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smartaz42

23 karma · joined October 17, 2021

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smartaz42··on Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?
I've always thought it odd that the one thing the caller and callee need to agree on are called arguments.
smartaz42··on In a milestone for Manhattan, a pair of coyotes has made Central Park their home
While walking my dog on leash some years back, we were surrounded and stalked by 5 very hungry coyotes (it was a drought year and they were very scrawny) for about 20 minutes.

They got increasingly more bold, eventually only just out of kicking range. As I would charge and threaten the one or two in front of me, the others would try to approach from behind. We were being hunted.

All this while carrying my dog (they definitely would have killed him if he were on the ground) and wearing flip flops.

This was in Santa Cruz, late in the summer, at dusk. Terrifying. They tracked us all the way back to the car, but once I found a good stick they became much less daring.

smartaz42··on NativeJIT: A C++ expression –> x64 JIT (2018)
FWIW for C only I've used libtcc repo.or.cz/w/tinycc.git with great success. The API is a joy, as we all expect from a Bellard project. It focuses on compilation speed, the generated code is not at all optimized.
smartaz42··on Writing toy software is a joy
For me, one of the enjoyable aspects of toy projects is that there is no schedule to meet. Which means that I can take my time. And yes, that means I take much more time than the article implies. As an examine, I've been polishing my PEG-based Turing complete language (which features both AOT-to-C and a fully featured repl) since COVID was a daily aspect of life.
smartaz42··on How easy is it for a developer to "sandbox" a program?
I haven't personally used it but cosmopolitan claims to provide a simple and portable sandboxing capability
smartaz42··on Show HN: Let’s Bend – Open-Source Harmonica Bending Trainer
I've found Jason Ricci to be a most useful source as well. Adam Gussow, Tom Leckie, Will Wilde, and Howard Levy all have recommended YouTube content.

I haven't checked out the app, but certainly plan to in order to fine tune my scales (major/minor penatonic, blues, and a few more).

By the way, once you get 2nd position major pentatonic those same notes are 5th position minor penatonic (albeit with a different starting notes). Same for 1st major and 4th minor, and 12 major and 3rd minor.

smartaz42··on There's Life Inside Earth's Crust
Hmm, but speculation is so easy and sampling is anything but. Some of Einstein's speculations were pretty damn productive. The later experiments aka samplings (Einstein proved right again!) were in my view not particularly productive.
smartaz42··on California Flat Earther admits partial defeat after trip to Antarctica
What would "south" even mean to flat earther? I can't envision a model in which any sane definition wouldn't lead to a contradiction.
smartaz42··on Google removed my Yubikeys from a Google account 'just to be safe'
I'm sure that they have outstanding customer support. But you, however, are not the customer.
smartaz42··on Bringing a dynamic environment to C: My linker project
Redbean (part of the often discussed comopolitan c library) does something like that.
smartaz42··on Show HN: Loodio – A Bathroom Privacy Device
Wouldn't that be SFH?
smartaz42··on The Packrat Parsing and Parsing Expression Grammars Page
That grammar simply matches 2^(n-1) a's. Not mind-boggling from that point of view
smartaz42··on Proposal to add constexpr to C [pdf]
Hmm, isn't square normally x*x?