My biggest gripe is the lack of respect/understanding for the importance of data models and clear domain boundaries.

Most things that end up as “technical debt” can be traced to this. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, because what the data models changes, or the requirements of the domain, etc.

And, it’s very innocent looking differences sometimes. Like “We know that the external system state will change from A to B, so we can update that value on our side to B”. Suddenly you have an implicit dependency that you don’t express as such.

Or, things like having enum that represents some kind of concept that isn’t mutually exclusive. Consider enum values of A and B. Turns out this really represented AZ, and BP (for some inherent dependency to concepts Z and P). Someone later on extends this to include ZQ. And now, suddenly the concept of Z, is present in both AZ and ZQ, and some consumer that switches on concept Z, needs to handle the edge case of AZ… And we call this “technical debt”.

I did eventually yes. Thanks for asking. I was exhausted yesterday, and upon reading my comment again, I get the downvotes. Being a second language doesn’t fully explain the wrong tone there. The article was a lot more insightful and in depth than I had mistakenly assumed.

After reading it tho, it seemed a lot more focused on performance than I think would be warranted. But that could be due to different concerns and constraints than where I’m used to working. I’d focus more on the mechanisms that best expresses the intent, and although they do discuss this well, the Venn diagram for the appropriate use of exceptions and error codes don’t overlap as much in my world.

And, it’s not like I’m arguing that they are wrong. It’s an opinion on a choice for a tradeoff that I only think, while allowing the possibility of being wrong, might miss the the mark. Stack unwinding is by its nature less explicit for the state it leaves behind. So it shouldn’t be a question of either error codes or exceptions, but which are most appropriate to express what, and when.

Even for Rust, where monads are preferred and part of the language to express and handle error codes, I would say that the statement of “newer languages like Rust don’t allow the use of exceptions”, seems incorrect to me. Something like panic!("foo"); coupled with panic::catch_unwind(|| { ... } }); I believe would unwind the stack similar to that of a throw/catch.

Anyways. Thanks for reminding me to actually read the post. It was well worth it, and very insightful.

I’m just going to comment on the face value of the title itself, and make assumptions otherwise.

• Exceptions are control flow mechanism. I.e. that can be used for code execution flow, in the same application.

• Error codes are useful across some API boundary.

Does this adequately cover whatever it is they figured out was a good tradeoff?

You’re kinda arguing my point tho, so maybe I didn’t communicate it very well.

If a character such as Trump gaining power can be considered a symptom, then the conditions that allow it is the disease. I.e. the points you make, with news networks not beholden to facts, lack of education and critical thought.

All of this is what I would argue is the underlying cause and conditions that are fertile grounds for populists. Also, just a little reminder that Hitler first succeeded on his second attempt at becoming a dictator. And unlike in the US, he was imprisoned for the first attempt.

Isn’t Trump just a symptom? What scares the shit out of me, isn’t Trump. It’s that Americans voted for him once, and a repeat of that shit show is somehow again a possibility. Even 5% thinking that could be a good idea, would be cause for concern. 10% is “what the actual fuck America…”.

Remove Trump from the picture, and the issue is still there. The people who would vote for him, and the machinery in place that can convince them of it.

Imagine someone as vile as Trump, but not dumb as a sponge…

Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these “problematic” terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.

The false pretense of having done something, is worse than doing nothing. It’s just noise.

To be clear: I don’t mind the changing of terms. I’m too old to care about trivial stuff like main vs master. But if the reasoning for such a change is dumb and potentially harmful, you’ve lost my respect.

https://youtu.be/UjtOGPJ0URM

This covers it pretty well.

If you want a very short version: a hypothetical eventuality in the technological advancement of intelligent life, as to limit their existence.

Are you thinking about daylight savings time? I’d agree there, but timezones absolutely make sense, and we’ve always used some version of it. “See you at noon” has a sort of built in timezone, as does sunrise and sunset. We (all human societies) relate hours to the day in a similar, albeit more regular way. If you did away with timezones, you’d replace a minor inconvenience with a monstrous one. Everyone uses what, GMT? Naah

One of the best shower thoughts I’ve heard.

I do have some experience. What you are talking about are all internal hurdles, and what I was referring to as the hard problem to solve.

Incurring an expense in order to compensate for a service rendered, which is what the company would need to do in this case, is not difficult.

If you deal with amounts that need special consideration, there are people who do this for you for money. I believe that the correct approach is to show up, and sequentially slide individual banknotes from a densely packed stack in their general direction.

There are two common types of laser printers. Those that have special paper that react to heat, such as receipt printers, would fit the description.

The other laser printers… Hm, I don’t think your description is accurate either. It’s more that the laser electrically charges ink particles so that they jump on to a separate roller that gets rolled on to the paper.

I’m no expert though.

All of the other things you mention can be solved with money. In terms of the things that are easy and hard, this very much the former.

The real hard part here is whomever in charge of making the actual decision, to expense a pittance.

Failing that hard to not know what is, and isn’t knowable, is a good reason to not give a single f about what they think

In the EU, it sort of isn’t.

Takes a long time to write a proper response for all the GDPR stuff. The responses surprisingly don’t change all that much whether or not I do, so I might as well save me the trouble.

First thing you mention is such a fun and useful exercise. But as you point out, way overkill. Might even be dangerous to expose it. I got mine to 20kb on top of busybox.

