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addie

@ addie @feddit.uk

Posts
1
Comments
248
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Ocasio-Cortez Must Pay Another $2,700 for Met Gala Dress

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  • Well, at least she looks good in it.

    Having hired suits and whatnot before to go to weddings, I'm not quite seeing the logic here. $19k "tax the rich" dress seems a bit of a tasteless disconnect between medium and message, but renting it for $1k doesn't seem crazy. Committee "did their own research" and thought $3k would be more appropriate, when most attendees pay nothing at all? Surely getting her fee refunded would be more in-line?

  • Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold

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  • If we had the technology to freely form diamond, then it's exceptionally hard, has incredible chemical resistance, among the very best thermal conductivities of any material, and it isn't particularly heavy.

    Being able to coat the inside of chemical vessels and pipes with diamond would hugely increase their lifespan, a heat exchanger made out of it would be incredible. Great for food processing, since you'd be able to clean it easily; great for abrasive or highly acid / alkili materials that corrode everything else. Probably awesome as a base layer for semi-conductors, as it would be great for heat dissipation.

    But we are probably talking about nanotechnology to lay it down in sheets, which we don't have (yet).

  • Classical music is so fucking rude

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  • Ritardando = slowing down, it's a tempo notation.

    pp = pianissimo (very soft), mf = mezzoforte (medium strong). One of my old conductors would say "it's not about volume, it's about feeling", so intensity is a good word, although it often refers to volume. One of the main jobs of the conductor is making sure the music is interpreted in a way that fits the venue; pianissimo can be quite loud (but 'soft') in a big auditorium.

    Die doesn't mean anything - at least, not too me as a violinist. Might just be a percussion instruction to let the sound die away, rather than muffling it.

  • McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’

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  • Years, sadly.

  • 'Technofascist military fantasy': Spotify faces boycott calls over CEO’s investment in AI military startup

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  • Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There's a lesson to be learned somewhere.

    Qobuz' recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify's slop.

  • Home invader

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  • Ah, but that is my cat. We call him Tux, our neighbours called him Boots. We've a 'street whatsapp' channel for arguing over the bins and getting to the bottom of who's cat has rocked up in who's house. Number of times I've seen a familiar moggy on an unfamiliar bedspread.

    Cats, man. You might think you own them, but if anything, you own them for a while.

  • UK’s Porn Providers Agree to Age Checks by July 25; Aylo, Owner of Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, Will Add Age Assurance Checks.

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  • So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent...

  • Trump Mobile launches $47 service and a gold phone

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  • You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It's also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are 'made in USA' and 'open-source drivers' worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It's not really 'made in USA' either - it's a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)

    I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.

  • SSSSSEEEEEXXXXXXYYYYY

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  • Nothing to me says 'sexy' quite like your grandad and your great-grandad being the same guy, or your (great * 5)-grandmother / grandfather being one man and woman, when most people have that responsibility spread between 64 people.

    Close family. Must have made Christmas easy - having the in-laws round isn't so bad when they're your own blood relatives too.

  • Prophecy

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  • Cats develop bigger cheeks under the influence of testosterone. So I'm assuming that lad struggles to walk normally due to the enormous pom-poms he's got hanging off the back, because his face is ROUND.

  • Python needs an actual default function

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  • Enough of that crazy talk - plainly WheeledDeviceServiceFactoryBeanImpl is where the dependency injection annotations are placed. If you can decide what the code does without stepping through it with a debugger, and any backtrace doesn't have at least two hundred lines of Spring boot, then plainly it isn't enterprise enough.

    Fair enough, though. You can write stupid overly-abstract shit in any language, but Java does encourage it.

  • Python needs an actual default function

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  • Succinctly and well put.

  • Python needs an actual default function

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  • Well now. My primary exposure to Go would be using it to take first place in my company's 'Advent of Code' several years ago, in order to see what it was like, after which I've been pleased never to have to use it again. Some of our teams have used it to provide microservices - REST APIs that do database queries, some lightweight logic, and conversion to and from JSON - and my experience of working with that is that they've inexplicably managed to scatter all the logic among dozens of files, for what might be done with 80 lines of Python. I suspect the problem in that case is the developers, though.

    It has some good aspects - I like how easy it is to do a static build that can be deployed in a container.

    The actual language itself I find fairly abominable. The lack of exceptions means that error handling is all through everything, and not necessarily any better than other modern languages. The lack of overloads means that you'll have multiple definitions of eg. Math.min cluttering things up. I don't think the container classes are particularly good. The implementation of pointers seems solely implemented to let you have null pointer exceptions, it's a pointless wart.

    If what you're wanting to code is the kind of thing that Google do, in the exact same way that Google do it, and you have a team of hipsters who all know how it works, then it may be a fine choice. Otherwise I would probably recommend using something else.

  • Python needs an actual default function

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  • I feel that Python is a bit of a 'Microsoft Word' of languages. Your own scripts are obviously completely fine, using a sensible and pragmatic selection of the language features in a robust fashion, but everyone else's are absurd collections of hacks that fall to pieces at the first modification.

    To an extent, 'other people's C++ / Bash scripts' have the same problem. I'm usually okay with 'other people's Java', which to me is one of the big selling points of the language - the slight wordiness and lack of 'really stupid shit' makes collaboration easier.

    Now, a Python script that's more than about two pages long? That makes me question its utility. The 'duck typing' everywhere makes any code that you can't 'keep in your head' very difficult to reason about.

  • They're trying to normalize calling vibe coding a "programming paradigm," don't let them.

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  • Frezik has a good answer for SQL.

    In theory, Ansible should be used for creating 'playbooks' listing the packages and configuration files which are present on a server or collection of servers, and then 'playing the playbook' arranges it so that those servers exist and are configured as you specified. You shouldn't really care how that is achieved; it is declarative.

    However, in practice it has input, output, loops, conditional branching, and the ability to execute subtasks recursively. (In fact, it can quite difficult to stop people from using those features, since 'declarative' doesn't necessarily come easily to everyone, and it makes for very messy config.) I think those are all the features required for Turing equivalence?

    Being able to deploy a whole fleet of servers in a very straightfoward way comes as close to the 'infinite memory' requirement as any programming language can get, although you do need basically infinite money to do that on a cloud service.

  • They're trying to normalize calling vibe coding a "programming paradigm," don't let them.

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  • No love for the 'declarative' programming paradigm? You can actually do some useful work with SQL or Ansible...

  • Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails

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  • The plural of faux pas is also faux pas, because you know, French. But this is less one false step in the dance, than doing entirely the wrong dance altogether.

  • Graphics are now BANNED

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  • Although you should give the egg to the thief (he can open it and you can't) and then kill him and retrieve it from his dead body later, otherwise you can't win the game. Obviously.

  • xkcd #3085: About 20 Pounds

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  • Well, we know that our understanding of physics isn't correct - galaxies rotate faster than we think they ought to based on the amount of matter that we think is in them based on our theories of gravity and the evolution of the universe.

    The "simplest" explanation is that there's a particle that only interacts gravitationally, and has no other interaction with matter, hence being dark. Gravity might work differently on galactic scales, although it's hard to make that maths work; or neutrinos (which are also 'dark') don't have the gravitational interaction that we expect from theory.

    Simple answer is that we don't know, and "dark matter" is the useful placeholder term until we work it out. Could be a lot of things, although there's a lot of things that we know it isn't.

    Wikipedia has a big list of all the things that don't fit our current model, and which a proper theory of everything would have to explain. Dark matter ticks all the boxes, whereas other theories work for one or two but can't explain the rest.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter