SpaceCowboy
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
- Comment on How disheartening for Snowden to do the right thing and be stranded in Russia. 4 weeks ago:
If you think it’s bait, it’s because you’re in an information silo and don’t often come in contact with different opinions. This results in people bein ill-equipped to discuss issues with people who are considering factors you haven’t so you have to pretend it’s “just someone trolling me” to avoid thinking about another point of view.
For what it’s worth, I agree with the above person. Snowden is a traitor, him now being a citizen of an adversary should be a clue. He now has to say whatever Putin wants him to say or he’ll fall out of a window.
- Comment on Elder scrolls 1 month ago:
Frankly, you’re coming off quite hostile about what is literally a texture.
So it’s acceptable for you to call me a pedant, but I’m crossing the line when I say you’re being a curmudgeon? Ok.
What I’m telling you is that it’s literally a visual element. I already said, it could be optional.
It could be, but maintaining multiple designs isn’t free. To keep them all involves additional QA and bugfixes for every release and designing an interface to allow a selecting different designs. There’s a cost to this, and why bother? As you say it’s literally a texture, not a big deal. What’s your justification for a development team to put time and effort to maintain some old designs that are no longer optimal?
And this is a microcosm of all interactions with technology. Some people simply don’t like change, even when there’s good reason for the changes. Every technological improvement no matter how big or small comes with reactions similar to yours. It’s best not to impede technological improvements to please curmudgeons, because there’s no pleasing them. You can decide to be angry over every minor improvement in technology, but that’s just deciding to be angry for petty reasons. It’s best to try to understand technological changes rather than always being angry over them.
I mean you’re still upset over a change in the look of scrollbar, even after the reasons for the changes were explained. There are much bigger changes in technology coming, not sure how you’re going to handle it if a scrollbar change bothers you.
- Comment on Experimental Video Game Made Purely With AI Failed Because Tech Was 'Unable to Replace Talent' 1 month ago:
Yeah, there’s many times I type “class for:” followed by a a dump of SQL, JSON, XML or whatever and it’ll make a class with properties named correctly with the right types. I still have to figure out tricky data relationships and that sort of thing, but the boring tasks of creating interfaces to databases and objects for serializing stuff goes a lot faster now.
So a much larger percentage of my time is devoted to solving problems rather than doing all the boring grunt work usually involved with getting data in and out of the app.
- Comment on Elder scrolls 1 month ago:
I’ve explained to you the decision making process that’s used when changing UI elements. If you’re so dedicated to being a curmudgeon to learn about why technology changes, that’s your decision.
- Comment on CFCs 1 month ago:
Dude, a date is a fixed point in time… just has less accuracy than if a time is included.
In what archaic system are int’s still 4 bytes?
When you have more experinece in programming in more languages, you’ll find that in a lot of modern languages an int is always 32 bit and a long is 64 bits. Doesn’t change if your system is 32 bits or 64 bits.
If I read your format on a 64-bit machine, it’ll break.
And this is exactly why many programming languages don’t change the definition of int and long for different processor architectures.
You clearly don’t have any experience with higher level programming languages, which you should really look into. If you have so little understanding of the problems with dates and times you should really only work in languages that have a well defined DateTime structure built in so you won’t get into trouble with all the various edge cases and performance problems you’re creating by not understanding why parsing date strings should be avoided whenever possible.
You know what’s not ambiguous ? “This time is stored as an ISO8601 string”.
Interesting that you were boldly claiming that experts use a dd-MM-yyyy format and now you’re bringing up a format that starts with yyyy-MM-dd. Do you understand now why it’s put into that order?
But yeah check out high level languages, they’ll serialize dates into a standard format for you. Though I still have to put in serialization options to handle communications with partners that don’t follow standards. Like all the time. I get enough headaches with just dates in a string formats when I can’t avoid it that I know better than to do it when I can avoid it.
The meme you had that says that experts use dd-MM-yyyy is the wrong way around. Beginners use the built-in DateTime functionality that’s offered by a high level language. Experts use this as well. It’s only the mid tier devs that think they’re going to come up with a better way on their own and get into the problems you’re going to find yourself in.
- Comment on CFCs 1 month ago:
First of all, midnight in what timezone? A timestamp is a specific instant in time, but dates are not, the specific moment that marks the beginning of a date depends on the timezone.
What are you talking about? The same problems apply no matter which format you’re talking about. Depending on which side of the dateline your timezone is on you could wind up with different dates.