There is something that tickles the right spots when a complete container image significantly smaller than the average js payload in “modern” websites.

Zig is a pretty interesting alternative to C

Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

I guess? Are you alluding to someone or something in particular?

There is no good answer to that question. Too many don’t understand the importance of context/intention, and unfortunately they are also the same ones that get easily offended on behalf of everyone else. Part of the “but, the discussion should be more about meeee, and my feelings, and how offended I am”-mindset.

Which is why “kid cosplaying as early days MJ” manages to offend anyone. Why you cannot watch the Community episode on D&D. Why they likely wouldn’t dare make Tropic Thunder today. Why many git-branches are renamed to main, etc, ad nauseum.

Even though unicode group could (and IMO should) define all things useful, I don’t see why “male-genitals-flaccid”, and variations, couldn’t be specified. Doesn’t require any application level visual implementation. But those that do, and have good reason to, can use a specification, rather than make up their own. Not really a big deal, of course.

If you can have

"1F646 🙆 face with “ok” gesture, described as a person with arms raised above the head forming a “circle”, interpreted as “OK sign” (derived from the Japanese gesture for “OK”). Intended as gender-neutral but represented as a woman on most platforms

Just, throw in a penis or two. It’s… fine

Shower thoughts don’t really need to be insightful or accurate.

I don’t think the Unix philosophy of having lots of small tools that do one thing and do it well that you compose together has ever been achieved

Why do you think this might be the case? It’s not remotely accurate, which suggests that you must understand it very differently than I do. To some extent, I am curious.

I’ll give you a recent example. Which is just from yesterday. I had a use case where some program had a memory leak, which would eventually lead to the system running out. So, I “built a program that would monitor this and kill the process that used the most memory”. I don’t know how complicated this is in windows and PS, but it took about 2 minutes in Linux, and it very much leverages the Unix philosophy.

Looks something like this:

get_current_available_memory_mb() {
    cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemAvailable | grep -oP '\d*' | xargs printf "%d / 1024  \n" | bc
}

Functionality based on putting together very small pieces that do their things well.

• /proc/meminfo is a file pipe that gives you access to information related to memory usage.
• cat just outputs data from a file or a named pipe, here the latter
• grep lets you filter stuff. First time the relevant line. Then again to strip out the number with a regex.
• xargs does one thing well, and lets you pass that on to another command as arguments, instead of stdin.
• printf formats the output, here to express the numerical operation of dividing the value by 1024 as “[number] / 1024”
• bc evaluates simple mathematical operations expressed in text

Result: 1 file pipe and 5 simple utilities, and you get the relevant data.

The PID of the process using the most memory you can get with something like:

ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -n2 | tail -n1 | awk '{print $2}'

Same sort of breakdown: ps gives you access to process information, and handles sorting by memory usage. head -n2 just keeps the first two lines, but the first one is a header so tail -n1 keeps the second line. awk is used here to only output the second column value. And, you get the relevant data. Also, with simple tools that leverage the Unix philosophy.

You then check if the available memory is below some threshold, and send a kill signal to the process if it does. The Unix way of thinking also stops you from adding the infinite loop in the script. You simply stop at making it do that one thing. That is, 1. check remaining memory. 2. if lower than X, kill PID". Let’s call this “foo.sh”.

You get the “monitoring” aspect by just calling it with watch. Something like watch -n 2 -- ./foo.sh.

And there you go. Every two seconds, it checks available free memory, and saves my system from freezing up. It took me 10 times longer to write this reply, than to write the initial script.

If memory serves me correctly, PS also supports piping, so I would assume you could do similar things. Would be weird not to, given how powerful it is.

I could give you an endless list of examples. This isn’t so much a case of “has ever been achieved”, but… a fundamental concept, in use, all the time, by at least a dozen people. A dozen!

Also yesterday, or it might have been Saturday. To give you another example, I scratched different itch by setting up a script that monitors the clipboard for changes, if it changes, and now matches a YouTube URL, it opens that URL in FreeTube. So… with that running, I can copy a YouTube URL, from anywhere, and that program will immediately pop up and play the video. That too, took about 2 minutes to do, and was also built using simple tools that do one thing, and one thing well. If you wanted it to also keep a local copy of that video somewhere, it wouldn’t be more effort than the 10 seconds it takes to also send that URL to yt-dlp. One tool, that does that one thing well. Want to also notify you when that download is complete? Just add a line with notify-send "Done with the thing". What about the first example, if you want to get a OS level notification that it killed the process? Just add a line to notify-send, same tool that does that same one thing well.

None of this takes much effort once you get into it, because the basic tools are all the same, and they don’t change much. The whole workflow is also extremely iterative. In the first example, you just cat meminfo. Then you read it, and identify the relevant line, so you add grep to filter out that line, and run the command again. It’s now a line containing the value, so you add another grep to filter it out the number, and again, run it. “Checks out”. So, you pipe that to printf, and you run it. If you fuck something up, no biggie, you just change it and run it again until that little step matches your expectations, and you move on.

No complaints from me. Maybe if I had to use it. The thing that strikes me as particularly noisy is what seems to be either case insensitive commands and flags, or case sensitive and using Pascal-Case for both commands and flags. Which would be my least preferred option.