every time you see me complain about my mental health you have to picture me as a failgirl scientist in a lab coat studying a very strange monkey

"Please set a new password for your account."

okay

"Your password does not meet your organization policy."

okay, you could have hinted that in the interface before I hit enter, but what's the policy

"It's a secret to everybody."

The reason I haven’t responded to your email, based on how long ago you sent it:

1. I am currently doing something else, I’ll check it later

2. It is later and I have to check it… That means it is a demand, my autism hates demands so I need to leave it a bit.

3. I have left it a bit, but it is still not urgent enough to get my ADHD to prioritise it

4. I have forgotten about it

5. I remembered but it’s been so long that my guilt and shame are now an insurmountable obstacle.

On the fediverse, no one knows that you are a human

crikey (Australian misskey fork)

I've just misread std::transform as std::transfem. I swear I spend too much time on Fedi. 😄

the entire universe of stargate only works because 10,000 years ago the ancients decided the best way to document their work was to carve the manual into stone on the side of the computer

good practice for all developers

Today's Low Quality Ad is for this Myth of Syphilis Pin. I love Greek Mythology. Keep trying pal, you'll get it some day.
https://collabs.shop/yh04rj

Which German bread has the most complicated shape?

Das Mandelbrot

The first commandment was actually “Accept no substitutes.” MosesGPT added all the flowery language.

"Thou shalt have no false gods before me" means I don't even read emails if I'm on the "cc" line instead of the "to."

AI in a nutshell.

Yes

#catsofmastodon #haha #Funny

The recent post criticising Free Software advocates for advocating user-modifiable software and then being annoyed at LLMs annoys me and the reason is best illustrated by this analogy:

Public-transport advocates spend years advocating for a connected public-transport infrastructure, where it’s easy to take a small combination of busses, metros, trams, and trains to get from anywhere to anywhere. The network would be efficient and operated as a non-profit-making public good, making individual movement cheap (or, ideally, free). They work with municipalities to build out some of this infrastructure, persuade national governments to invest in the longer routes, and so on.

Someone comes along with a massive subsidy for a handful of private taxi companies to hire a bunch of drivers and give free (paid for by investors) ride to everyone. The drivers are immigrants who don’t speak the language very well, which is great for the taxi companies because they are easy to exploit (they are, in fact, underpaid and put in dangerous situations routinely). The owners of the taxis are pocketing a load of investor money for every ride though.

When you get in one of these taxis, there’s a 90% chance they’ll take you where you want, a 9% chance they’ll take you somewhere nearby, and a 1% chance they’ll just drop you off in a dangerous part of town. A bunch of people are mugged and a few more murdered as a result of this, but the companies aren’t liable. The investors behind this tell everyone ‘don’t bother learning to drive, there’s no point, our taxis will take you anywhere, for much less money!’. At the same time, ridership on existing public transport drops off, leading to calls to cut its funding and there are mass redundancies for bus drivers and so on. The taxis are all diesel and heavily polluting, leading to worse air quality everywhere they go. To make sure that they can pick people up easily, the ones not actively giving rides are constantly circulating, placing huge strain on road infrastructure and further increasing pollution.

And then someone says to those public-transport advocates: ‘this is what you wanted, why are you unhappy just because it’s not delivered in the way you imagined?’

One of the things I’ve noticed moving from C (and Objective-C) to languages like C++ and Rust, with richer static type systems is that it changes what most of the code is for.

When I write C code, almost all of my code is to do the thing. When I write the same in C++, I can usually do the thing in about half as much code. But I don’t write half as much code. The other half of the code is making sure that’s if the code doesn’t do the thing, it probably won’t compile. If I have a field that needs accessing with a lock held, I’ll write an accessor that takes a lock guard to prove lock ownership, and a wrapper that acquires the lock and returns the lock guard and a reference to the field. This compiles down to the same code as the C version (except maybe in debug builds, where I’d assert that the lock guard is really for the right lock), but now it’s harder to get wrong. Especially when I come back to the code in two years and don’t remember to read the comment telling me the locks I need to hold to access the code.

This is why I’m excited by Verus for Rust: it gives me a very rich set of tools for ensuring that my code is going to do the right thing. But it’s a big mindset shift from ‘code exists to do the thing’ to ‘doing the thing is the easy part, most of the code exists to make sure you’re not doing the wrong thing’. And I suspect that’s both why it’s hard for people to switch from C and why few people who do ever want to go back.

I have a joke about trickle down economics, but 99 percent of you won’t get it.

Worship before the feral druid cat ...

If you're an audio engineer, or in networking, this might be the carpet from hell