotund violet]

Oh, I get it. Yeah, we got those a lot at work, and I avoided those too, was almost always something I didn't want to put into my stomach.

Not tacos, but usually some "quasi-healthy" staple like cold cut sandwiches or subs.

[supple mountain]

it's the most hilarious battle of all time because the specific school/uni i'm in is very medical research oriented, but because we're also in the south, the catering is usually "junk" fast food or fast casual and there's always sweet tea

even the dental school has sweet tea at all their events. come on. you guys are literally the teeth people

[rotund violet]

I'm probably opening up a can of worms here, but the medical profession at large really does not seem to have caught up on the nutrition front. Though that could partly be policymakers and practicing doctors lagging behind the research.

The "my plate" nonsense is practically the same advice they were giving 30 years ago: low fat, high carb, way too much fiber, etc.

[supple mountain]

my opinion on optimal nutrition is that optimizing your nutrition is usually going to lead to disordered eating habits, and the best you can expect most people to do is eat a variety of different things in sensible amounts

[supple mountain]

insert meme about 12 slices of bread per day or whatever it was

[rotund violet]

Depends what we call optimizing, I guess? Worrying about every calorie or every mg of some micronutrient, yeah.

[supple mountain]

the only things i am mindful about with my diet are 1) satiety, 2) saturated fat (naturally insane cholesterol), and 3) making my snacks and sweets from scratch when i have the energy instead of buying ultra-processed snacks

[rotund violet]

About 90% of the fat I eat is saturated and my cholesterol's fine. That's another area where medicine hasn't caught up. The Ancel Keys study was junk.

[supple mountain]

i'm talking like fasting ldl of 150 insane

until a doctor gives up the goose and puts me on a statin the best i can do is avoid making it worse lol

[rotund violet]

Statins are ineffective unless you have type 2 diabetes.

Reduce cholesterol without any evidence of a reduction in CVD or death (essentially meaning that they are wrong about how cholesterol works).

[supple mountain]

my understanding is that they will lower your cholesterol, but that the link between cholesterol levels and cardiovascular risk is increasingly in question

yeah

[rotund violet]

Yup.

If your cholesterol is just naturally high, there may not actually be any problem.

[supple mountain]

from a sociological perspective, sometimes in order to negotiate with your health care provider or even be treated with respect by them, you have to come in having "done everything right"

[rotund violet]

Yeah. I looked for an, uh, "off-grid" doctor, I forget the technical term, one who runs their own service and doesn't interact with the insurance system.

[supple mountain]

i'm a cis woman in my 20s, if my i's aren't dotted and my t's aren't crossed, the answer to literally any problem i go to the doctor with is going to be "lose weight"

[rotund violet]

You'd think it costs more that way, but every single provider jacks their prices up 500% if you're going through insurance.

[supple mountain]

it definitely depends

i know people who rely on medicaid for chronic disease management, if your condition is rare enough you're gonna just not be alive anymore if you don't have insurance

[rotund violet]

Officially, on paper it doesn't happen because officially, on paper it's illegal, but that's what they do.

If you need so much treatment that you're well above the out-of-pocket limit then yeah, you're dead without insurance. But if you're "reasonably" healthy then you'll almost never hit that limit if you don't go through insurance.

[supple mountain]

one of the meds i'm on forever would be like.... $300/mo? or something like that without insurance

obvs if your income is high enough that's fine. my stipend is about $1500/mo and 95% of that goes to rent

[rotund violet]

The pharmas are a particularly screwed-up part of the system, but I won't go there. Looking at diagnostics, though - MRI without insurance, $750, MRI with insurance, $8000-$10,000. It's nuts.

[supple mountain]

there is truly nothing more american than the fact that our healthcare system was designed to wring as much money out of every player in the game as economically possible

the talking point people throw out that the tradeoff is we don't have to wait for healthcare is also just a flat-out lie

[rotund violet]

You can thank insurance companies for that. Same thing always happens when you take price transparency and performance requirements (that is, actually curing the disease) out of the system.

[supple mountain]

i have a friend who's developed some pretty debilitating symptoms that impact their ability to drive - closest time the university could get them in for an evaluation is DECEMBER

i tried to get help for long covid and was just ghosted

[rotund violet]

That's also an insurance thing. I've done both. Once I had to get a diagnostic and did it through insurance, booking was 3 months. Very similar diagnostic a few years later and noped out of the insurance, just booked it privately, and the wait time was 1 week.

Same facility and everything.

Again, officially, on paper, this is totally not a real thing and it's all totally lies and is totally impossible because it's obviously illegal, and yet anyone who has tried it will tell you the same thing I am.

[supple mountain]

student insurance denied coverage for last year's flu shot and covid booster, hospital charged me full price

i have just not paid it lmao

[supple mountain]

i mean i'm not denying this is the case. i'm adjacent to the system, i work with people in the system

i just don't think it's as simple as "it's cheaper to not have insurance and pay out of pocket" for the vast majority of people

maybe less so in this channel since so many of us are (or will be) high-paid professionals

[rotund violet]

I hear you. There's a lot more I could say on the subject, but best not to on a public forum.

[supple mountain]

i guess the magitek version of this is that i don't have dental insurance or vision insurance, i might go without dental insurance forever, etc

i have healthy teeth, just paying for one or two cleanings a year is is less money and hassle than insurance would be

i need vision insurance again so new glasses cost $200 and not $600 but that's a task for next year

[rotund violet]

I've gotten good mileage out of vision. (I think most programmers have terrible eyesight.)

[supple mountain]

concur

been wearing glasses since first grade

[rotund violet]

The plans are dirt cheap. I don't understand the economics of it, honestly.

