“Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day. Teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime.” – David Leinweber, Mathematician and Berkeley Computer Science Professor
#computerscience #programming
@simon_brooke Not sure about that. If #Fujitsu represented to #PostOffice that its system was accurate (knowing that it was flawed) and it was aware that people were being prosecuted based on that representation (hard to believe they were not aware), then it seems like Fujitsu is also at least partly responsible for the prosecutions.
The lesson from the post office scandal that nobody seems to be talking about is that it's about time that the software industry faced proper regulations akin to other engineering disciplines. Software fails all the time and yet despite that people feel a sense of trust in a machine founded on logic. Software needs to be held to the standard that people expect from computers, or else more lives will be ruined.
I hate it. Just so over engineered, and doesn’t even solve the actual problem of wild animals being killed, but rather just hides the problem… Just hang a bell around their neck, it’s not hard… https://www.engadget.com/the-flappie-ai-cat-door-stops-your-pet-from-gifting-you-dead-mice-033237654.html
With all the talk of promoting browser diversity, I thought I’d try using Firefox when doing development work in 2024. Within just a few hours I found a bug in the dev tools that caused me to waste more than half an hour chasing a non-existent fault in my webpage. I’m sorry but Chromium has won; it’s over.
British politics at the moment:
Conservatives: We’re going to do X!
Labour: We oppose doing X. It harms the most vulnerable in society, damages the economy and the environment, and violates our international treaty obligations.
Conservatives: We have a huge majority, so we’ve done X!
Journalists: Will Labour reverse X if it wins the next election?
Labour: No.
1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.
So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.
10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.
She screams: "THEY GOT OUT!!!"
If Dr. Seuss made programming tutorials https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIrDMR6CaHY
Elm’s been a hugely inspiring language to me, because it did such a great job of making Functional Programming a joy to use & to teach.
But front of the queue for Elm-related inspiration must be Richard Feldman, who’s currently taking the best of its philosophy into a Roc. Lots of rich, juicy design ideas in this week’s episode of Developer Voices.
📺 https://youtu.be/DzhIprQan68
🎧 https://pod.link/developer-voices/episode/12c96f4851e6c11c51eff8975a556f7b
It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ removal (CDR) like a time machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example:
Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million trees take us?
A: If one mature tree takes up an average of 25 kg of CO₂ per year, then 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back 33 minutes and 6 seconds in a year.
It's not a lot.
I have to say, Unison's documentation system is just next-level brilliant.
* All your libraries' docs are local.
* Everything's perfectly hyperlinked, even after refactoring.
* Markdown-ish with extensions that totally nail literate coding.
Seriously, if you're writing a language, look at Elm for the error messages and Unison for the docs.
(And Haskell for the monads, of course. 😅)
https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/usage-topics/documentation/
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk