Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

Oh man.

#cplusplus supports a user-defined literal. So if you define an `MyDistanceType operator""_km(long double val)` function, it'll allow you to say `const auto distance = 12_km;` and cause that to evaluate to a MyDistanceType representing 12 kilometers.

Cute, but I really can't see why anyone would bother when the language already supports `const auto distance = Distance::from_kilometers(12);`

Modern software compilation be like https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxL9PhboBv5_pODCovAH3ubmBWKPwVUkrI

I think the next evolution in electronic music is gonna be hyperpatriotism and militaristic nationalism. Lots of marches and mixing in old warhorse speeches, military jargon hooks, and remixing battle standards.

You know, #corpscore.

I'm impressed by how PayPal continues to get more complicated but never actually get better.

Me: "PayPal, I'd like to login."

PayPal: "Cool. Oop, you need to two-factor. I've sent your code via text message to this phone number."

Me: "Well that's a landline so it'll never get received."

PayPal: "Oh, our bad dawg. In that case, just give us another phone number."

Me: *gives Google Voice*

PayPal: "Not that one! We can't use that!"

Me: "Sigh..." *gives raw cell number*

PayPal: "Thanks! Okay, we are sending a code to that number."

Me: "Sounds g~ wait: why are we doing this again?"

PayPal: "Two-factor authentication!"

Me: "Right, that security system where..."

PayPal: "You guard against attack by requiring something the user knows and something the user owns. Along two different channels!"

Me: "Right. In other words, me... a potential attacker... supplied the password. And the ID code. Sent to the phone number. That was just supplied by me. The potential attacker."

PayPal: ".... look, do you want your fucking $23 or not?"

"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? ;)