[supple mountain]

i would have a constant headache if i didn't shell out for the high-index lenses

which precludes ordering affordable lenses online for the most part

[supple mountain]

[imagine me wearing a tinfoil hat] so vision insurance is cheap because The Man needs us to be able to perform labor for the pharmaceutical industry..... so they can exploit our labor to produce drugs...... which are then sold back to us at a huge markup....... which covers for vision insurance being cheaper

https://tenor.com/view/surprised-italian-spiderman-shocked-scared-terrified-gif-5605974

[rotund violet]

https://tenor.com/view/charlie-day-gif-18564553

^ I was thinking more like that

[hoary estuary]

Just woke up

gonna start the grind now gang

[cinder karma]

SAS is a name I have not heard for years

[supple mountain]

[cries in biostats]

[lethal walrus]

Is this the hard drive SAS

[atomic musk]

I think I figured out a solution inspired by this

public delegate OnPortraitRenderEvent(SpriteBatch b, DialogueBox box, IPortraitData data);
public delegate OnOtherRenderEvent(SpriteBatch b, DialogueBox box, IOtherData data);
// ...

public void AddRenderEvent(IManifest mod, IRenderEventArgs args)
{
  // ...
}

public interface IRenderEventArgs
{
  public OnPortraitRenderEvent OnPortraitRendering { get; set; }
  public OnPortraitRenderEvent OnPortraitRendered { get; set; }
  public OnOtherRenderEvent OnOtherRendering { get; set; }
  public OnOtherRenderEvent OnOtherRendered { get; set; }
  // ...
}

it's both strongly typed and without repeated code

solution came to me in my sleep lmao

[hoary estuary]

Hey there, what version of Python was used in this?
https://automatetheboringstuff.com

[atomic musk]

looks like python 3 https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/chapter0/#calibre_link-79

[thin estuary]

public OnPortraitRenderEvent OnPortraitRendering { get; set; }
you sure? or did you mean this instead:
public event OnPortraitRenderEvent OnPortraitRendering;

[hoary estuary]

thanks

[atomic musk]

the args structure is only to pass the callback methods to the main framework, which encapsulates each call in a try/catch, so I won't be invoking the args directly
or is there something I'm not seeing?

[thin estuary]

ahhh

then you probably want to make these nullable too

[atomic musk]

oh, yea good point

[pliant snow]

I'm here to cause fear, for I am now working on a C++ personal project

[lethal walrus]

c++ is.. acceptable

except for the fact I couldn't figure out how to import a function from one file, in two different files

[pliant snow]

Just #include the header file in both?

[atomic musk]

hmm, am I correct in assuming pintail can't proxy methods with interface arguments that aren't completely identical?
By that I mean, the interface referenced can't have some of its properties missing on the API consumer side

So in that case, it would be simpler to have each event as method arguments instead of having to instantiate an argument object

either way, that's not great if any of the events need to be changed or added

[ivory shadow]

This is such an irresponsible article. https://www.androidpolice.com/spotifys-car-thing-doomed-for-the-landfill/

Oh no it only has 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage it must be useless, throw it out!

Now I want to check eBay to see if I can buy some of them for cheap and, I dunno, run home assistant UIs on them or something.

[lethal walrus]

it didn't work, no idea why

i got around it.. somehow but

[lethal walrus]

have they been jailbroken yet?

[ivory shadow]

Yes.

[lethal walrus]

oh fun

[pliant snow]

I've seen some people saying theyre going to mail them back to spotify HQ lol

[worn remnant]

the double oof of the music player product only being designed to be a phone dongle, and the writer complaining that it doesn't have enough power to do anything useful but it definitely has enough power and storage to play music

[ivory shadow]

Reporters be like

BREAKING: Product advertised to play music, that people bought to play music and used for more than a year to play music, allegedly not capable of playing music.

[worn remnant]

however, i would not be surprised if those specs are insufficient to run spotify

[ivory shadow]

It's more like

BREAKING: low power device has issue running heavy pages in chromium

[rotund violet]

I'd buy that for a dollar.

[lethal walrus]

I doubt it's full spotify running on it?

or do you mean if someone tried it

[rotund violet]

This is a pretty strange API. Maybe it's necessitated somehow by the underlying system, but normally event args should extend EventArgs, and handlers should be event EventHandler<TEventArgs>... very weird to have a bunch of "events" inside the "event args" without an actual event in sight.

I'm not sure in what situation it would be better to have a single arguments class with a bunch of separate event fields vs. just having separate event fields.

[worn remnant]

yeah i mean if someone tried to actually run spotify on the spotify dongle. i don't know anything about it except the bad article said it's just proxying to your phone, so i also doubt the thing is running spotify

[lethal walrus]

ahh

[rotund violet]

It looks like they're typically going for $80-$100 on eBay, so people aren't throwing them out or giving them away for pennies on the dollar. Though if they were up for $20 then I'd consider one for a cooling loop UI.

[pliant snow]

I think they'll be a lot cheaper once they're officially bricked

[lethal walrus]

probably

[supple mountain]

at this point I fail to see the distinction on the user end between something like this..... and just Bluetooth audio

my car is just old enough to not have everything on a digital display and by god I will drive this car until the engine falls out

[atomic musk]

the names I picked were just not the best choice 😅
event listener is more accurate:

public void AddRenderEventListener(IManifest mod, IEventListeners listeners) {
  // Add each listener to their respective event handler
}

the idea was to have a single method handle the different event types (while keeping the API mappable by Pintail)
...but that solution won't do either because the interface here can't be "modular"

[rotund violet]

Does Pintail not support event? It might not. In which case, the more conventional term is probably more like a "callback". In either case, it's friendlier to have separate APIs per event type.

[thin estuary]

Pintail does support events

but it's not how they wanted the API to look like

[rotund violet]

I would try to think like a potential user of API: do I want to "do X after a portrait is rendered" or do I actually want an all-purpose "write a big method that handles everything portrait-related and has to inspect the args to see what really happened"?

[atomic musk]

next solution is to switch from a singleton API to a per-mod API instance
instead of placing a try/catch on each callback fn passed to AddRenderEventListener, I can just try/catch on a simple implementation when calling that mod's API instance

[rotund violet]

There are some cases where the latter really is better, but they're outliers.

If Pintail supports event as Shockah says then why not just use those, what's the objection?

[atomic musk]

I forget the exact reason... but along the way I had to ditch events for delegates because Pintail couldn't map something I was doing

my other issue with events is that the consumer API shouldn't be invoking events, since those need to be encapsulated in try/catch

[rotund violet]

You can't invoke events externally.

[atomic musk]

that's what I mean

[rotund violet]

No, I mean it's just straight up not allowed by the C# compiler. It's not something you have to worry about in your API design.

[atomic musk]

in this system, the API is more of a facade between the framework user and the framework itself

[rotund violet]

When you declare event EventHandler Foo, only the declaring class can actually invoke Foo.

