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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Don’t know if you’ll get something for as low as $20, but a small thermal printer. Functions as a label maker on steroids, there is no ink, or proprietary* paper. Some thermal paper rolls have built in stickers, some are transparent, some have special shapes and colors, etc.

    I’ve used it to label plants, tools, cables, boxes, so-so-many gridfinity boxes. It takes 1-2 seconds from hitting print to having it ready.

    * not entirely the case, in that some have set sizes, or markings to automatically feed and count. However, these are low tech, and there are third party vendors.


  • I think your example is pretty good. The important detail is that the timetable for Bulgaria, would be fairly similar to your own, except it has some kind of offset, which would be more or less exactly what the time zones express. So, instead of everyone that want to relate to some other places’ relative time schedule, having to do it themselves, we just use… Time zones. that’s what time zones are.

    Without it, you’d have the same complexities inherent with time zones, but with none of the benefits.

    A case of a problem being solved, and mistaking inherent challenges, i.e. the sun moving with a different offset around the world, as a fault of the existing approach. The suggested alternatives would improve nothing, and instead make the problem worse.







  • The last four times I’ve voted. I spent, on average, less than ten minutes from arriving at the place to vote, and leaving that place. And I don’t mean at the booth itself. I’d say from when I parked the car, to when I left in the car… but I walked. 10 minutes (the first 3 times) and after moving, 5 minutes last time.

    It’s amazing how shit things can get, when enough people deliberately want to make it more shit. You know who and what I’m talking about. If not, I’d be happy to clarify.




  • I find this question very interesting. What does it mean to “know” a programming language. They map to certain paradigms for how to solve problems, in various degrees, with different tradeoffs there for surrounding tooling, libs, and what not.

    A bunch of the most familiar ones are procedural with different sprinkles on top, and they pretty much do the same things when it comes to the “language” side. So, “knowing” one, or another, IMO, has little to do with the syntax, parsing and keywords, and is much more if you have suffered through cryptic compile errors, figured out good debugging tooling, etc.

    Which is to say, if we compare these two list

    • C++, Haskell, Prolog
    • C++, Java, Python, Rust, Kotlin, Objective-C, Dart, etc

    I’d consider the first one much more impressive in terms of diversity in “knowing programming languages”. And, I say that as someone belonging squarely in the latter.


  • The image of USA is not good, at all, if that’s what you’re asking. I used to care, but some time around 2016 I simply gave up. Something about an obvious grifter and professional fuckwit, seriously considered to lead anything other than a burger to his fat face. The alternative, although infinitely better, is clearly suffering from some dementia. It’s just a shit show.

    And that’s just the politics. But it mirrors most other fucked up things in the US. The obvious and effective approaches are not considered. So… best to not spend too much effort and hope the impact of it reaching critical mass isn’t too bad.




  • I don’t know… I’ve been using ChatGPT4. I use it only where the knowledge it outputs is not important. It’s good when I need help with language related things, as more of a writing assistant. Creative stuff is also OK, sometimes even impressive.

    With facts? On moderately complicated topics? I’d say it gets something subtly wrong about 80% of the time, and very obviously wrong 20%. The latter isn’t the problem.

    I don’t understand where the “intelligent” part would even come in. Sure, it requires a fair level of intelligence to understand and generate human language responses. But, to me, all I’ve seen fits: generate responses that seem plausible as responses to the input.

    If intelligence requires some deeper understanding of the world, and the facts and relationships between them, then I don’t see it. It’s just a coincidence when it looks like it happened. It’s impressive how often that is, but it’s still all it is.


  • Absolutely. Those you suggest there are good examples.

    Good enough that, instead of “is/isn’t” programming language, it would be more a “ah, so, how do you define that then?”. Now that I’ve had some sleep, one could argue that I could have been nicer and suggested that approach for HTML as well. After all, it’s just words that mean stuff, and transfer a concept between people, that translate to the same (ish) idea. The moment the latter isn’t the case, it’s no longer very useful for the former.

    Most disagreements, I find, are just cases of different understandings. Discussions worth having is when both are correct but different, and both want to figure out why they differ. So, on second thought, I think I was appropriately rude _

    Both LaTeX and roff are Turing complete, but they are also DSLs with a somewhat narrow “domain”. Sounds exactly right that these blur the lines between what is/isn’t. You could even argue that claiming one or the other is just one way to express how you understand that difference.


  • That’s such a weird point to make. Is it because to you, it seems like the line drawn is arbitrary? I cannot imagine any other reason. Certain words just mean certain things.

    Markup languages are exactly as much “programming” as you marking a word and hitting “bold”. Which is to say, nothing at all. People are wrong all the time, and I have a very limited amount of fucks to give when it happens.

    As for Scratch, it is a programming language. So, why would you think it’s a logical next step for me to say otherwise? Next, you’ll say something remarkably dumb in response. Resist the temptation, and do something more productive.