We don't take enough advantage of old English.
Biweekly:
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So there's this aspect of programming languages I've noticed (and is what irritates me the most about using them), but I don't have a name for it. I'm wondering if anyone has studied it formally.
It's easiest to give a concrete example rather than try to generalize it. In Python, named arguments can be passed directly(in="the", function="arguments", like="this"). But you can also pass them as a dictionary: directly(**args).
When you want to flip between those two representations, it's a little non-trivial because the representation for function arguments and for a literal dictionary are pretty distant from each other. Here's the steps:
I find that, in general, some languages are more susceptible to this phenomenon and some less. Python and JavaScript are mostly pretty good most of the time. LISP is okay (having to move right parens around to make all the scopes work is irritating; there are very good IDE accelerators for it, but I'm considering this issue at the language-syntax level, not the language-with-tooling level). I haven't used enough Rust to know, but I bet having to update lifetime constraints is a chore. C++ is easily the worst offender I've used (oh, you want to templatize that function? It looks entirely different now, and you'll be making changes across the .h and .cc file. Are you sure you wouldn't rather embrace the life of a humble dairy farmer?)
Is there a term for this?
[#]programminglanguages #Python #cplusplus
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I suspect I'm about to discover that my use of emacs is broken into two eras: the era before I knew avy existed and the era after.
[#]emacs #avy
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(People who track emotional and household labor differences between men and women can put this in the tally box: I'm past 40 and this is literally the first time I've run a self-clean cycle on an oven, if you're wondering why I didn't know what the steps were. They don't need self-clean cycles when your idea of cooking is "spaghetti goes in this pot" so you never use them.
Parents, we let the vampires shut down all the Home Ec classes. Teach your kids how to maintain a kitchen. Their future SOs and spouses will thank you.)
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Me: "Hey, work-from-home day, I may as well self-clean the oven. Just empty all the trays out and push the button... Here we go."
Me later: "Hm. What's that smell. Hey Google, is there anything else to do when self-cleaning an oven?"
The Internet: "Step 1: Make sure the kitchen is well-ventilated..."
Me: ".... oooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh."
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While having the media moguls aligned in his camp is dangerous, Trump lacks something that both Hitler and Mussolini had: full authority over the information channels. In their time, radio and television were young, and it was quite feasible to apply violence to the handful of outlets that would inform most people of the world they couldn't see in front of their faces.
That's much harder here. The proliferation of media means the hands that seek to grab all of it must be much, much larger. And America is not 1940s Germany in some key ways: even if the First Amendment turns out to be a mass-hallucination with no real power, individual states control their own presses and are not inclined to toe the line of Washington.
Given this, the new fascists seek to jam the channels instead of controlling them: if they can fill the media they don't own with outrage, anger, argument, and noise, signal will drown there and they have some hope of being the "voice of reason" that most people will turn to, simply because they're clear enough to understand.
We have some agency in not letting this happen.
Mastodon, and how we choose to use it, is part of that agency.
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There's a lot about dog biology I do not know.
We have three dogs. Same breed. Two are even siblings. Identical lifestyles. Identical diets. I'm pretty much running a control-free trial of dogs here.
One of the three, the younger sibling, on the same diet as the other two, has the smelliest farts. Like: cannot clearly describe. One part wild garlic and one part skunk (and no, he's not getting into any wild garlic outside, I checked).
WTF is up with that? How do I put the exact same ingredients into the chemistry of three dogs' stomachs and get such wildly different outputs?
[#]dog #diet #wtf
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Something I never noticed in the history of fascism in Europe that is all too apparent now that we're back in this bullshit...
Fascist leadership ends up disconnected from reality. Fast.
Trump is ranting about things in California that did. Not. Happen. Fortunately for America, we're still decentralized enough (for now) that he gets pushback from other loci of authority with control over the channels of communication that can call him out on his shit, but it's really worth looking at this and seeing it for what it is: a man who, if he lacked the title and comforts of his office, is just a raving lunatic misinterpreting information to make himself the hero of a story he's telling himself (that a critical mass of us voted to be compelled to listen to).
Hitler had syphilis and it went to his brain. Mussolini may have too. It was the people around them, translating that madness into authority and action, that did the real damage. Without them, they'd have been addled pathetic men talking to themselves.
If anything, this observation reframes and emphasizes the culpability of those that serve the throne in those stories. The evil men at the top were part of the problem, but the cowards beneath them who hid behind deference to insanity were monsters too.
Sometimes, a monster comes cringing and moaning, claiming they're powerless while they devour you.