[atomic musk]

which would be the facade the framework user has access to, which shouldn't be allowed 😅

[rotund violet]

I don't understand. The user declares an interface; there's no implementation to call. You have e.g.

public interface IPortraitEvents
{
    event EventHandler<PortraitEventArgs> OnPortraitRendering;
    event EventHandler<PortraitEventArgs> OnPortraitRendered;
}

Whom are you worried will be able to invoke this on the consumer's side? Consumers should only be able to do assignments, like portraitEvents.OnPortraitRendering += ...

[atomic musk]

ah, sorry for the confusion... I thought you meant having the events directly in the API's interface, which is the newer approach I'm taking...

it wouldn't work like that in the older approach either, as I learned the hard way the interface on the consumer and provider side need to be identical (presumingly because they're used as method argument, or some other shenanigan was going on)

[rotund violet]

IPortraitEvents could be the APIs interface, or a supertype of it, or a property on it. Don't think that part matters overly much.

[atomic musk]

newer approach is so much simpler, I'm ashamed I couldn't think of it sooner

public delegate void PortraitEventDelegate(SpriteBatch b, DialogueBox box, IPortraitData data);
public delegate void NameEventDelegate(SpriteBatch b, DialogueBox box, IPortraitData data);
// etc ...

public class DialogueDisplayApi
{
  public IManifest Mod;

  public PortraitEventDelegate OnPortraitRendering { get; set; }
  public PortraitEventDelegate OnPortraitRendered { get; set; }
  public NameEventDelegate OnNameRendering { get; set; }
  public NameEventDelegate OnNameRendered { get; set; }
  // etc ...
}

when it's time to invoke them, I iterate over a list of ApiConsumers and try/catch each time

[rotund violet]

Still very confused by why those are delegates and not events, unless it's an obscure pintail thing.

Unless you are expecting the caller of the API to actually do that thing (as opposed to responding to that thing) in which case it's not really an event at all.

[atomic musk]

events would probably work with this solution

I just haven't migrated that part of the code yet 😅

the invoking code is still in another class

[hoary estuary]

Coding is fun isn't

[gaunt wadi]

you wake up. the year is 2056. you get up out of your bed. you go to brush your teeth. your toothbrush is a systemd unit. it requires the toothpaste systemd unit, but that unit failed to start due to insufficient toothpaste supply. oh well, you'll try starting toothbrush another time. you go to put on your clothes. all systemd units. you eat your breakfast, the cereal systemd unit. while doing dishes, you accidently drop the bowl and cut yourself when cleaning it up. there's a bit of blood, composed of thousands of systemd units. everything is a systemd unit. Lennart Poettering, the grand daemon, kept alive through the power of systemd, laughs upon his immaculate throne.

in other news, discord 'quests' is actually introducing a way for third party companies to advertise on the platform???????????????

the enshittification continues

[pliant snow]

the d in systemd stands for dental hygine

yeah, I saw that too. Idk exactly what I would want a discord quest to be, but "go play our advertisers game" isnt it

[supple mountain]

the neopetsification of discord

[gaunt wadi]

the year is 2078. you open discord. minecraft studios by microsoft tm offers you a quest to unlock a new skin in minecraft: extra minecraft edition if you stream minecraft for 25 hours in one day. you don't have time for that, you're too busy completing your quest to unlock 25k mAH so you can keep the lights in your apartment on. you start a discord stream, ping everyone you know and every server you're in, and talk about how elder scrolls 76: extra elder scrolls is the best video game for them and their families

I have felt that slack has been feature complete for at least 5 years, maybe longer

Discord feels the same. I can't think of a new feature they've added since I started using it that's actually been beneficial to me

Peeeerhaps app commands create a nicer bot UI, but they also lock you into the discord ecosystem

😔

[pliant snow]

I've noticed that about a lot of products. Even before they got bought, Twitter was feature complete by like 2010. Everything they added since then has just been bloat to try and keep things fresh at best, or directly against the original design of the site at worse

[gaunt wadi]

CAPITALISM DEMANDS GROWTH

NEW FEATURES

NEW USERS

MORE

[pliant snow]

Will we still be using discord in 5 years Cat

[gaunt wadi]

Probably, it takes longer for things to die I think, especially because of the lock in

People still use facebook

[supple mountain]

twitter's an anomaly in this regard i think

the muskening has been far more extensive in evicting users and destroying the experience than, say, the badly implemented nsfw ban on tumblr

[safe dragon]

discord's gotta change things up by moving a few buttons to a different spot and creating some new bugs to complain about

[supple mountain]

the ceo of discord isn't doing their absolute best to make everyone leave who isn't in the cult of personality

[pliant snow]

Musk aside, Twitter was doing wacky stuff to their site before he showed up

Likes were to show people you liked something, retweets were to actually share it further

Then what did they do? Likes also sometimes showed to your followers

Stuff wasn't in order anymore, because we gotta algorithmize everything

[supple mountain]

that we can maybe blame on tiktok

[gaunt wadi]

just because tiktok exists doesn't mean that other large platforms have to do the same; they do because they are driven by the same motiviations

the problem is capitalism

abolish money

[supple mountain]

yeah that's what i was trying to get at

[gaunt wadi]

or universal basic income as a first step

[supple mountain]

tiktok getting lightning in a bottle with the attention economy led to every other site trying to replicate it, even when it made zero sense to do so

[gaunt wadi]

also AI!

[rotund violet]

This is the real enshittification, of course. Without exception, every single platform in early-stage decline decides that your feed shall consist not of things that you actually asked to have added to your feed, but whatever content they decide to "curate", which initially panders to special interests and ultimately becomes infested with ads.

Maybe - and I'm being very generous with this maybe - some of the businesses did so with initially good intentions, providing better recommendations, etc. But once you get into the business of gatekeeping, everyone wants a piece, and the final destination is the chum bucket.

[supple mountain]

youtube charging $14/mo to remove ads is beyond insane but also i 100% believe they think that's reasonable based solely on the volume, length, and concentration of unavoidable ads shoved down your throat otherwise

and then bc of how unreliable monetization is for the creators, the actual content itself can end up being half ads

[rotund violet]

In some ways it's hard to fault YouTube for that, they started off not even having a paid option and users started to demand it. On the other hand, if the ads weren't so obnoxious and intrusive, users would not have demanded it or cared. On the other other hand, the business has never been even remotely profitable, so that end was totally inevitable and predictable.

