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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s gotten a lot better in recent years tbf in terms of those kinds of resources. Beginner recommended languages like Python are still a pain because it’s super easy for a beginner to bork how they set it up, but on the whole there’s plenty of online code sandboxes and other ways to get started.

    Your point is definitely valid though. Why on earth would we want someone who’s just showing an interest in programming to write their own compiler??? Wtf? If someone wants to get into baking you don’t send them out into the fields for 6 months to grow some wheat.

    When I was a kid I mucked around with html and css to make some GeoCities sites. I decided I wanted to learn how to code so I got a book from the library called “how to code games for beginners” or something. The thing never told you how to set up an IDE or compile the game. So I was just frustratingly typing out the code examples into notepad without a clue as to what to do. I think this was during the dialup era so it wasn’t like there was a wealth of info online.

    I ended up abandoning programming for quite a few years. It just seemed like nonsense because writing graphics libs for C in notepad does feel like nonsense to a child. I wonder what life would be like if I had some better resources at that moment in time and decided you continue pursuing it.






  • Something with enough context to write sensible test cases for a large codebase. It would be great if you could write test cases for a couple of domains, then ask it to write cases for a third domain following the same general style as the first. It would ideally have a conversation about what things to mock/stub and what things to keep.

    I personally think 5 years isn’t enough time to get to that point with something that works really well. It’s tricky enough to get a junior up to speed with doing it sensibly, but cutting down on the time it takes to build a good test suite would mean we Devs can spend a lot more time on features and improvements.



  • HDR support is supposedly fixed on kde and should be getting fixed in most other distros soon supposedly.

    Unity worked for me on pop os after some fiddling and installing of dependencies, but it didn’t fully work. There was a bunch of tools (like animation keyframes) which just didn’t display correctly for me though. Checking out the source code of one the util did a check to see whether it was running on windows or Mac, then exited if it wasn’t either of those. Would be good to run it via proton if possible so we get full support without the Devs needing to write tons of code to support a small percentage of users. That experience is pretty common when running Linux as your main, but the other benefits make up for it.





  • To counter this I used to visit some factories for a big contract manufacturer in the UK. They would often make say lasagne for the supermarkets and for the “premium” brands. Whilst they were all made in the same place, the “premium” brands products had much better quality ingredients in them and different ratios of the good stuff (say meat) to filler (say pasta sheets).

    For some things it’s the exact same materials, but for many it’s different. You have to do blind taste tests to see which ones you prefer.






  • I don’t understand this argument re Scotland. Brexit was a disaster for a country which had been a member with a trading block for a few decades and which only had some regulatory compliance laws on its own books to amend.

    Scotland has been fully integrated into the UK economy, political system, and legal system, etc for hundreds of years. It would be many many times more painful and damaging for them to leave, and joining the EU after who knows how many years of sitting up there isolated wouldn’t make up for what Scotland would lose by leaving the UK.

    We should be arguing for more cooperation and bigger unions, not smaller ones. Further devolved powers, a better system for representation of the nations in parliament, kicking out the Tories and bringing in more beneficial policies for the UK, etc should be the priority imo. Not even more -exits.


  • I hate this trend of saying “SLAMMED”, or “HOUNDED”, or “ATTACKED” etc in news articles where the stories are just “a couple of people with a dozen followers between them posted slightly negative tweets about topic xyz”.

    My parents were bitching about how Adele was “HAMMERED” online because she said “I am proud to be a woman” or something. Turns out it was just two complete nobodies tweeting about how that’s trans exclusionary or something with 1 heart each.