Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

Well, we've officially reached the "Hey kids, let me teach you how to downcast in Java!" phase of FRC crunch-time, so I hope your teams are doing better. ;) #frc

#SoberingThoughtFriday

It is always valuable, when looking at a novel instance of people discussing "Is this AI sentient / intelligent / worthy of rights," that the bar is much higher than the Turing Test.

We are a species that has historically (and contemporaneously) denied the personhood of our *biological* kin. The bar for a machine becoming a person is going to be much, much higher than its ability to convincingly beg for its life.

UX team's vision vs. UI team's implementation.

Some days, "Trying desperately to do the right thing in an under-documented process in an ecosystem with a bunch of name-aliasing and systems that 'everybody owns' that nobody documented or is trained on" looks a lot like "malicious compliance."

... but I swear, this isn't *intentional* incompetence; it's just *regular* incompetence.

#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

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?"

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.

"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/

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/

People predicting the death of information online through the use of ChatGPT-powered falsehood-generators as if I'm not spending my days slogging through an eternal stream of human-generated-and-curated plausible falsehoods.

Bad news: we don't need an AI; we already Mechanical Turk'd this problem by building a system to let everyone put stuff on the Internet. 😉

The Lemony Snicket Limit is the value asymptotically approached by summing a (finite) series of unfortunate events.

The theorem that you will never reach the Lemony Snicket Limit by summing a finite series of unfortunate events is the Lemmany Snicket.

"Yeah welcome to the club pal." #chatgpt #bing