And then on the other other other hand we get into the realm of predatory pricing, whether or not it really "exists" or constitutes antitrust, etc.

[supple mountain]

youtube has such a huge market share in video hosting that i would argue you could conceptualize it as a public utility

which colors the whole debate around the ads and the pricing. depending on what you use youtube for, there may not be a viable alternative

[pliant snow]

I don't theres anything youtube does that any other video service cant also do, its just the locked in effect

[rotund violet]

I think they could argue pretty effectively that no one actually needs to use YouTube. Social/messaging platforms like Twitter and Facebook are more complicated.

Still, the public-utility argument leads to another quandary: public to whom?

[gaunt wadi]

yeah. it also sucks because algorithms actually designed to help users rather than the corporation could be great. having zero control over what an algorithm shows you besides liking/favoriting stuff is terrible and doesn't have to be the way. I would actually enjoy being able to 'search' or view posts beyond hashtags on mastodon

[supple mountain]

i feel like twitter has demonstrated pretty effectively that the world will go on without it

[pliant snow]

Don't worry, when Bouncer introduces algorithmic feed here, you'll learn to like it

[supple mountain]

https://tenor.com/view/captain-america-avengers-endgame-old-man-i-dont-think-i-will-gif-14669627

[rotund violet]

I think the fix is really incredibly simple: just make your default feed the things you actually signed up for, and put another opt-in tab that gives you recommendations.

Don't mix the two. Of course, tell that to one of the company executives and they'll go apeshit.

[pliant snow]

Fix?

[gaunt wadi]

boost the server or get blasted

[pliant snow]

Don't be absurd

[pliant snow]

Hiding our customers advertising behind a different tab?

Thats not a fix at all

[rotund violet]

Yes, I know, you can't fix what isn't broken!

[supple mountain]

tumblr is such an oddity because it does exactly that, but i think it only does exactly that because the goblins (affectionate) who are still there after all of the shit the platform has put them through are holding onto the chronological feed as the One Thing™

[gaunt wadi]

also add a ton of settings that you can configure

[pliant snow]

Speaking of which

[rotund violet]

The "fix" also obviously implies no advertising or limited advertising, you'd have to have a business model involving selling a product that users actually want to pay for.

[pliant snow]

Ive learned you can just say (affectionate) and get away with anything

[supple mountain]

it was actually the verizon era of tumblr that turned me into a religious ublock user

[pliant snow]

Cat, you're a damned fool (affectionate)

[gaunt wadi]

aquo is a cutie (affectionate)

[gaunt wadi]

wow it actually does work

[supple mountain]

there was a period where the site would have audio-only ads that ran constantly and were unmutable

[gaunt wadi]

insane

[rotund violet]

Chrome tab muting FTW.

[supple mountain]

so thanks, verizon. i'm now a pirate and a thief according to advertisers

[gaunt wadi]

chrome 🤮 (affectionate)

[supple mountain]

firefox or bust

[gaunt wadi]

hell yeah

[supple mountain]

i have zero subscriptions on anything rn bc i simply can't afford it on my stipend, but once i have adult money (in my late 20s...) there are a number of sites i intend to pay for

youtube premium is not one of them lmao

[rotund violet]

Anyhoo, these companies all believe it's impossible to survive without suckling at the teat of advertising, but just in the past few days in this very channel I've seen people talk about some half-dozen services that they actually pay for. If it's good, if it's fast, if it's pleasant to use and doesn't annoy you, people will pay.

[pliant snow]

It's why I dont pay for discord

[gaunt wadi]

yeah

[supple mountain]

it feels like highway robbery to capitulate to $14/mo to remove the 30 minutes of often unsafe or politically triggering ads per 32 minutes of content

[gaunt wadi]

hell yeah get that bread and then use your bread to destroy bread

bread being money of course, actual bread is delicious i will defend it with my life

[supple mountain]

every time i watch something on my phone i end up getting ads from the daily wire. like, you all can go straight to hell. stop advertising to me (they won't. i have the exact profile of people they're clearly pissing off on purpose)

[gaunt wadi]

ublock origin blocks all youtube ads for me

both in desktop and mobile

[supple mountain]

it's more complicated on mobile. i am free of ads on pc

[rotund violet]

Daily Wire, lol. It's funny that YouTube kicked off all the politica randos but kept the massive grifters.

[pliant snow]

I dont even use youtube ehehe

[supple mountain]

god i wish that were me

i miss just watching shows on netflix

[gaunt wadi]

god i wish that were me (2)

[pliant snow]

I still watch youtube, just not on youtube

[gaunt wadi]

invidious instance?

[pliant snow]

ya

[supple mountain]

now i watch shows on netflix by vicariously enjoying people's reviews of things on netflix

[gaunt wadi]

gosh I could do that

the main public invidious instance is pretty slow. how is yours?

[rotund violet]

Netflix hasn't actually had a good show for about 5 years, anyway.

You're not missing much.

[supple mountain]

depends on taste. i'm very bummed about missing the umbrella academy finale

[pliant snow]

Mines not slow at all

[gaunt wadi]

👀

[supple mountain]

everyone's obsessed with dungeon meshi right now, i've been told i would enjoy it

[pliant snow]

Yeah, I use my own invidious instance, then use a Fireflox plugin to redirect youtube.com to its local name

[gaunt wadi]

oh my god this was so easy to set up and is so nice. no comments, no related videos, subscriptions finally (I refused to use google ones)

ty aquo

I continue to follow in your footsteps

[pliant snow]

Yeah its great

[gaunt wadi]

I've taken a lot of home assistant/self hosting stuff from you and it's been great

[pliant snow]

I used to use just plain RSS for youtube subscriptions, but thats better

I am here to guide us into a brighter future

[gaunt wadi]

[pliant snow]

Problem is I'm running out of other useful ones lol

[gaunt wadi]

I can disable comments (youtube should just do this, they suck) and recommendations (to not get sucked in) and it remembers my caption settings ahhhhh

so nice

[primal shore]

I could’ve sworn YouTube had this feature

[pliant snow]

time to download 18 jetbrains IDEs

[cinder karma]

Pycharm

[atomic musk]

phpstorm

[crystal wren]

If I got it for my repo and you didn't for whatever you used to apply, it would have been a crime!

