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msla

5,098 karma · joined July 6, 2017

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msla··on Perlisisms (1982)
OK, how is manual memory management relevant to writing a program to get weather information from an Internet API and display it to the user? In that context, "relevant" is the domains of getting the data (network communications) and displaying it (console vs GUI, converting units to the user's preferences, determining how much to show) and how the program internally manages its buffers is a distraction from those important concepts. Every line of code I have to write to ensure I have the space to store the data I need to work with is visual and cognitive noise, which is why programmers developed garbage collection.
msla··on What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice
I can, but what annoys me is people saying "Well that technically isn't champagne because it isn't from the right region of the right country" and acting like being able to quote obscure regulations makes them "technically correct" in any context outside of a courtroom.
msla··on What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice
> Food authenticity should only mean DOP or geographic identity (GI) regulation.

It shouldn't even mean this much, frankly, as those things are merely protectionist trade policies meant to artificially drive up the price of certain goods without regard for quality. People on the Internet give too much deference to politicized trade regulations.

msla··on If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
When I'm a newbie at things, I tend to have the opposite problem: I can overthink things to Hell and gone, but since I don't know what I'm doing, I focus on the wrong things and 80% of my effort is worthless. Like trying to make a multithreaded GUI in tkinter in Python: I tried to find a good way to do it, but the answer is a brief "Don't do that, use root.after() instead so your worker function can run in the main thread without blocking the event loop." I just had the wrong mental model and put forth effort an expert would have avoided entirely.
msla··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
"What, support Safari? Isn't that, like, less than 20%? And its standards support is abysmal! No, not worth my time, they can upgrade to a normal browser like everyone else."
msla··on Life is too short for a slow terminal
GUIs are almost entirely non-scriptable. Some exceptions exist, but they're few and extremely limited compared to what you can do with a CLI. (Note I said CLI. A TUI is almost always a GUI made of text, and is just as non-scriptable.)
msla··on Programmers Aren't People
Are you even attempting to read what I wrote?
msla··on Programmers Aren't People
> deepity

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deepity

> A superficial equivocation which only seems to be profound.

msla··on Programmers Aren't People
> amazing how you understood nothing from any of my words, how about using the clanker to vibe your understanding too?

"Coding is a pseudoscience" makes sense like "plumbing is a pseudoscience" makes sense: Fluid dynamics might be a pseudoscience, but plumbing either works or it doesn't, and it's either maintainable and modifiable or it isn't. Computer Science is what you're groping for, in your speech laden with things you will probably defend as not-slurs but which you're still bizarrely excited to get to use, but outright saying Computer Science is a pseudoscience might make you realize you're talking absolute nonsense.

msla··on Programmers Aren't People
> coding is still a pseudoscience.

Amazing how you said that like it made any sense at all.

msla··on Programmers Aren't People
Eh, programmers used to be people who'd desk-check their flow charts before hand-translating them into machine code to enter into a front panel. There's been decades of growth in abstraction since then, and LLMs are just one more layer, another return of the perennial idea of "programming" by writing specifications in a natural language that a machine can automatically translate into actual code which it can run. You know, like what COBOL allows. We're still going to need people who are capable of making such specifications, ensuring the resulting code is correct, and fixing them when they're no longer sufficient.
msla··on C++: The Documentary
> IMO, if c++/cfront didn't ride on the tails of c, I'm skeptical it would've seen widespread use

Obviously. C++ was a "better C" in that you could keep a lot of your "legacy" C code while improving your codebase piecemeal with C++ features. Your management didn't even have to care, in that C/C++ was accepted as a valid descriptor even by people who should have known better. It's a wonder Java/C# and Perl/PHP never caught on.

msla··on Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity
> "The best kind of science is magic, and the best kind of magic is science."

Who has ever used that phrase?

msla··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
No evidence of that, of course, but your comment stands.
msla··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Original title: Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed offline products

The change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

msla··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Interesting how this has generated such negative response.

I wonder why Microsoft has so many defenders here.

Also, the change in the title of the post makes what happened much less clear. Interesting how that just chanced to happen as well. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

msla··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.
msla··on He Lost It at the Movies
> I'm not sure what you mean by separating review from criticism. Can you expand on that?