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Anyone have a favorite cheap, low power x86_64 "wall wart" style computer they like with 2GB RAM?
I have many raspi boards sitting around the house but I want to start using a system that requires x86_64 and I'd rather not emulate.
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I've noticed a weird corner-case in my psychology that I don't have a name for, but it's definitely there.
Picked up a loaner car from my mechanic because they have my car in to change the oil (side-note: thanks folks! The fact yinz offer a loaner car is huge). On the loaner contract, they highlighted a part where I had to bring a receipt proving I'd filled the gas tank.
This is new, so I asked what's up: normally I just bring the car back with the tank full. I even top it off for them because, hey, it's like three spare bucks for me and it saves someone on the staff a trip out in the cold.
Boss tells me the needle sticks a bit, so the receipt is to make sure it got filled. "Even if it's just fifty cents," he says, "need the receipt." Otherwise, they charge a flat $20 for a courtesy fill.
Now, my normal process is: drive over, fill the tank at the station two minutes from their garage, drop it off. But now that a receipt is involved? I'm inclined to fill it two minutes from my office, drive a half-hour to their garage and drop it off... Just so there's less actual gas in the tank.
I don't know why I'm like this. But when someone replaces a reasonable system between two rational actors with a contract and rules, it's like part of my brain flips a switch and goes "Oh. There are rules now. That must mean this is a game. And I intend to win."
[#]IATA #WhyAmILikeThis
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Oh, interesting.
Google has chosen to no longer be my search engine of choice.
So, what are people's favorite search engines these days?
[#]google #emacs
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At this point, my shader-based fire effect is really underperforming on raspberry pi: low framerate and screen tearing. I could spend hours debugging graphics drivers and messing with settings.
... Or I could run it on the big beefy gaming rig, record five minutes of video with a screen capture tool, and let VLC be incomprehensible magic.
I kinda like that plan!
[#]vlc
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Meanwhile, I try running VLC from the command line and It Just Works. Including "oh, your not even running an X session? Let's just go ahead and grab the video hardware directly, there we go." Tear-free fullscreen video on an HDMI TV running an MP4.
I swear, those coneheads aren't even in the same league as everyone else. #vlc #love
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When I read about students, parents, and teachers having their PII stolen in the PowerSchool data breach, I'm reminded of the letter my high-school employer had to send me disclosing that my tax information was stolen... Form a palette of paper. As in, crooks broke into a warehouse and made off with the federally-mandated-auditable records from two decades ago.
Your data is not secure. It's not secure because it's not securable.
[#]powerschoolhack
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Anyone have any tips on setting up a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu as a display kiosk?
I'm making a virtual fireplace and want a raspi to just display a video on loop. I don't have any experience interacting with the graphics layer outside the window manager; not sure how to set it up so that I could ssh into the machine, run a command line app, and have the result of that be one app taking over the whole screen and displaying its output.
Any suggestions welcome! #ubuntu #linux
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Huh, so that's what a burst pipe looks like.
We got lucky. When they installed this pipe they put a cut off right next to the mains that isolates this pipe alone, so we don't have a plumbing emergency, we have a plumbing inconvenience.
And surprisingly, I don't even think it's weather related. It looks like they joined two pipes of two different types of metal and they corrodeed each other.
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Everytime I typo "alignment as "aligment" and my brain interjects "ALIGMENT MY BALLS!!!"
... when does one's brain stop being five?
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"And this is our Netrunner. She's got preem software and a top-of-the-line cyberduck."
"Nova. This op should... Wait, what did you say?"
[#]cyberpunk #hack #NoTheOtherKindOfHack
https://hackaday.io/project/171269-cyberdck-a-circuitpython-anatidae
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I should get around to writing a blog post about privacy, the cloud, and why corporations keep pissing people off by doing default opt-in on data analysis features that people find creepy.
The thumbnail sketch is something like:
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Finally got hibernation working on my Thinkpad running Ubuntu 22.04.3. This guide provided all the missing pieces.
As a side-note... I know I'm just spitting in the wind, but perhaps a day might come when getting table-stakes features like "You can walk away from your laptop and it won't stay on and drain your battery to death" doesn't require copying two magic numbers from two programs, a trip to the GRUB config file, and accepting the big "If you do this wrong you may render your computer unbootable" warnings. Or I guess I could just spend money on an OS that doesn't require this rain-dance... But damned if I don't love the XMonad tiling window manager and it only works on this OS!
[#]Ubuntu #Linux #ThisIsTheYearOfLinuxOnTheDesktop
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text/gemini
