Codex

It’s sad but i stopped writing answers or comments on SO years ago. I used to have all these optimistic ideas about people working together to collectively grow our shared knowledge. I guess Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep barely hanging in there, but if anything those cases prove my point: without one extremely strong personality to hold the corruption in check, all these collaborative “digital commons” projects are a leadership change away from completely selling out all the work put into them. That can be feeding everything into AI but it’s also monetization schemes and EULA changes to claim ownership of user submitted content and locking the public out of your site without accounts and subscriptions.

And usually the public’s only recourse is to tear it all down and start again, waiting for the next con artist to come along and steal the village’s prosperity.

I was curious if (since these are statistical models and not actually counting letters) maybe this or something like it is a common “gotcha” question used as a meme on social media. So I did a search on DDG and it also has an AI now which turned up an interestingly more nuanced answer.

It’s picked up on discussions specifically about this problem in chats about other AI! The ouroboros is feeding well! I figure this is also why they overcorrect to 4 if you ask them about “strawberries”, trying to anticipate a common gotcha answer to further riddling.

DDG correctly handled “strawberries” interestingly, with the same linked sources. Perhaps their word-stemmer does a better job?

“Trending on Occupied Twitter”

I’ve been thinking we need to get aspirational and take it to the next level:

Instead of “X (formally know as Twitter)”, the time has come for “Twitter (currently called X)”.

Are you in the czech republic, speaking in Czech, and presumably not using a VPN?

I agree with the other suggestions so far, to wit:

1.dyn is fine, when you need it. People will give you a lot of guff about performance but vtable lookup on a dyn is no less performant than the same thing in C++ (in higher level languages almost every call is dynamically dispatched and those are used for plenty of serious, performant work).

2. Use enums more.

3. Use traits and generic functions

And I would add a couple of other thoughts.

For some DI type work, you can use cargo’s Features to define custom build flags. You can then put variants on the same code (usually implementing a trait) in different modules and use conditional compilation on the Features to swap out which code is used. This is like a compile-time strategy pattern. I use it for testing, but also to swap out databases (using a local in-memory to test and a real one in prod) and to swap out graphical backends on my roguelike (compiles to OpenGL on windows but Metal on my Mac).

You’ll probably want to learn Rust’s macro system sooner than later as well. Sometimes a macro is better than a function when you need to generically operate over several types (function argument overloading, in other languages) or work on something in a general but well-structured way (tree walking for example).

I think this probably applies…

So Thief: The Dark Project (1999) and Thief 2: The Metal Age (2000), are a couple of classic stealth FPS games, proto-immersive-sims, and still some of my all time favorite games. They both use the Dark Engine, an in-house engine from the now defunt Looking Glass Studios, which also powered System Shock 2.

In 2010, the source code to a System Shock 2 port (for the dreamcast or ps2 iirc…) leaked online, and on 2012 someone used that code to create NewDark and TFix, patches to make these old games work on modern computers (and some bugfixes, support for HD, etc).

There are still updates regularly released for it too!

I must emphasize that these games are still sold on Steam, GOG, etc and this patch is essentially required for them to work. And these are hardly the only games like this, just the ones most personal to me. Retrogaming is built on the backs of unsung individual heroes who backwards-engineer, hack, patch, and mod their favorite games to keep them running for everyone long after the publishers have died or abandoned their work.

You currently owe Oracle $500MM in unpaid licensing fees for this floor.

I’m very amused that (so far, on my client) you seem to have no up or downvotes, but an upvoted response. No programmer kink shaming, but no one else wants to be nice to Java either.

I’m not ready for 4D, just let me try out C Lattice on a few smaller projects first.

This is still a business problem. The truth is, we solved basically all the technical problems that could be practically solved by the 2010s. We have all the technology, we know what people want and need. We could, and should, build a lifetime personal computer (phone form factor) for every person on Earth that provides for their communication needs, acts as a personal assistant and organizer, and more. And we’ve had those, dozens if times.

But how do you keep selling people stuff once you’ve met all their needs? You tear it all down and keep rebuilding and reselling it. You enshittify to squeeze money out, customers flee, so you encircle them with another capitalist enclosure and rebuild the same shit again. Repeat.

Software devs should basically all be making games and trying to teach AI to be smarter but instead we’re replacing internet search (a problem we solved in the 90s!) with LLM enabled advertising engines that literally can’t find info for you so they make it up. And we’re iterating on the 10 thousandth version of an e-commerce site because all internet shopping is part of a giant global MLM now. Seriously, “drop shipping” is the latest iteration of the same old scam they used to run on diet pills and knives and magazine subscriptions.

But every college student with a fresh business degree can set up a Wix site to resell sunset lamps. It’s uber for scams. The reseller takes on all the risk, sets up the e-commerce site with a builder, firehoses ads all over their social media, and does all the work. There are multiple industries now entirely supported on conning desperate people into being your salesforce, workforce, advertisers, and customers all at the same time.

I’m just poking fun that the fundamental type in JS (Object) is an associative-array/hashmap. Technically it has some fancy under-the-hood handling for pure arrays and primitive types. This is also exactly true of Lua, and a little true of Ruby and Python.

Really, most programmers would do great to start with a hash map or array list and only specialize out further when the problem calls for it.

Overly fawning and positive tone when the terrible examples speak for themselves. I did laugh loudly at the “black man eating spaghetti” when he goes to take a second bite which transforms mid-flight into a wine glass and smooshes his face. As an unintentional comedy generator, B+. As a useful tool that isn’t built on the stolen labor of millions of youtubers, F.

Javascript devs be like…

Our administrator is understandably a little bitter about the whole experience as it has unfolded, saying, "We were forced to switch from the perfectly good ESET solution which we have used for years by our central IT team last year.

Sounds like a lot of architects and admins are going to get thrown under the bus for this one.

“Yes, we ordered you to cut costs in impossible ways, but we never told you specifically to centralize everything with a third party, that was just the only financially acceptable solution that we would approve. This is still your fault, so we’re firing the entire IT department and replacing them with an AI managed by a company in Sri Lanka.”

Crowdstrike is providing free red team activity and backup testing for all their customers! What service!

Jrogramming in Jee Plus Plus: A Pragmatic Guide to the 1999 “JnCo” Standard

That command syntax looks kind of like how Skyrim’s scripting console works, and gods help us if reality is a Bethesda game! (Kind of, if you added string-parsing based overloads and, for some reason, a command-syntax sudo keyword.

Bro its so easy bro, just use flexboxgridcolumns its been a standard since 2010 just flex it bro you haven’t learned to flex yet just check w3c schools and add a flex you can polyfill it but don’t use that hacked one use the good flexpolyfill then { content-align-middle-child-elements: center-middle-true-neutral } so easy with flex bro

I was rewriting some old code of mine and ended up stripping out the comments. I kept reading them instead of the code, which I had been changing, and they were irrelevant. (I added new comments back in, though a big reason to rewrite was to make the code more self-explanatory.)