yumaikas

I wonder how much of "smart" is due to his power, and how much of it is due to his intellect.

I say this not because I don't believe he doesn't have an impressive intellect, but because, well, what if someone had his intellect, but worked in an Amazon warehouse due to circumstances outside of their control?

Why does this make you sad?

I mean, ADHD awareness has gone up a ton in the past year. I definitely agree that "isn't a video game completionist" is hardly a reason, on it's own, to question if one has ADHD, but it could very well be one part of a puzzle if someone has other patterns that line up.

The common term for it I've seen online is Body Doubling, though that might be a more specific variation.

ADHD is a very well studied medical phenomenon, which results from physical differences from the brain. When it does apply, getting the right kind of help can be life changing.

And even if it is "ordinary laziness", that doesn't mean that seeking confirmation of it something is ADHD or not is a bad exercise, if you can afford it. The lack of motivation also is a very good sign that the OP is heavily disconnected from their work, and needs to find another job or lifestyle, especially if it's this bad and they don't have ADHD.

If it is ADHD, then you have confirmation of a very helpful community and set of medical and psychological tools that you can apply, and you can ignore vast amounts of advice that just doesn't work for people with ADHD.

> Do we really need to go to a doctor so that we hear that we have a problem, and we might need medicine, to focus?

Modern society can be very inflexible if you're in the wrong spot, and don't have the ability to explain why the fit is so bad.

Lastly, many people who do have ADHD have been told that they are lazy or haven't lived to their potential their entire lives. They know they don't fit in. They pick over their brains, looking for ways to do better, trying ways to do better. They are, as a population, far more self-examined than the norm. They don't need your doubt, they have plenty of their own.

That's interesting, though. I find a lot of political and critical content on TikTok. You do have to look for it, it's not as popular, but TikTok definitely can be used for it.

So, listening to this talk, he doesn't spend any time addressing ADHD? That seems like a pretty glaring omission to me.

Often some additives may get absorbed by your gut.

A smoothie vs a peach may well have different glycemic indices. Few people chew their few up to the extent that a bender will break it down. Also, how many peaches go into a smoothie, and how much extra sugar via, say, yogurt, or smoothie mix?

Spear phishing, by design, is intended to not look like junk mail. Maybe it's designed to look like it came from an agent? Maybe like it was from someone they had hired to take care of their pets, or kids? If you're constantly busy (and it is my understanding that many celebrities are busy, at a bare minimum), and you don't want to think too hard about a particular thing, then a spear phishing attack could quite easily hit you, if your guard isn't up, and you don't consider technology to be a battelground.

Also, to add a further point: Because much programming is done by intuition rather than formalism is why there can be so much unintended use of a given program.

So, this is for a few reasons.

Syntax is a skill floor, but it's not anywhere close to a skill ceiling.

If you want rapid-fire example of the various forms a given language commonly uses, I recommend X in Y minute guides. Those show off the various bits of syntax for a given programming language, though without rigorously defining them as such.

Part of the reason that programming syntax is usually taught by example, rather than by formalism is that the formalisms for programming syntax, well, look like this: (cribbing from wikipedia).

  program = 'PROGRAM', white_space, identifier, white_space, 
            'BEGIN', white_space, 
            { assignment, ";", white_space }, 
            'END.' ;
  identifier = alphabetic_character, { alphabetic_character | digit } ;
  number = [ "-" ], digit, { digit } ;
  string = '"' , { all_characters - '"' }, '"' ;
  assignment = identifier , ":=" , ( number | identifier | string ) ;
  alphabetic_character = "A" | "B" | "C" | "D" | "E" | "F" | "G"
                       | "H" | "I" | "J" | "K" | "L" | "M" | "N"
                       | "O" | "P" | "Q" | "R" | "S" | "T" | "U"
                       | "V" | "W" | "X" | "Y" | "Z" ;
  digit = "0" | "1" | "2" | "3" | "4" | "5" | "6" | "7" | "8" | "9" ;
  white_space = ? white_space characters ? ;
  all_characters = ? all visible characters ? ;

Can you take that grammar and write 10 examples of valid statements from it, with no other context?

vs, if I give you

  PROGRAM ASSIGNMENTS
  BEGIN
    MYSTRING := "A STRING";
  MYNUMBER := 123;
  END

That gives you a much better flavor from looking at things.

Ultimately, most programming languages should have defined grammars in their docs somewhere, but most devs use them by intuition, rather than formally.

The other thing, as well, is that it's one you get past grammar as a primary concern that you gain true fluency. And there are a lot of things that are higher level than grammar that can aid/hurt a program much more than the grammar constructs (like various patterns, know algorithms, schemes of organization for different types of projects, and so on). A mostly human-usable grammar is table-stakes these days.

If you have a specific language you want examples or a grammar on, let me know, and I'll see if I can find it.

