I wonder if influencers are real. People will make decisions and then gravitate towards something, and others will end up thinking that that something is the cause. But I’ve never seen evidence that an influencer with 1 million followers is anything other than a mustering ground for people already wanting to act out. I guess “influencer” is just shorthand for “we don’t actually know what’s influencing all these people, but we know where they’ve assembled!”

It’s new to me, I think it’s saying that your system is built up by you declaring what you want in a file, a single source that everything comes from.

It’s atomic because each action the system takes is carefully completed rather than bailing out and requiring you to fix something.

It’s immutable meaning you declare how you want things to be set up and then critical changes stem from those declarations and nothing else. You would obviously generate preferences, save data, etc. but the files that make the system / packages work are carefully locked.

It’s like the concept of flatpaks + structured system defining + modern common sense OS operations?

And because corporations aren’t people, here’s the CEOs that ran things during 2014:

Hans Vestberg (b 1965) Verizon

Randall Lynn Stephenson (b 1960) AT&T

Glen F Post (b 1952) CenturyLink

We let these people act with impunity in our society but it doesn’t need to be this way. Look at how Elon, who thrives on attention, flips out over being tracked and heckled. They stole hundreds of billions from us but we don’t even act like it.

No problem. I’m no guru and I’m currently on Zig but I think learning some Rust is a really fast way to hone skills that are implied by other languages.

You use lifetimes to annotate parameters and return values in order to tell the compiler about how long things must last for your function to be valid. You can link a specific input with the output, or explicitly separate them. If you don’t give lifetimes the language uses some basic rules to do it for you. If it can’t, eg it’s ambiguous, then it’s a compile error and you need to do it manually.

It’s one of the harder concepts of rust to explain succinctly. But imagine you had a function that took strA and strB, used strB to find a subsection of strA, and then return a slice of strA. That slice is tied to strA. You would use 'a annotation for strA and the return value, and 'b for strB.

Rust compiler will detect the lifetime being shorter than expected.

Also, ownership semantics. Think c++ move semantics. Only one person is left with a good value, the previous owners just have garbage data they can’t use anymore. If you created a thing on the heap and then gave it away, you wouldn’t have it anymore to free at the end. If you want to have “multiple owners” then you need ref counting and such, which also stops this problem of premature freeing.

Edit: one more thing: reference rules. You can have many read-only references to a thing, or one mutable reference. Unless you’re doing crazy things, the compiler simply won’t let you have references to a thing, and then via one of those references free that thing, thereby invalidating the other references.

I’ll have to check the leaderboards but this might be the most money ever raised by a convicted president.

…

Yep! Number one!

I’m currently watching the Trump presser the day after, and he’s straight up violating his gag order, spending awhile talking about Cohen, basically saying “I can’t talk about him, but his name rhymes with Mohen, they call him a fixer, and …” The whole thing is nuts but just thought that was a bit special.

Reading the report makes me feel like I’m from a different planet.

It clearly spells out Israel blocking aid to Gaza. It describes what we all would call blocking aid. If someone did what Israel does, to you, you would call it blocking. Israel blocks aid and the report makes it plain.

Just because they have a different definition of “blocking aid” doesn’t mean the report cleared Israel. I don’t get it. Can you really just say whatever you want, end it with “but it’s not what it sounds like” and that’s the takeaway everyone gets?

It’s one thing for a document to have arbitrary restrictions on what it can say. That happens. It’s another for people to take it so literally.

Edit: I don’t even know what definitions they were working with, I just got a “it’s not technically…” vibe. But I do know that the report describes blocking aid.

I don’t see a negative. It’s foss so you ought to be relaxed about others using your code. The issues are probably just articulating problems that were already there. If it’s stuff you don’t care about… it’s a foss repository so you just ignore it.

Maybe I’m hallucinating because I can’t find it, but I swear there was a Nietzsche bit about “It is a weak man who walks around in armor.” In this case it’s literal armor.

Is it just me or does the report state that Israel is blocking aid? The legalese might make a distinction between ‘technically blocking aid’ and ‘doing everything in your power to slow, delay, and otherwise mitigate aid’… but that’s exactly what a layperson would call blocking aid.

They have to choose words carefully lest they accidentally trigger some process. But they did just describe what a smarmy country does to block aid while maintaining plausible (big stretch of the word) deniability.

When a computer reads some signal, the 0s and 1s in it’s memory is the data. The data must be processed so that the computer can understand it.

This computer is using threads to read neuron activity. It must necessarily receive data because if it didn’t it wouldn’t be reading neuron activity. They’re the same thing.

This data is processed so that the computer can make sense of the brain. Once it understands some activity it generates signals that can control external devices.

Here’s an example. Imagine a device that monitors the heart and does something to fix a problem. The device would get data on the heart and process the data so that it can perform it’s function.

Wouldn’t monitoring health concerns and mitigating data loss be extremely important in these scenarios?

Put it this way: If you took a thread talking about some tech from a joke community, and a thread about the same topic from a generic technology community, you won’t be able to tell them apart. People will bring the same energy and mindset to both. Jokes and “lol get rekt company I hate” will be pushed to the top, because they totally contribute to the discussion, while basic observations like “removing functionality is bad” will be pushed down. 👍

Craziest thing is that nobody will ever tell you why they want dental hygiene to be illegal. They will say something like, “My favorite series is Harry Potter. I never saw him brush his teeth.” and you’re just thinking, “What does your favorite book have to do with this? Also I’m pretty sure Harry brushes his teeth – did you even read your favorite book??”

It’s an angler fish thing. Sometimes you see the nightmare lurking in the darkness, but usually you get the “some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet!” facade.

Not SO or it’s methods, I mean the human experience. It can be awkward to be new to it all and to feel the frustration/tunnel vision associated with being stuck on one problem… and then step back and have to dissect your issue, structure your question correctly, etc.

It’s just how it is, for exactly the reasons you stated. You can capture every little problem people face in programming, or you can hone in on useful patterns in goals, problems, and solutions, and educate people on how to see these things.

The idea of SO is a little awkward too I think. With something like Wikipedia we’re presumably in an academic mindset. Carefully gathering information, sources, structuring it all. And even then people can get turned off by the ‘bureaucracy’ or nitpicking or whatever.

When people show up at SO they’re probably more in a “I can’t figure this damn thing out!” mode. We’re struggling with a problem, keeping a bunch of junk in our head, patience being tested, but we’re still expected to have a bit of academic rigor in our question and discourse.

Yeah but a lot of people don’t really know what SO is for. They think you just go there and get help and call it a day. But the entire point is to produce structured questions, discourse, and answers aimed at future readers. Super specific, no-context, or duplicate problems are not useful. If you are not trying to generate useful content, don’t go to SO.

Just look at all the people getting frustrated at being told “you should probably do it a different way.” They really don’t understand that just because they’re asking the question, it’s not all about them.

Yeah it gets much easier after lots of practice. But it’s not 100%, which would be ideal.

Some basic questions to train your media literacy:

How many people, exactly, (or less ideally, roughly,) were doing this? (Article provides no answer.)

How often does this normally occur, esp. when it isn’t a trendy topic? (Article provides no answer.)

Any similar events to provide context, perhaps give us clues about what to expect? (Article provides no answer.)

Was this a critical mass, or majority, of those present? (Article provides no answer.)

If you ask basic, perfectly reasonable questions, and then read the article, and see that it answers nothing an interested individual is curious about, you get suspicious about what you’re reading. “Oh jeez, a thing happened, we have a thing, it involved people.” Very cool, very news.