king mierdas

I’ve heard a lot of nicknames for that man, but that one fits so perfectly, even going all the way back to his casino empire days.

Was playing Civ6 the other day and can confirm: wine is a luxury resource.

mocktails and marijuana

I’m liking this as a potential album name.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Take solar, for example. On the one hand, you could argue that if your primary goal is to generate heat, you might as well use a solar thermal plant with lots of focusing mirrors over photovoltaics. The conversion to electricity first would inevitably be far less efficient.

On the other hand, if you’ve got your PV plants for electricity already but they are overproducing at times, there is the question of what to do with the excess power, and using it to run heat pumps may actually be a pretty efficient application at the point?

I paid a visit to Green Bank WV once out of an interest in astronomy. The giant radio telescopes are truly a sight to behold!

Less impressive were the people camped out nearby who saw the place as the promised land where they could cast off their tinfoil hats in the cellular-banned zone surrounding the complex.

There were breaking changes between C and C++ (and some divergent evolution since the initial split) as well as breaking changes between different releases of C++ itself. I am not saying these never happened, but the powers that be controlling the standard have worked hard to minimize these for better or worse.

If I took one of my earliest ANSI C programs from the 80s and ran it through a C++23 compiler, I would probably need to remove a bunch of register statements and maybe check if an assumption of 16-bit int is going to land me in some trouble, but otherwise, I think it would build as long as it’s not linking in any 3rd party libraries.

The thing about human-induced warming is that it has a rather pronounced effect at night when the planet is trying to shed the heat built up over the day and no longer can as effectively.

I am not a botanist, but I wonder if desert plants are adapted to take advantage of the cool desert nights to recover from the intense daytime heat? If so, I could see where they would be in trouble now.

I think the thing with C++ is they have tried to maintain backward compatibility from Day 1. You can take a C++ program from the 80s (or heck, even a straight up C program), and there’s a good chance it will compile as-is, which is rather astonishing considering modern C++ feels like a different language.

But I think this is what leads to a lot of the complexity as it stands? By contrast, I started Python in the Python 2 era, and when they switched to 3, I was like “Wow, did they just break hello world?” It’s a different philosophy and has its trade-offs. By reinventing itself, it can get rid of the legacy cruft that never worked well or required hacky workarounds, but old code will not simply run under the new interpreter. You have to hope your migration tools are up to the task.

I suppose the same could be said on the lemmy side. There’s no reason someone couldn’t write a lemmy app that lets you do what an RSS client does in terms of only showing content from a selected subgroup of communities.

You raise a good point that it would be nice to have more control over which group of communities you are drawing from at a given time. (Is there a way to group subscriptions and switch between them?) It’s a bit disconcerting to see 5 tech headlines and then suddenly something about the war in Ukraine or whatever. It jars my train of thought. With an RSS client, you can group feeds however you want.

That said, my experience with RSS readers is not quite so idyllic. In the end, rather than having nicely partitioned feed groups by topic, I wind up having to separate the ones that produce content frequently but with a poor signal-to-noise from those that post once in awhile but are generally worth your time. With something like lemmy, people are helping you do the work of finding the more interesting content from that site that posts every 10 minutes.

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Anyways, did I miss anything?

I think the big problem in link aggregation is how to sort/prioritize content for the end user. RSS does not provide a way to do this, nor should it as far as I’m concerned. It should simply be about public content being tagged in a standardized way for any app to come along and organize it using whatever algorithm.

A simple RSS reader has the problem that the more prolific sites will tend to flood your feed and make it tedious to scroll through miles of links. Commercial news portals try to learn your tastes through some sort of machine learning algorithm and direct content accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but tends to build echo chambers around people that reinforce their biases, and that hasn’t done a lot of good for the world to put it mildly.

The lemmy approach is to use one of a number of sorting algorithms built atop a crowd-sourced voting model. It may not be perfect, but I prefer it to being psychoanalyzed by an AI.

Btw there was a post from about a month ago where someone was offering to make any RSS feed into a community. I’ve subscribed to a few of them and it’s actually pretty awesome.

This reminds me of when I had to roll my own dynamic memory allocator for an obscure platform. (Something I never want to do again!) I stuck metadata in the negative space just before the returned pointer like you say. In my case, it was complicated by the fact that you had to worry about the memory alignment of the returned pointer to make sure it works with SIMD and all that. Ugh. But I guess with strings (or at least 8-bit-encoded strings), alignment should not be an issue.

Oh, so you’re talking about text representation in an editor or something along those lines? That’s kind of a separate problem isn’t it?

At the lowest level though, I suppose you still need to consider whether to use null-terminated segments. I think I’d still be going length + data, though I wouldn’t worry about packing down the length representation like with serialization formats. Your code will need to be highly cognizant of the length of strings and managing dynamic memory allocation all over the place, so it’s good to have those lengths quickly accessible at all times.

Better in what sense? I put some thought into this when designing an object serialization library modelled like a binary JSON.

When it got to string-encoding, I had to decide whether to go null-terminated vs length + data? The former is very space-efficient, particularly when you have a huge number of short strings. And let’s face it, that’s a common enough scenario. But it’s nice to have the length beforehand when you are parsing the string out of a stream.

What I did in the end was come up with a variable-length integer encoding that somewhat resembles what they do in UTF-8. It means for strings < 128 chrs, the length is a single byte. Longer than that and more bytes get used as necessary.

Well, I managed to join a hispanic choir at a Portuguese church and I must say we’re having a blast, language barriers notwithstanding. I am of neither ethnicity but I just play violin so it doesn’t matter. And man, latino hymns rock!

Of course I don’t understand a thing the priest is saying. This week I thought hang on, I’ll just run Google Translate as he’s speaking. But I think there’s a problem. It could be he’s speaking Spanish with a thick Portuguese accent and it wasn’t coming out right? Unless he was actually saying:

…And sushi are big carts of yesterday and today as farms catalyzed for purposes. He is not saying about Jesus…

I didn’t even have a color monitor :'( I would’ve been jealous of yours.

I almost quit programming too when my brother walked in one day as I was feverishly typing. “What? You’re programming basic? That’s for losers.” Then he whips up a ski slalom game in a single incomprehensible line of apl and I was like wtaf?

Today I’m a professional dev and my bro is a perl hacker. I still can’t understand a line of his code.

To me, it seems the right have been getting ever more extreme in the ugliest ways imaginable. The left, then, has to decide whether to become more inclusive of those who lean somewhat right but are feeling alienated at this point. Do they take in the refugees, or do they stick to their principles and leave a void in the middle? In short, it’s an identity crisis and people are taking sides.

As a Canadian, I look at US politics and see only a centrist and right party. In some ways, the Democratic Party is further right than our Conservative Party, though the latter would certainly want to change that if we let them. There are some Democrats who are uncompromisingly left like say Bernie Sanders, but they are in the minority.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if they made a version that just stays in one age indefinitely and lets you explore it in an open world sort of way?

Like take Minecraft. I played that for years without even knowing there is an end game, and it came as something of a shock when someone told me. You can finish Minecraft?!?

But then I was like meh, leave me alone. I’m trying to build Noah’s Ark with a functioning village on top and a crystal waterfall down to the animal sanctuary below. And I still haven’t completed the Mars colony. Wonder how the pandas are doing over there?

I remember magazines from the 80s where you could find code in BASIC for some little game. It’s how I learned how to program as a kid.