Codex

All these jokes about naming variables and yet no serious suggestions that if you have a turtle2, what you really need is a turtle array. I like to block out all the memory I’ll need for the whole program up front, put it all in one big array, and then I can use clean, easy to remember numbers for all my variables!

With a 20 year head start she might be able to actually do it, maybe by becoming president or head of the cdc or something?

The ability for a time traveler to prevent 9/11 with one day’s notice is… definitely going to be more difficult.

Angry driving can make one quite blunt

Enough to rage over a mundane stunt

At bicyclists abreast

a roar rose in his chest

SINGLE FILE YOU TWO-WHEELED CUN–

Skeleton Warriors!

Well, banned for having mild opinions on US politics and then getting defensive when someone called them a genocide enabler. Sounds like hexbear did them a favor. If only the right-wing loonies were so quick to ban people who disagreed with them instead of setting up a big slide to draw them further in.

It’s sad but i stopped writing answers or comments on SO years ago. I used to have all these optimistic ideas about people working together to collectively grow our shared knowledge. I guess Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep barely hanging in there, but if anything those cases prove my point: without one extremely strong personality to hold the corruption in check, all these collaborative “digital commons” projects are a leadership change away from completely selling out all the work put into them. That can be feeding everything into AI but it’s also monetization schemes and EULA changes to claim ownership of user submitted content and locking the public out of your site without accounts and subscriptions.

And usually the public’s only recourse is to tear it all down and start again, waiting for the next con artist to come along and steal the village’s prosperity.

ViScount Coders

Oh you have no idea how deep my paranoia on this goes! We’ve been implementing Dynamics 365 at my office, MS made software that manages your entire business from the accounting ledgers on out. Copilot AI is everywhere in it, trying to encourage you to teach it how to do things.

MS wants to offer the next generation of knowledge worker. No more accountants, no more senior managers of inventories and all those many miscellaneous titles it takes to run a company. Certainly no more technical support. AI is going to do it all. MS wants to tell every business how to do business.

I was curious if (since these are statistical models and not actually counting letters) maybe this or something like it is a common “gotcha” question used as a meme on social media. So I did a search on DDG and it also has an AI now which turned up an interestingly more nuanced answer.

It’s picked up on discussions specifically about this problem in chats about other AI! The ouroboros is feeding well! I figure this is also why they overcorrect to 4 if you ask them about “strawberries”, trying to anticipate a common gotcha answer to further riddling.

DDG correctly handled “strawberries” interestingly, with the same linked sources. Perhaps their word-stemmer does a better job?

I agree with the other suggestions so far, to wit:

1.dyn is fine, when you need it. People will give you a lot of guff about performance but vtable lookup on a dyn is no less performant than the same thing in C++ (in higher level languages almost every call is dynamically dispatched and those are used for plenty of serious, performant work).

2. Use enums more.

3. Use traits and generic functions

And I would add a couple of other thoughts.

For some DI type work, you can use cargo’s Features to define custom build flags. You can then put variants on the same code (usually implementing a trait) in different modules and use conditional compilation on the Features to swap out which code is used. This is like a compile-time strategy pattern. I use it for testing, but also to swap out databases (using a local in-memory to test and a real one in prod) and to swap out graphical backends on my roguelike (compiles to OpenGL on windows but Metal on my Mac).

You’ll probably want to learn Rust’s macro system sooner than later as well. Sometimes a macro is better than a function when you need to generically operate over several types (function argument overloading, in other languages) or work on something in a general but well-structured way (tree walking for example).

I think this probably applies…

So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.

In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc…) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).

There are still updates regularly released for it too!

I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.

You currently owe Oracle $500MM in unpaid licensing fees for this floor.

I’m very amused that (so far, on my client) you seem to have no up or downvotes, but an upvoted response. No programmer kink shaming, but no one else wants to be nice to Java either.

Now do “the South” stretching up into southern Ohio.

I’m not ready for 4D, just let me try out C Lattice on a few smaller projects first.

One of the machines breaks on monthly turnover because no one documents any formats or uses standards at this company. It consumes at least one employee each time, but it’d be expensive to add more numbers to the big sign so no one fixes it.

I wanted to find the “Brazil mentioned” meme but with HL3, but this will do too:

Got to meet Chuck a few weeks ago on tour for his latest book. Some souls are too pure and good for this world, and Dr. Tingle ranks high amongst them.

This is still a business problem. The truth is, we solved basically all the technical problems that could be practically solved by the 2010s. We have all the technology, we know what people want and need. We could, and should, build a lifetime personal computer (phone form factor) for every person on Earth that provides for their communication needs, acts as a personal assistant and organizer, and more. And we’ve had those, dozens if times.

But how do you keep selling people stuff once you’ve met all their needs? You tear it all down and keep rebuilding and reselling it. You enshittify to squeeze money out, customers flee, so you encircle them with another capitalist enclosure and rebuild the same shit again. Repeat.

Software devs should basically all be making games and trying to teach AI to be smarter but instead we’re replacing internet search (a problem we solved in the 90s!) with LLM enabled advertising engines that literally can’t find info for you so they make it up. And we’re iterating on the 10 thousandth version of an e-commerce site because all internet shopping is part of a giant global MLM now. Seriously, “drop shipping” is the latest iteration of the same old scam they used to run on diet pills and knives and magazine subscriptions.

But every college student with a fresh business degree can set up a Wix site to resell sunset lamps. It’s uber for scams. The reseller takes on all the risk, sets up the e-commerce site with a builder, firehoses ads all over their social media, and does all the work. There are multiple industries now entirely supported on conning desperate people into being your salesforce, workforce, advertisers, and customers all at the same time.

I’m just poking fun that the fundamental type in JS (Object) is an associative-array/hashmap. Technically it has some fancy under-the-hood handling for pure arrays and primitive types. This is also exactly true of Lua, and a little true of Ruby and Python.

Really, most programmers would do great to start with a hash map or array list and only specialize out further when the problem calls for it.

Javascript devs be like…