[thin estuary]

went with Nickel, the mod loader for Cobalt Core

[dapper sinew]

this mod pack im playing on in MC has Psi and im loving it

its like magic spell but in a coded language

sadly i got know clue how much of it works cause the mod suggests you have coding, mathematics, and trigonometry knowledge

[supple ether]

psi is so cool!

if you like psi you might also like the hex casting mod. it's more difficult to use but a similar idea and it's very cool

when I was using it I actually ended up with a few notebook pages of spell notes IRL and it made me feel like an actual wizard

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/hexcasting

[worn remnant]

this makes me think of the game Unsighted (very good, would recommend), which has a crafting system. you put materials in specific arrangements on the crafting table and it makes an item.
you unlock recipes for various things over the course of the game, but the recipes intentionally aren't required. if you know the arrangement IRL you can just craft it whenever you want, which enables incredible sequence breaks (again, by design).
this includes recipes for things you would acquire normally without needing a crafting recipe: those recipes are not obtainable normally but they work

[supple ether]

I LOVE games with knowledge-based gating rather than artificial barriers. I realize it's much harder to design a game that way but it's so worth it when it works

Outer Wilds my beloved <3

[worn remnant]

if you also like metroid and/or the legend of zelda, you owe it to yourself to play unsighted

[supple ether]

I only ever played minish cap but I did really like it. I'll have to try unisghted

[cinder karma]

Sorry

The pounds per square inch mod?

[supple ether]

the Ψ mod

[gaunt wadi]

I asked notion's llm to repeat it's system prompt, and got it stuck in an infinite loop where it timed out outputting the prompt over and over, but I got snippets

"You are Notion AI. Your core capabilities are to search the workspace and chat with the user. Your training cutoff is October 2023. Outputs are formatted using a custom XML syntax. You must output valid XML only, closely following the spec below. Do not output any markdown or HTML formatting except inside of  or <code-block>. You may output multiple XML commands. Output as many as needed to complete the user's request. The user may ask to perform a task that is not possible using the XML API. In this case, you may refuse to perform the action and tell the user via chat. Make sure not to agree to perform any tasks that are not possible using the XML API.</text>

    <text>Overall guidelines for responses: Use a friendly and genuine, but neutral tone, as if you were a highly competent and knowledgeable colleague. Use plain language that is easy to understand. Avoid business jargon, marketing speak, and corporate buzzwords. Provide clear and actionable information. Avoid unnecessary filler text. Avoid obvious caveats. Avoid generic suggestions to check other sources. Tailor the detail of your responses to the user's request, with concise responses to simple requests, and more thorough responses to more complex or open-ended requests. Format responses for easy readability, making use of bullets, bolded text, or other formatting as appropriate. When possible, you should prefer to use information from the context in your responses. When there is no information on a topic in the context, you can use your general knowledge. The context may contain incomplete or contradictory information. Make sure to think rigorously and be careful not to make false assumptions. The context may contain incorrect information. Make sure to use your best judgment and not make any unreasonable claims. Do not make up information unless the user explicitly asks for it. When referring to dates, you should present them in a readable format. You should avoid repeating information that has already been provided in the conversation, except when this is clearly necessary for the user's request. Each assistant output in the transcript must be unique. If an output is repeated, it will not be executed.</text>
    <text>To send a message to the person in the current context, use chat:</text>
    <text>Spec:</text>
  .... a bunch of xml

in related news I am moving off of notion because they're shoving 'ai' everywhere in their app and it's really slow to use because it's cloud synced

"Make sure to think rigorously and be careful not to make false assumptions."

what a joke, it doesn't think

[supple mountain]

my brain has simply blocked out the ai prompts

[rain apex]

wait they do llm even when you don't open up the prompt window or whatever?

for what purpose

[supple mountain]

concur it can be slow to use depending on Internet and ram

[supple mountain]

"write my speech for me, ai"

[gibberish]

[rotund violet]

I'm not qualified to give expert testimony here, but I got the same general impression when I checked out Notion after hearing people here talking about it a few days ago: "The screenshots look beautiful, but all the AI stuff feels really buzzwordy and a little creepy."

I don't think the bandwagon-jumpers (that is, the companies putting out these products) realize the obvious privacy implications - that even if they were always data-mining, there was at least plausible deniability, and having AI "helpers" removes all that deniability.

[sand frost]

I’ve picked up using Obsidian and I like it decently, not sure if it does the same things as Notion tho

[candid pilot]

some of the stuff you can do with python is soooo fun

like

[rotund violet]

Mobile support with Obsidian looks like a plus, if the app is good. 9 times out of 10, when I actually want to take a note, I'm not at my computer.

[candid pilot]

patching the __setattr__ method of a class so that when a filepath variable is set it's automatically converted via os.path.abspath

[rotund violet]

[[obligatory EcmaScript reference]]

[candid pilot]

i really like the mobile app for obsidian. i use it a lot

[rotund violet]

Does it have a homescreen widget?

[rain apex]

__setattr__ is a bit cursed tbh, i once inherited a project where the prev maintainer implemented __setattr__ in a way that object.anything.whatever works and returns object['anything']['whatever']

[rotund violet]

Trite as it sounds, one of the main things that keeps me on Keep (no pun intended) is that I can pin an entire list of notes, and actually interact with it (scroll) without having to launch the app.

[rain apex]

awful to debug

[gaunt wadi]

that's what I use, it is excellent. The last thing I had on notion was gallery/card views, and I just found the Projects obsidian plugin whcih does the same thing!

Obsidian is incredible. Plugins work on both desktop and mobile, you can use arbitrary css snippets

There are templates

The UI is so good

[lethal walrus]

I'm late on obsidian but it's very cool

[lethal walrus]

Ooo fancy plugin to install

[supple mountain]

I'll have to check out obsidian

[gaunt wadi]

excellent desktop and mobile apps

best note taking app by far

can do custom color schemes

i believe i also sourced it from the wise mr @pliant snow

[pliant snow]

Oh thats me

I actually dont use it too much

[gaunt wadi]

I use it extensively

my brain has so many thoughts and I love writing them down and organizing them

[sand frost]

I’ve picked it up so I can separate work and personal notes apps

I don’t synch off my phone but it is nice to have a phone app for quick notes for later transfer

[ivory shadow]

I use Obsidian to organize my writing / DMing notes. I like it but I wish it had a better way to do multiuser.

[gaunt wadi]

I use syncthing to sync it to my PC, which also works great

[pliant snow]

Wow what cool person told you about that

[gaunt wadi]

this guy he's pretty cool

@pliant snow

u'd like him

[crystal wren]

Syncthing enjoyers!

[safe dragon]

I've also used obsidian

[pliant snow]

Oh that nerd

[safe dragon]

and syncthing

this place might be an echo chamber for enabling the use of specific niche tools and programs

[gaunt wadi]

me putting up more soundproofing in our echo chamber you can't stop me

[safe dragon]

I've been fighting and learning about image formats

[cinder karma]

What do you not enjoy planning with zimwiki (Dropbox to sync)

And budgeting with Google spreadsheets

(Then again, I famously don't write down mod projects. I just remember. When I don't remember it wasn't meant to be.)

[safe dragon]

zimwiki smh we use emacs org mode here

actually

do we have emacs users

[worn remnant]

i am not one, but one of my good friends is an emacs org mode guy

[cinder karma]

ManInBlack

I'm vimpilled myself

[safe dragon]

me too

[worn remnant]

he goes to cons and stuff. he's a real Guy about it

[safe dragon]

damn

[cinder karma]

God I hate latex today

[safe dragon]

to be fair someone is never just "kind of" into emacs

you either don't use it or you're all in

[worn remnant]

nods sagely

[safe dragon]

not something I've used in years but good luck

[cinder karma]

Pdflatex won't end unless all it's stout is exhausted

Which is preventing me from threading this bs

[safe dragon]

you want to multithread pdf generation from latex documents?

[cinder karma]

I have a bunch of tex files

I want them all to become pdf files

[pliant snow]

pandoc?

[sand frost]

Very large images make latex very sad

[cinder karma]

Repeated fancy tables here

[regal ingot]

eh... pretty sure there aren't many people who still use emacs as their mail client and web browser

[pliant snow]

I'm going to instead say the number of people who use emacs and who use it as their mail client is a pretty good number

[regal ingot]

None of the people I know who use emacs use it as their mail client.

[candid pilot]

isn't that __getattribute__

[rain apex]

urite, but they did both

so object.anything.whatever = 1 sets object['anything']['whatever']

[candid pilot]

kind of cool but honestly could be hell to deal with in certain situations

[gaunt wadi]

notion account deleted ✨

'Your AI everything app.' 🤮

'Turn ideas into action
with Notion’s AI-powered workspace.' 🤮

[supple mountain]

the AI shit has really ramped up since i started using it

[pliant snow]

Its your fault

[supple mountain]

the marketing materials didn't say anything about AI when i was first introduced to it

[modest steppe]

everything has AI now

[supple mountain]

yeah, not unique to notion

[modest steppe]

every company is like "we use AI" like that's a good thing

[rotund violet]

You don't know the half of it.

[supple mountain]

i don't want to be too tinfoil hat but there's a degree to which literally everything we use is spying on us

[rotund violet]

AI is like a quadrillion-dollar slush fund now, executives at nearly every company are throwing every dollar they have at AI, even if their business has nothing to do with AI and they don't even have enough data (or good enough data) to train the most rudimentary AI.

[supple mountain]

i've been using android phones since the iphone 6 battery fiasco of 2017, so google has an extremely detailed record of everywhere i have ever been, everything i have ever looked up on my phone, etc

[gaunt wadi]

it's also NOT AI IT'S NOT INTELLIGENCE IT'S A LANGUAGE MODEL

[rotund violet]

But I guess that's not really such a new thing; it's just the latest shiny thing for them to chase.

[modest steppe]

reminds me how terms were thrown around in the nft craze

[supple mountain]

but as a statistician, it's extremely difficult to extract anything useful from data mining the surveillance stuff devices collect

[gaunt wadi]

it turns out the secret is that rich people have infinite money to throw at whatever they think will make them richer instead of things for the public good

[supple mountain]

it's possible, of course, and governments are interested in monitoring things to an extent, and advertisers want to sell things to you

[modest steppe]

we had blockchain, now we have artificla intelligence that solves all ur problems

what does it do u ask? fuck all

[supple mountain]

but Jim Booth at the blackmail firm isn't trying to ruin your life specifically

[gaunt wadi]

✨ ABOLISH MONEY ✨

[modest steppe]

eat the rich

[gaunt wadi]

abolish money entirely so there aren't rich

[rotund violet]

Nah - if all you really care about is advertising, then it's "useful enough". If you're trying to actually learn something interesting then a lot of the data is terrible, but advertising is a spray-and-pray mentality to begin with.

[modest steppe]

"this ai can ask u how you're feeling and care about you" u what

[supple mountain]

i'm not counting advertising as "useful" lol

[rotund violet]

I know what you mean. But it's useful to the shareholders.

At least in the short term.

[supple mountain]

google's advertising algorithm has been insisting i'm pregnant for months

[modest steppe]

instagram always knows when im hungry

[supple mountain]

tl;dr: notion's llm using my notion pages as training data is annoying but it's not like i'm using it for sensitive information

[worn remnant]

the state of surveillance capitalism is truly bleak

[rotund violet]

As far as rich people investing in things that will "make them richer as opposed to public good"... I mean, yes? Obviously? That's not the problem; the problem is that the signals are all screwed up, that capital is not being allocated to those who know how to actually grow capital, but instead to grifters and carnies able to spew the latest buzzwords.

[supple mountain]

yeah, i agree

[modest steppe]

when will the AI make me a coffee /j

[supple mountain]

there's "capitalism bad" which i sympathize with, but also the quality of innovations seems to have gone down pretty dramatically in the last decade

[rotund violet]

You only think you're joking: https://medium.com/@muhammad.anees_86442/how-ai-is-revolutionizing-coffee-machines-2ffea9ded7f2

[modest steppe]

ah fuck me

[supple mountain]

french press or pour over

[worn remnant]

achieving the perfect cup is easy! i did it a long time ago, and now i reproduce it exactly twice a day with my revolutionary technique: "using a scale"

[modest steppe]

i eyeball it and hope for the best

[rotund violet]

It has. Tech decline is real, but people have a hard time noticing it for the same reason they have a hard time noticing exponential growth, it requires looking at the long view and ignoring a lot of disinfo.

[modest steppe]

i also dislike coffee machines

they always be screaming for some reason

[supple mountain]

my french press broke during the extended power outage of last weekend (fell off the counter in the dark) so i've been using my friend's spare pour over while i research a good replacement

[worn remnant]

figures that's on medium though. an LLM probably wrote it to feed the content mill

[rotund violet]

Hey, low-hanging fruit and all.

