• 2 Posts
  • 432 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@sopuli.xyzwhy
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    4 days ago

    Feminine is what the Académie settled on, months after everyone settled on Masculine.

    That institution holds some normative power with other institutions (e.g. some media outlets) but has utterly failed to impose its outdated and reactionary outlook to anyone but other reactionaries. They’re constantly coming out with revisions for words that reached common parlance years earlier.

    So common usage is Le covid. If someone used the feminine I’d have to assume they unironically use the word “Wokisme”, because only these kinds of people actually think that the Académie is worth listening to.


  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@sopuli.xyzwhy
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    4 days ago
    • Dick (bite) = Feminine
    • Cunt (con) = Masculine

    My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.

    That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).


  • Tell me you live in NA without telling me you live in NA.

    Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary, and not only does daylight last less than 8 hours but thanks to the coastal climate it’s not abnormal to only get single digit hours of sunlight per month (5/7th of which are when we’re stuck in an office). Rest of the time is either rainy or cloudy, neither of which is useful to find stray UVB. London has basically the same climate.

    In the winter it’s not even useful to commute by bicycle, because it’s dark outside both ways. What the fuck do you want from me doctorman. I’ll be gobbling up those supplements because my Vitamin D deficiency is the least surprising outcome of working an office job in Belgium in winter.



  • In my local experience, these are actually just profoundly incompetent. Hanlon’s razor.

    They tailgate because they are actually incapable of maintaining a following distance (you know the kind, when the road is empty they alternate between mashing the gas and driving well under the speed limit, and somehow if you’re a passenger they’re totally unaware that they are doing it even if they are not distracted, how it is possible to be this bad at gauging speed and distance I do not understand but these people do exist).

    Then as their malfunctioning brain randomly processes that they want to go faster, they overtake, and since the lane is clear they mash the gas.

    Then when they are done and they merge back, their brain performs a hard reset and they somehow drive slower than before they passed you. They do not notice. You pass them, and they are not looking distracted; the only explanation is that their brain is doing the simpsons-monkey-cymbals.gif.


    1. Buy more dishes so you can go longer between washes
    2. Buy a half-height dishwasher. They exist, I owned one that lived on the floor of my bathroom.

    I live alone and I fill up my full size dishwashers every few days. If you don’t eat ordered/preprocessed food you can also just chuck pots and pans in the bottom rack.

    Dishwashers use a lot less water than hand-washing. Even if there’s a little bit of room left, it’s still a net positive. There’s no reason for anyone to hand-wash unless they live in a tiny NYC broom closet or exclusively eat take-out in disposable containers.


  • I read people complained that ME1’s character creator was ass. I guess it must have gotten that reputation by being kind of ass for making a dude, because my Shep was a badass bitch. Voice actress was on top of things too. She’s by far the most memorable custom character I played.

    Until ME3 where they yassified her from a 40-something war veteran to a glossy-skinned 25 year old lifestyle vlogger. Interestingly that made me - a cis man - feel viscerally connected to the injunction to look a certain way for the male gaze, and I got so fucking mad at bioware during that intro cinematic.



  • you’re at risk of becoming dependent, and not building the understanding you’ll need to make something that matters

    Could be – and has been – said about literally any abstraction. Some people still haven’t gotten over the fact that assembly is not the default system programming language anymore.

    For me vibe coding is more akin to vbscript or MS Access. It’s for people who neither know nor care about the “how” and don’t give a shit about quality, performance, security, or maintainability (i.e. people who have no interest in software development). It’s a market that’s looked down upon for many good reasons, but it does exist and it does serve a purpose for small-scale and low-stakes DIY automation. Unfortunately that purpose is a lot narrower than the marketing pitch, nevermind all the other deleterious problems with the AI industry as it exists today.


  • So happy to see the game is not dead.

    Combat and movement look fun and satisfying, graphics look amazing. So many moody areas, from gritty snowscape to colorful caves. Mojang could learn a thing or five from this trailer.

    I do hope there will be more breadth of gameplay especially on the creative side so those promising exploration mechanics do not feel stale after a few hours of running around and blasting skeletons. That’s one thing mojang does get right, if anything they have too much breadth and not enough depth.

    Not sure about the ease of movement when scaling multiple blocks. Figuring it how to get from point A to point B with the limited movement options is a core part of most Minecraft gameplay loops, especially when caving and/or fighting. Seems they made up for it with good fighting mechanics, but they will have to make up for it in the other gameplay loops as well.

    Either way I wish them the best and hope they light a fucking fire underneath mojang’s ass.

    EDIT:

    This is the original legacy engine from the 2018 trailer, running on a four-year-old build as we push Hytale forward again.

    Now hold the fuck up. What do you mean this is the 2018 engine? What the fuck have they been doing the past 7 years? Did they rewrite a whole new engine for no good reason? It looks fucking beautiful and seems to run great! I’m sure they had their reasons, and I don’t think we can draw accurate conclusions by speculating, but the insider perspective on the development cycle must be absolutely wild.

