Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

"Why do people keep making web UIs when it could just be a desktop app?"

Great question. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to re-install Discord again, from scratch. See, they made a minor version bump, and the Ubuntu version can't self-update, so every time they pop out a minor tweak my ten-second login becomes a two-minute install (and a trip to some website to look up, *again,* the command in Ubuntu to install a downloaded package...).

Hahaha j/k I used to do that now I use the web interface. ;)

There's plenty of obscurely-named command line apps that are super-powerful but nigh-on inscrutable.

Credit where credit is due: yeah, you have to read all the docs to really take advantage of it, but "ImageMagick" does what it says on the tin.

General #Mastodon question:

What's the equivalent in Mastodon to "I don't want to follow this thread?" Like, if there's a conversation being had that spins off from a topic I started and I don't care to follow it but (a) I don't really want to block anyone, I just don't care to see *this* rabbit-hole and (b) I keep getting @'ed into the stream, what's the tool to down-sample that signal in my feed?

I ask because I notice when I reply to a big thread that like four people will get @'ed in; I don't want to remove them in case they *are* following the discussion, but it feels awkward if I end up in a back-and-forth with one person and I have no idea if anybody else cares about our little deep-dive. I have no signal on whether to delete the other @'s.

"But Mark, why does it matter that some methods are methods and some 'methods' are functions that take an object as the first argument?"

Theoretically? It doesn't; the two are isomorphic modulo a little bit of bookkeeping convenience on an OOP system knowing the method is always associated with the object.

Aesthetically? Because I'd rather fix *this shit* in an implementation by writing a new function that is every bit the peer of the existing behavior, not "living off in a cupboard somewhere else because I didn't get there first."

More than anything else, my career being "fixing this without being able to modify the object" is the main reason OOP has lost its luster for me.

I rarely write micro-fiction.

https://personal-blog.fixermark.com/posts/2023/parable-of-the-silence/

A big breakthrough for me today was realizing that most of what I know about #cplusplus is wrong.

I mean literally. There was a standards update in the early 2000s that fundamentally changed some rules of the language, in a desperate attempt to wallpaper over the disaster that error messages had become by forcing developers to be more explicit about specific statements (so that the compiler had enough info to distinguish typos creating accidentally-valid statements from mis-instantiations of templates, because the language is complex enough that parsers can't tell the difference... This is related to the legendary issue with the language that `WhenYou<nest<templates>>` some compilers get really confused about whether you meant "close template argument" or "bitshift right" at the end of that statement).

... but I was programming on Windows back then, and Microsoft basically told the standards committee to pound sand; they had a billion human-hours of accrued business logic (their own and their customers) written in MSVC's interpretation of C++, they'd do what they want. So I got CVS-receipt-length error messages but *didn't* learn the tweaks to the language to try and make those shorter. Those tweaks are (in the new environment I find myself in) `-Wall -Werror`-flagged, so the old ways are dead.

Now I have to learn how the language spec literally changed while I was doing something else and that I just un-lucked into training in the wrong dojo.

Hey, gotta know there's a problem to fix the problem, right? ;)

I'm excited about the potential for #Rust in embedded automotive programming... But they really should've chosen a different language name for marketing reasons alone. ;)

So I don't do book recommendations because, cards on the table, I hardly read books these days. Too much time spent reading to read.

But Catherynne Valente is on track to release the sequel to Space Opera in November this year. Space Opera was the best book I read last year, and I can 1,000% recommend it if you haven't read it.

Can't wait for the next one.

https://www.amazon.com/Space-Oddity-Opera-Book-ebook/dp/B0BTZ8VM4V

A little bit about #objectorientedprogramming.

So I'm pretty cool on OOP these days, and the main reason is that I'm pretty hot on writing code that's easy to change in the future. The main advantage to OOP is that one couples the data to the methods that can manipulate the data. This is great, and makes intuitive sense.

The main disadvantage, I've decided, is that for just about all OOP languages I'm familiar with, this divides the world into two sorts of functions per object class:

* The methods the class knows about

* Everything else

... and I've come around to thinking that drawing that line is prognostication. Especially since basically all systems I deal with don't let you "open up" an object definition and add new methods. So you end up with `foo.something()` methods, but also `manipulate(foo)` methods living in some other library, and don't even get me started on whether methods that involve manipulating two objects should be `foo.do(bar)` or `bar.do(foo)` or both or neither. All of that is just noise. These days, I prefer to keep the set of "methods the class knows about" as close to zero as possible.

So what's replaced OOP for me? Usually, I'm nowadays working with interfaces, composition, functions, and generics. I find those work great, and the situations where I *really* want OOP are vanishingly small. If I want to find the "methods" of a data type, I just search the codebase for functions that take that data as an argument (trivial with modern IDEs and modern languages)... and hey, bonus, it finds me the additional functionality that someone else wrote in their module because they couldn't re-open an object to add behavior and they weren't in control of the module that defined the object!

Watched a neat documentary on the making of #TRON.

There are "glitch" effects where everything is lighter for a quarter second. Those weren't intentional. The movie used literally tons of film from Kodak to shoot it, and they didn't realize until halfway through production that they hadn't controlled process to keep the film the same order it had come off the truck. If you keep it in order, small manufacturing fluctuations end up continuous through your shots and the human eye doesn't really notice; if you jumble raw film canisters, the difference can be up to half an f-stop and it's very noticeable.

But since the entire film was ultimately animated at the end, they solved the problem by animating in a little sprite or circuit surge or something every time the film quality jumped and several brighter frames spun through.

Fixed it in post. ❤

Seriously, I don't know if this is an our-codebase problem or a general C++ problem, but I generally use three configs: debug symbols, production-optimized, and address sanitizer.

We use Bazel as our build management system, and changing configs is a "go get coffee" change. Ten to twenty minute recompiles.

#cplusplus

"Oh no... that value changed unexpectedly. That's probably... A memory leak. I'm gonna have to recompile with... *gulp*... The address sanitizer."

*intense grinding noises*

Open #Fediverse though / question.

On a thread about someone being brigaded here (and being able to use the tools available to shut out the bad actors and several of their servers, working as intended), it was mentioned by someone that it's relatively straightforward for bad actors who've had their servers banned to create new servers and start again.

To my knowledge, there is nothing really blocking that scenario. What are the options? Because the risk is that if it's as easy to set up a bad actor in Fedi as it is in, say, the email server ecosystem, then the long-term trend of this experiment is we end up where we are with email: a few big players with a heavy first-mover advantage because new nodes are assumed default-hostile, and it becomes nearly impossible to set up one's own independent node and have one's messages seen by people on the established servers.

#JavaScript is hard because it's the language of web browsers.

#Cplusplus is hard because it's the web browser of languages.

There's a lot about how #cplusplus (the language) behaves that boils down to C++ (the implementations). In other words, "Look, the most popular compilers are implemented in phases, this thing is resolved in phase 1, and you have to be explicit here even though the language allows you to be implicit elsewhere because in phase 1 it hasn't built the lookup tables to guess what that symbol means, so you are forced to tell it."

... this is only one step away from "It is that way because it is that way" which is, I think, one of the reasons the language is so slippery in my brain.

#Gmail just needs a big "DECLARE BANKRUPTCY" button that archives all non-starred unopened emails older than 1 day.