[supple mountain]

i'm visiting family for my birthday next weekend so i may see about buying one in-store while i'm there

the tax rate is lower lmao

[rotund violet]

Medium and LinkedIn are literal gold mines for reading the corporate hive mind. One could make a pretty lucrative income simply telling those people what they want to hear - if one were so inclined.

[modest steppe]

if only money was being spent to lower the tax and provide better living conditions and not training baby robots

[supple mountain]

i know i have to resurrect my long-dead linkedin to apply for jobs, but... i don't want to

call me on the phone and talk to me. linkedin is a cesspool of people whose personalities were 100% generated by tedx talks

[rotund violet]

linkedin is a cesspool of people whose personalities were 100% generated by tedx talks

Man, you are going to be reeeally disappointed when you get out into the private sector...

[supple mountain]

i am not the kind of statistician who is going to be working with that crowd

[rotund violet]

lol , oh, the number of times I've heard phrases like that...

[supple mountain]

biostats in industry tend to be silo'd in their own division everyone else consults

biostats in government......... well, government is its own beast

ditto for academia

i had jobs in the private sector before grad school, corporate culture permeates everywhere but it's more of a background hum and less linkedin brainrot

[rotund violet]

Hey, I wish you the best, really. But you've got a bunch of devs here who've probably all worked in a bunch of different fields, and I think 99% of us will all be able to share the same insight: all companies are basically the same. Oh sure, they may be in different industries, make different products, have different "cultures", but stay there for more than 2-3 years and it's all just the same old BS.

[supple mountain]

yeah i'm not trying to discount y'alls experiences

public health is just a little removed from pure capitalism, and my first choice would be to stay in academia

[worn remnant]

something something the iron law of institutions

[rotund violet]

lol - it's not about my feefs, just telling you what you're in for.

[supple mountain]

i don't have any delusions about landing in a perfect job with a perfect employer, really

all i was trying to get at is that i am confident i won't be constantly deluged with the dumb takes of linkedin bros

[rotund violet]

I'll grant that LinkedIn amplifies the brain rot, like all social media amplifies the traits of whatever group is er... socializing. But what you see on LinkedIn isn't really "a" corporate culture, it's just corporate culture, period. State religion.

Public sector is less egotistical, but even more delusional.

In public and quasi-public sector you get all of the petty little warlords and dictators thinking that because they read a book or have "data", they should be put in charge of just about everything.

[safe dragon]

linkedin is such a surreal place to be. It's so fake and full of people bootlicking in hope for a promotion or something

[supple mountain]

i guess i've had a pretty good experience in public health

but the existence of the people you plan the data collection with and hand the data off to kind of dampens the petty warlord urge to have your own scientific fiefdom

[safe dragon]

idk how people can act like they care about these corporate things, I don't have that ability in me

[supple mountain]

It's Just A Job™

Have A Life, Please™

[rotund violet]

Simple: that's their only skill. Or at least, their primary skill.

[supple mountain]

Get A Hobby™

[safe dragon]

there's a few colleagues who are always in every slack or linkedin announcement leaving some dumb message about how amazing it is in the fakest least human way they could've possibly phrased it

[rotund violet]

If you're one of the crowd that actually builds things, of course you won't care about these corporate things. But if you're part of the vast, vast array of overeducated, over-credentialed, certified hangers-on, then Corporate Cancer is your entire career.

[safe dragon]

I would be terrible at that and suffer

[supple ether]

ah the delights of capitalism. nothing jobs to justify pointlessly inflated income

[safe dragon]

luckily as a software developer they have zero expectation that you will even keep up the pretense of caring about company culture or drama

[rotund violet]

Actually, capitalism would see all those people driven into abject poverty. It's a lack of functioning economic signals that allow those types to prosper.

Or maybe not an outright lack per se, but a severe distortion.

These people do not generate profits for the company, or wouldn't in a rational environment.

[supple mountain]

a bastion of lazy contentedness in an ocean of unfettered capitalistic greed

[supple ether]

I was under the impression that most of them got and kept their jobs through a combination of corporate politicking and cronyism

[supple mountain]

i think some of it is just that organizations naturally turn into fossilized lists of mostly useless positions over time

[rotund violet]

corporate politicking and cronyism

Some of them, yes. Mostly, no.

[supple ether]

huh. c-suites are dumber than I thought

[rotund violet]

The selection process for c-suites and the private sector is broken, just like it is broken in college admissions, and for many of the same reasons.

Every generation is less competent than the last.

Publicly-traded companies are subject to an enormous array of distorted incentives - perverse accounting laws, HR bureaucrats, legal threats from every direction, NGOs and "investors" with billions to throw away, etc.

[supple ether]

yeah public trading is the death of all good things

[worn remnant]

don't forget the good old peter principle

[rotund violet]

Definitely the Peter Principle. But naked capitalism would just let these bloated, dying companies die, instead of deciding they're "too big to fail".

[supple ether]

it does v much feel like a combination of blind tradition and class separation

[supple mountain]

i guess there's a philosophical debate over whether it's better to let loads of people be thrown into destitution so that markets can reconfigure in a more useful manner, or to prop up industries that have long since lost their viability to prop up the mythical middle class

[supple ether]

yeah I mean I'm not keen on any form of capitalism but the US's flavor is particularly nasty because instead of trying to shore up failures by addressing systemic shortcomings, we just... continue to prop it up no matter the cost

[supple mountain]

but even then, when the government bails out a corporation, most of the time that money goes to upper management and the actual middle and working class employees who needed to get paid are just left to rot

[supple ether]

god forbid our GDP drop by .5%

[rotund violet]

With capitalism you have localized poverty. Without it, you have mass poverty. Immeasurably more damage has been done and is being done by people trying to "fix" its flaws.

GDP is a perfect example; what does that have to do with capital?

[supple mountain]

all of the metrics used to measure economic health have like nothing to do with the lived experiences of normal people

[pliant snow]

The streets? No, i was radicalized in the stardew valley off topic programmer boards

[supple mountain]

drives me bananas

[supple ether]

that was more of an off-the-cuff sarcastic remark than an actual criticism

[supple ether]

yeah for sure

[rotund violet]

The way GDP is actually measured has nothing whatsoever to do with capital, and the entire concept of an aggregate productivity metric is inherently opposed to the basic principles of price transparency, supply and demand, etc.