Let's start with applying both to "Eraserhead":

A critical approach might have a thesis on how it links with Lynch's interest in Buddhism and how those concepts surface in the film, how different events and characters in the film can be read through that lens and how the resolution of the film makes sense in a Buddhist context. Absolutely none of this tells you whether the person who watched the film was enraptured by it from the first scene or whether they got through it out of academic obligation and immediately bitched about it on social media afterwards. Criticism has a thesis about a work and defends it, which doesn't usually involve how enjoyable the work is.

A review of "Eraserhead" would tell you about the experience of watching it, whether the person writing the review thought it was a well-constructed and engaging film, and maybe some thoughts on how much sense they made of it, but the analysis wouldn't be the focus. Thumbs up, thumbs down, that's the meat.

It's entirely possible to mix the two realms, but there's a difference in focus and intent. The better YouTube channels (Folding Ideas) mix the two quite deftly, in fact, but I'd put Folding Ideas in the realm of criticism more than reviewing because he does tend to have a thesis and defends it in addition to saying how much he enjoyed (or, more often, didn't) the films he talks about.

For example, in his video about The Nostalgia Critic's review of Pink Floyd's movie The Wall (that is, his video about another person's review of a band's movie made from their rock opera album) his thesis is that the person behind The Nostalgia Critic character is creatively stalled and fundamentally lazy. He defends this thesis while lambasting the video he's talking about, but the thesis is centered. That's criticism.

msla··on He Lost It at the Movies
The problem with "criticism" from the perspective of the average person is that "Is this film worth my time and money" isn't really a question criticism answers. The linked article touches on this when it bemoans "the consumer guide approach" but until we firmly separate criticism from reviewing we're bound to keep going around and around on this.
msla··on Don't Roll Your Own
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user?

Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them.

Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.

msla··on The Art of Money Getting
More formats here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581

msla··on AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale
If we outlaw plagiarism, we've just killed culture.

Everything is "stolen" from other art. Every piece of creation takes inspiration (read: steals ideas) from things that came before. This is how creation works, it is how creation has always worked, and it is why you cannot legally own an abstract idea. You can own the implementation of an idea in specific works, such as copyrighted works and patents and trademarking specific logos and such, but once the ideas go into the blender and get mixed with other ideas, the output isn't yours to own anymore. That's what culture is.

msla··on C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For
OK, is there a horrible speed penalty for writing your SIMD in pure assembly functions and then calling those functions? If you're writing assembly anyway, just drop the "inline" part.
msla··on Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track
Being against nuclear only kept the world on coal longer.
msla··on I want to live like Costco people
It's close to true about personal computers. The poorest can't afford Apple computers, but you don't need to be that rich to buy Apple hardware and what's up from that in terms of mainstream status? Nothing, as far as I can see. Specific groups might want a Framework laptop or System76, but those brands are invisible to most people, including, it seems, most rich people.

(And for servers and other business machines, well, other criteria apply, but owning something in the Top500 has to count for something in terms of prestige.)

msla··on Write some software, give it away for free
> It cost about $600 USD to release, mostly due to two initial security reviews.

Can someone expand on this? I've given software away free and it didn't cost me anything.

msla··on Clarification on the Notepad++ Trademark Issue
If you've noticed, Disney has stopped doing that. New stuff is entering the Public Domain.

Like "Steamboat Willie", which I believe was mentioned here recently.

msla··on Clarification on the Notepad++ Trademark Issue
> People say it's not true because people confuse copyright and trademark. It isn't true for copyright at all, but it is true for trademark.

People believe so many dumb things about copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. For example: You don't legally need to use the various symbols for trademarks and copyrights you don't own. Unless there's a contract in force saying you have to, there's no Symbol Police gonna rappel from the skylights and break your keyboard if you say you used a Xerox without the nifty ™ symbol.

Another thing I've seen is the apparent notion that you can "renew" a copyright. Nope, not for a long time now: You get the full term up front with no special action, and once it's done it's gone, unless the law is actually changed in the meantime. Disney didn't "renew" the copyright on "Steamboat Willie" and the dumb live-action remakes aren't being done to "renew" anything, they're just some executive having a brain fart.

msla··on 'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level
There's precedent:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...

> “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” said Turnbull [the Prime Minster of Australia]

msla··on Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight
If you think that's terrifying, imagine all of the essential code written in COBOL and FORTRAN.

Skippy the Intern, now retired these thirty years...

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