(edited for formatting)

So, I think a far better way to think about what is called Tech debt is as Maintenance Load. Chelsea Troy has a series about thinking about Tech Debt from that perspective. I also think that the way we often talk about tech debt ignores the fundamentally human nature of software development.

I've been using Janet quite a bit for small CLI apps.

The stdlib is quite enough for basic CLI apps, especially when you use PEGs.

Janet's event loop also makes it very handy for issuing a lot of subprocess calls.

Janet has basic HTTP servers and clients, and there is an effort to shore it up there.

Front end dev, video games, devs that use Firebase or Mongodb all the time? Devs that work in companies where only a trusted few touch the database, and everyone else works on their abstractions? Heck, with stuff like Rails, you can mostly treat the DB as a strongly typed KV store unless people want heavy reporting.

SQL is useful to know, but it's hardly necessary in today's world.

So, for that, I can easily recommend Godot/GDScript and using Asperite for Pixel art, if that's the aesthetic you're going for.

Godot has a little bit of a learning curve, but easily justifies it. I've made some games in it: https://yumaikas.itch.io/. Godot, for 2D games, for me, has been a force multiplier in terms of what I can get done in X hours. For Hobbyist work, that just means you can take on more ambitious projects without having to do as much groundwork.

Barring that, you could look into bindings in your language of choice to Raylib. I've used a tiny bit of it with Janet via Jaylib.

If Lua or Fennel aren't hateful to you, there's always Love2D, TIC-80, or PICO-8. But, tbh, I really recommend learning Godot.

So, I like Lua as a language, but I think that Janet, 5 years down the road, will be a better fit for a "Lua+Batteries", for people that can stomach parens. It's already well on it's way there now.

There's a saying that Ruby gives "Every toddler a chainsaw" (https://codefol.io/posts/ruby-python-and-freedom/). You can use it and it's metaprogramming to write some really elegant APIs. You can also write entirely the wrong abstractions, and it will not stop you. You can even extract private variables from lambdas if you're willing.

Now, imagine that in the hands of someone with poor taste, or, even, just rather different taste than yours.

Yeah, that seems like an overkill to me.

The balance I do like to strike is to use interfaces for any classes that interact with the outside world, and then have those faked out.

That way, I can use them to provide data to smaller units, or record that business logic recorded the data I expected.

Obviously this doesn't fix if the DB interactions themselves are correct, but it's a start.

I'd also argue that it's helpful to understand the technology underlying your IDE, if only to be able to debug builds. (Understanding that MSBuild exists, and can be called from the command-line, for example, is a handy skill).

Honestly, where I'd draw the distinction between a database and a datastore is the ability to do multi-statement transactions. So, a filesystem? A datastore. Some support fsync on a single file, but multi-file sync isn't usually supported.

MongoDB and LevelDB both support transactions, so I'd err on calling them databases myself.

I think I'd differentiate between a database and a data store.

I'd argue that a filesystem is a data store, rather than a database.

I mean, for me, I host a lot of small utilities on my small DO droplet, as well as a few websites that I do want up all the time. One can do more than one thing on a droplet.

Where did you get that idea from? It can do text, as well as various objects.

Quite a few people, I imagine. For one, Powershell on Windows is a slower interactive experience than CMD.

That, and some windows-heavy projects still have a large amount of Batch files.

That being said, I'm super glad to have access to it when I'm stuck on Windows for deploys or the like.

Having used both Love2D and Pygame, Love2D is far and away more capable than Pygame used to be, because it can actually use GPU acceleration, and because Lua's features (like coroutines) make for a far more expressive way to write games.

Which isn't to say that people can't use Pygame to good effect, but that you're working uphill with it a lot more.

Looking at other comments here, though, it sounds like newer versions of pygame stepped up significantly in terms of what can be done. Kudos!

So, given that Jester exists and is a thing, how does this compare to it?

How does one actually go about that process of reversing damage to your arteries?

I suspect those modern compilers are also optimizing more than Delphi 2 was, and are probably parsing a somehow larger language.

Granted, it could be a case of a code base adapting to change poorly over time.

I got 35/45 with a little bit of research to find some spellings, so with no research whatsoever, I'd probably have been 29/45.

That really depends which reflection APIs are being used.

For C#, you can use type reflection to get the data or shape of a piece of code or a type (GetType and friends). That isn't super fast, and isn't intended to be.

The other major C# reflection API is Reflection.Emit, which allows you emit IL at runtime. The Emit->IL->JIT process is slower than executing the code outright the first time, but once you've done it, you can get code that's as fast as as if it were compiled from source. And, in the case, you might end up with faster code, since it allows you to do transforms on how the data is laid out and compiled.

Notably, the .NET regex engine exposes options for compiling the regex down to IL if it's going to be used a lot, so a library like Trill using reflection to accelerate code by vectorizing it, while keeping better ergonomics makes a lot of sense. You still pay the cost of compiling at runtime, since it's not a compile-time transform. Those do exist for .NET, in the form of Rosalyn plugins, but that's a bit more involved still.