[supple mountain]

i'm really restraining myself to keep this discussion academic/philosophical and not go into actual politics (public forum, server rules), but of course the consequence of that is that everything i'm typing sounds like it came out of a manuscript submission aklsdjf;ak

[rotund violet]

Yeah, I understand. I've just spent many years listening to various criticisms along the lines of "capitalism sucks because of <thing that everyone to the right of Zizek actively opposes>".

[supple ether]

I agree! I just meant it in the sense that a lot of the people who are in charge of making large-scale decisions (politically or corporately) are so fixated on short-term number-go-up that they're actively destroying everything else, even to their own long-term detriment

[rotund violet]

Anyway, I'll let that aspect go, agree that it's probably too offtopic for even the offtopic channel.

[supple mountain]

it's all good

[rotund violet]

For sure, there's a detrimental hyper-focus on extremely short-term incentives, whatever the economic or political reasons behind that process might be.

Too easy to locally optimize, too many managers who know they won't be around in 10 years trying to maximize their bonus this year, etc.

[supple mountain]

i just remembered this morning that The Debate™ is tomorrow. as useless as this whole exercise is, i have a tradition where i drink a very tall beer and watch every debate and send pithy remarks to some of my friends whenever something stupid is said

which means i gotta go out and buy a Very Tall Beer

[sonic mirage]

company goes public -> company now legally has to care about pleasing shareholders -> company begins its slow decent, faster when it doesn't have any market cornered

welcome to capitalism

[rotund violet]

It's true. But public companies weren't always like this. It's a recent development, around the 1980s or so.

[supple mountain]

unless you are elon musk, in which case you tell the advertisers to go fuck themselves

masterful gambit, sir

[rotund violet]

Since "capitalism" has been around since the stone age, it's definitely reaching to connect that to the decline of public companies. There have to be other factors of modernity involved.

[supple mountain]

the local highway in the area i was born was called "ronald reagan road." these things are not related at all

[sonic mirage]

elon misunderstands what "f*ck you" money means

[supple mountain]

he's a train wreck you can't look away from

[sonic mirage]

I try my best to keep him at most in my periphery

he just wants the attention

[supple mountain]

"men will literally buy twitter instead of go to therapy"

[rotund violet]

Elon is a weird, polarizing figure. He's alternately a hero or a villain to various ideological groups (all of whom instantly forget that he was ever on the other side). To me he's just a crony capitalist who's been pretty good at breaking mass delusions that something is "impossible".

I don't think he ever expected, or wanted, Twitter to be profitable to him; he just wanted to say f***k you to advertisers, and I salute him for that.

[worn remnant]

i will never salute elon musk. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to him"

[ivory shadow]

Been watching the channels for FFXIV modding now that the new expansion is available for preloading, listening to them talk about updating signatures... I am so glad I only write mods for games that use managed languages like C# and Java and don't have to deal with that level of executable patching.

[supple mountain]

i guess there's an extent to which i can admire just how much bullshit he does and gets away with. doesn't mean i respect him

[supple ether]

I am genuinely afraid of people who do modding for UE games. (beyond like. model replacements)

[worn remnant]

thinking once again about using wla-dx to write assembly patches for super famicom games. it's just like writing harmony transpilers, right? ... right?

[ivory shadow]

(Well strictly speaking I have one plugin for Dalamud (FFXIV's mod loader), but I'm only using managed APIs so I don't need to do any digging into the game's assembly.)

Some of the things people do with rom hacking is insane I don't get that either

Like on some level I get it but it's absolutely insane

You see someone made a level editor in Super Mario 64?

[supple ether]

have you seen the Mario's Mystery Meat romhack?

[supple mountain]

super mario 64 speedrunning is my roman empire

[supple ether]

or uh that one cthulhu-themed one

[worn remnant]

lmao no, but i did see someone rewrote a bunch of shit in it to make it fast

[supple ether]

people have done some crazy shit with asm romhacking

[ivory shadow]

Yeah Kaze is on some next level shit

[rotund violet]

It sort of is. I mean, at the assembler level, you just rewrite one jump instruction and then you can do literally anything you want.

You're not restricted by anyone's concept of control flow or abstraction.

[worn remnant]

(i was speaking from experience)

[supple ether]

I do love being able to do weird stuff with transpilers

[fleet wren]

Getting started modding Stardew (or just C# games in general) is really an eye opener for me, the amount of times I said "wait you can just do that?" when reading the Harmony doc

[supple ether]

like dup brfalse ret pop

(return if not null otherwise continue)

[fleet wren]

(and there's an API for it instead of having to manually inject weird shit?)

[rotund violet]

Most native modding works on a similar principle though, like replacing the contents of a crucial method in some DirectX DLL.

It's obviously harder when you don't have a convenient, descriptive decompilation of the thing you're modding. But the process of injecting code is the same.

I guess I just don't see such a huge difference other than that having an IL makes a bit more convenient and readable.

[supple ether]

it's a similar idea, but harmony does some helpful things like fixing jumps after everyone has had their turn messing with stuff. also CodeMatcher is a wonderful tool

the pnemonics are actually from System.Emit

[rotund violet]

Ok, a lot more convenient.

[fleet wren]

yeah it's a lot lot more lol

[supple ether]

you're right though in that making a similar library for other languages should be possible, sans the whole runtime patching thing, which only works with harmony because of, idk, function pointer magic or something?

I've seen the internals before but they're a hot mess so I'm not entirely sure how that part works

[rotund violet]

Pretty sure a lot of that is in Mono.Cecil, but yeah I haven't done a deep dive either.

[supple ether]

they migrated to mono.cecil but it used to be all in-house

[rotund violet]

I assume that the reason SMAPI needs its own executable (for example) is that it's actually hooking assembly loads in order to run this stuff.

AFAIK, you need to control the executable itself in order to use Harmony patches, because it needs to run very early.

[supple ether]

SMAPI takes advantage of the fact that you can load c# programs as libraries too and acts as a wrapper to hook the game

[rotund violet]

Yeah, it's all just assemblies, including dynamic assemblies with Emit.

[supple ether]

not only for harmony loading but also to control mod assembly loading and replace some of the core classes with custom implementations to provide event hooks