Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@rene I doubt weakening s230 will kill Mastodon, but only because most Mastodon nodes are functionally judgment-proof or outside jurisdiction.

... it would certainly make it harder to operate a federated mastodon node "legitimately." How much the community would care I can't predict; wouldn't be the first time a federation of protocol users just ignored the law.

@rene FWIW, most websites people are thinking about when they decry "The end of the Internet" are based in the US. They respect German law, French law, &c, but a change to *American* law will impact how those sites operate worldwide in a way that changes to the laws of nations the company isn't headquartered in won't.

Significant abridgment of s230 protections will make it impractical for a lot of sites to operate at scale because most of their traffic is Americans and the risk of the owner being thrown in jail / sued out of all their fortune is much higher if it's American law that gets broken.

#fatestaynight

https://personal-blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/fate-stay-night/

FBI recommends using an ad blocker while searching the web.

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221

@lauren That's okay; sentiment analysis is already a solved problem, right? ;)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to a lot more of the Twitter equivalent of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwGuXQcv7S4

A lot of #cplusplus makes a lot more sense if you can keep in mind what the language's design is optimizing for.

... which is "Letting the compiler figure things out with a minimum number of re-passes over the code."

This is, in these modern times, a very stupid thing[1] for it to optimize for at the language-design level, but it does help illuminate a lot of what seem like otherwise stupid constraints on the language.

[1] I'm making a strong assertion here, but I'm justifying it on observation that the reason you want minimum passes is to optimize compilation time. In that regard, relative to the languages I regularly use, C++ takes about a billion years to compile a codebase of a dozen files, three compilation units, and ~5,000 lines of code, while the TypeScript compiler is "boom-boom done" and the Python compiler is "What compiler?"

@aberrant68 I wrote a blog post on the AprilTags a little while ago (https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2022/april-tags-python-recognizer/).

For recognizing them in competition, the team I'm working with is using Raspberry Pis with PhotonVision (https://photonvision.org/). This solution is pretty plug-and-play (modulo the challenge of getting a Raspberry Pi and networking switch mounted and powered on the robot chassis)---once you get it working, it'll auto-recognize the tags and dump all the relevant data (either via NetworkTables or directly via a library for the robot code).

My kingdom for an Ethernet hub that powers off of USB-C.

For no other reason than I inevitably end up with a box full of Ethernet hubs and, unrelatedly, a box full of one-off wall-wart AC adapters forever disconnected from their hubs.

@tonic oh me too. I'm taking the piss out of Java for being a language where the nugget of what you actually want to do is wrapped in a thick candy shell of the boilerplate crap you have to write to make the ecosystem happy. As in "of course you can get a machine to write that! A machine should have been writing it the whole damn time!" ;)

(Java is one of those languages I'm perfectly happy to use with a competent IDE in the loop to do all the drudgery for me of renaming and type-changing variables, making , package declarations match with the package path, caring for and feeding the brood of young imports that have made a nest in the top of every one of my files, making file names match the class name since the language demands it, etc etc).

@ernie The nice thing about the public domain is if you hate what you see, you can either wait twenty minutes for something else to come along or just make your own. ;)

"Back i​n June 2022, we reported that GitHub Copilot was already generating 27% of developers’ code. Today, we’re seeing this happen more and more with an average of 46% of code being built using GitHub Copilot across all programming languages, and 61% among developers using Java."

... the jokes write themselves, too.

https://github.blog/2023-02-14-github-copilot-for-business-is-now-available/

@lauren "De-confliction" is a fancy way of saying "It'd be embarrassing for everyone involved if Russia accidentally bunker-busted the President of the United States of America." ;)

@lauren Ask me about my twelve-line (excluding copyright headers) PR that unifies two Java classes behind one interface, that the maintainers will not merge because they expect to replace the entire framework with a builder application.

...eventually. At some point. There is no design for it yet.

The zen of #cplusplus is that there is no zen. Every codebase is unique, no two large projects share every convention, and there are quirks everywhere. You'd no sooner expect two C++ codebases to conform to each other than you'd expect two families to have the exact same customs, tastes, and taboos.

The language is optimized for two things: making memory manipulation very explicit and, in that context, making the quirks from having every codepath make up its own rules for memory manipulation be tractable.

How to remote-shell connect from a Linux to Windows machine using VSCode.

https://blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/vscode-linux-to-windows/

@jackscerebellum @Viss This. I'm confused by the on-prem responsibility idea because running a cloud, it's never been *my* responsibility to drive around in a pickup truck with good suspension looking for where some yahoo took a shotgun to a fiber-optics box for fun and brought a physlink down.

On-prem requires so many more different responsibilities---different in kind---from cloud. You still need to design robustly and account for the failure of the cloud itself, but you rarely worry about maintaining good working relationships with the professional electricians in town or whether it's time to stop trying to cool with a standard office HVAC and switch out to industrial HVAC or liquid cooling.