    EDIT2: Okay their blog post explains quite a bit more. Seems to paint a picture that Riot wanted the engine to be cross-platform (makes sense for consoles) and they could not make it work with a full rewrite away from their otherwise functional Java/C# engine. Kind of a crazy play on Riot’s part to make Java/C# devs and former minecraft modders write a modern game engine from scratch in C++ if that’s the case. Probably a tough lesson to learn for everyone involved. If only they could learn from an incredibly popular voxel-based building/aventure game that went through the exact same engine rewrite away from a GC VM language and faced similar struggles.

    As a PC player, great news that they’re sticking to .NET and Java. It will make modding much easier.



  • For systems programming it makes the most sense out of the languages you mentioned. Languages requiring a runtime (Java/Python) do not fill the bill for system tools IMO. Golang is more arguable, but its memory safety comes through GC which many systems programmers aren’t fans of for a variety of technical and personal reasons.

    Rust is meant to be what C++ would be if it were designed today by opiniated system developers and didn’t have to be backwards-compatible.

    Those are the technical arguments I would use in a corporate setting.

    All that aside, there’s personal preference, and my point is that for FOSS projects that matters too. Rust is fun in a brain-teasy kind of way in the same way that writing C is fun, but without nearly as many footguns. Golang is practical but arguably not as fun. That’s the same logic that draws many programmers to write Haskell projects.

    The story of the Fish shell illustrates it quite well; the project gained a lot of development attention and contributions when they decided to rewrite from C++ to Rust, where they achieved a stable release with feature-parity a few months ago. It would have been a remarkably dumb decision for a private company to make, but makes perfect sense when you are trying to attract free talent.


  • The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.

    If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.




  • On maybe the third day of my first programming job, a colleague pulled me aside and said “don’t give me ‘shoulds’ and ‘probablys’. You need to sound confident so I can know to trust what you’re saying”.

    That guy was a bit of a dickhead in general but there’s a lot of truth there. To the question “what’s the expected impact of this change?”, “None.” is a good answer. “Well it should work…” is not useful feedback and a good Operations Manager will rightfully reject the change.

    Of course it is better to be hesitant than falsely confident, but far too many (software) engineers hide behind indecisive language to dodge the necessary hard work of validating their hunches. If you didn’t test your shit fully, just say so. If you’re right, say it. Personal ego doesn’t belong in an engineering discussion.


  • Real answer: it depends.

    • Deleting a file in use: no problemo. File is removed from the directory immediately, but exists on disk until last program who had the file open closes. Everyone wins! (Unless you’re trying to free up space by deleting a huge file that’s being held open by a program and not understanding why the filesystem usage didn’t go down)
    • Unmounting a hard drive in use: Will error out similarly to Windows. lsof can tell you which process has which files open. There’s nuance with lazy unmounts and whatnot but that should not be used in most cases.

    Now in practice you should be wary of one very important thing that changes compared to Windows: Writes are asynchronous on Linux. First the kernel writes to RAM, then it flushes to disk at a later time for performance reasons (this is one of the reasons why writing a bunch of small files is many times faster on Linux than Windows). The upshot is that just because your file copy is “done” doesn’t mean you can just yank the USB cable. Always safely unmount before unplugging a storage device on Linux.


  • And Hytale got shitcanned!

    It’s actually amazing that in an industry so hell-bent on copying successful formulas ad-nauseam (e.g. Quake&Doom spawning the whole genre of First Person Shooters), Minecraft has not seen anything reach the status of spiritual successor in over 15 years of charts-topping sales performance. Not from its own studio, not from its former creator, not with the Late Hypixel Studios.

    There are survival games and base-building games and exploration games, but none of them are “Minecraft-likes” in the way that early FPS were “Quake-likes”. CS has Valorant. LoL has Dota. Tekken has Street Fighter. PUBG has Fortnite has Roblox. Minecraft somehow remains truly one-of-a-kind, a gaming UFO that eludes suits looking for a replicable formula. I actually believe Mojang themselves don’t understand why Minecraft works in the first place either, which is why every update seemingly either underwhelms or angers everyone. That game is lightning in a bottle and no-one knows what to do with it.

    If Nadella had a stroke so bad he decided to make Minecraft FOSS, I’d be really interested to see what would happen. If any for-profit company was allowed to make direct Minecraft derivatives, I do think we would see a level of creativity and innovation that would dwarf even the already extremely prolific current modding scene.



  • Technology Connections and Hank Green have been shouting this for a while, but that whole issue is way overblown. Some first gen EVs around 2010 had issues, but every major manufacturer since then has way exceeded expectations on battery lifetime thanks to advanced BMS and thermal controls. Car batteries don’t just rapidly degrade out of the blue, the tech has nothing in common with what’s in your phone. But public sentiment has not caught up because most people think Li-Ion = smartphone = dead after 2-5 years, so second hand EVs are way undervalued. Which is great for buyers.

    It’s not like you can’t easily total a second-hand ICE by mechanical failure. Just ask anyone who own(ed) a puretech engine. If you went by manufacturer recommendations, the fucking thing might just eat your timing belt one day and grenade itself. And there’s no way a full engine swap on a 5-10 year old economy car is economically viable.

    There’s always something that could go wrong when you buy a car. Unless you get comprehensive insurance and warranty, you need to accept the fact that losing the entire car to an accident, catastrophic mechanical failure, or theft is always a risk. If that’s too much anxiety to deal with, get a lease.