Does your janky string format of “18-03-2024” suddenly has to become aware of the timezone if I tack on a “0:00” at the end of it? Or maybe you always will have timezone issues no matter what the precision of the time you want to store.
I think you got it in your mind that you can’t do anything other than Timestamp=getdate() and if it’s a date only you have to use a string. That’s not the case. You can indeed translate a date into any number of formats, unix time is one of them. I assure you that 1710720000 will translate to the same janky “18-03-2024” format you’re using every single time unless you deliberately mess with timezones in code where you admit that you don’t want to deal with timezones. But your string jankiness break simply by someone parsing it with MM-dd-yyyy just as easily and this may not require someone to do something to deliberately break it. Depending on the library that’s being used and the localization settings of the OS, this can happen automatically. If your code will break because someone has different OS settings than yours, you are writing bad code.
If the goal is to save space then your format uses 10 bytes, while the timestamp uses 4 (with Y2K38 problems) or 8 with 64 bit Epoch time. If you’re not too worried about saving space (you really shouldn’t be these days) then use the appropriate structs defined by the language you’re using and the DB you’re using.
Even this would be better than a string:
struct { int year byte month byte day }
Six bytes as opposed to 10 and there would be no issues with confusion with the dd and MM parts of the string. It’s still shit (use existing date libraries instead) but still won’t have as many problems than what you’re doing. Seriously anything is better than just dumping a date into a string. And as I say, using the dd-MM-yyyy format is bad for multiple reasons.
Though congratulations, you’ve convinced me that Y2K might’ve been a bigger problem than I thought given how adamant you are about repeating similar mistakes that caused those issues. I guess even when there’s very obvious problems with how someone’s doing things they will insist on doing things that way even when it’s pointed out all the problems with it. I can imagine someone in the 80s and 90s pointing out the Y2K problem to someone writing the code and getting some arrogant bullshit about how only mid-level programmers worry about that. “Experts put dates in strings LOL!”
- Comment on CFCs 1 month ago:
You also don’t store dates in a string that you’ll have to parse later. I’ve had to deal with MM-DD-YYYY vs. DD-MM-YYYY problems more times than I can count.
And you understand that you could have a date in unix time and leave the time to be midnight, right? You’d end up with an integer that you could sort without having to parse every goddamn string first.
And for God’s sake if you insist on using strings for dates at the very least go with something like YYYY-MM-DD. Someone else may someday have to deal with your shit code, at the very least make the strings sortable FFS.
- Comment on Gaslighting 1 month ago:
Telling a robot that he’s “done a man’s job” is a Gaff.
- Comment on CFCs 1 month ago:
The Mayans figured a calendar that only went to 2012 would be good enough. And they were right, their civilization didn’t exist anymore in 2012. Only relevance their calendar system had in 2012 was that some people felt like it was a prophecy about the end of the world. Nope, just was an arbitrary date the Mayans rightly assumed would be far enough away it wouldn’t matter.
While I suppose you could make a date format that was infinitely expandable, it would take more processing power and is really unnecessary.
Anyway got until 2038 until we’ll have to deal with a popular date format running out of bits. We’ll probably be in some kind of mad max post apocalyptic world before then so it won’t matter.
- Comment on CFCs 1 month ago:
You’re saying “imagine” a lot there.
Were there concrete examples of critical software that actually would’ve failed? At the time I remember there was one consultant that was on the news constantly saying everything from elevators to microwaves would fail on Y2K. Of course this was creating a lot of business for his company.
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
And sure a lot of of software needed to be tested to be sure someone didn’t do something stupid. But a lot of it was indeed an exaggeration. You have to reset the time on your microwave after a power outage but not the date, common sense tells you your microwave doesn’t care about the year. And when a reporter actually followed up with the elevator companies, it was the same deal. Most software simply doesn’t just fail when it’s run in an unexpected year.
If someone wrote a time critical safety mechanism for a nuclear reactor that involved parsing a janky homebrew time format from a string then there’s some serious problems in that software way beyond Y2K.
The instances of the Y2K bug I saw in the wild, the software still worked, it just displayed the date wrong.
Y2K38 is the real scary problem because people that don’t understand binary numbers don’t understand it at all. And even a lot of people in the technology field think it’s not a problem because “computers are 64 bit now.” Don’t matter how many bits the processor has, it’s only the size that’s compiled and stored that counts. And unlike some janky parsed string format, unix time is a format I could see systems at power plants actually using.
- Comment on Elder scrolls 1 month ago:
There is still a need to indicate progress when scrolling even with a mouse wheel. So scroll bars are designed with that in mind. And there is still occasion that you may want to use it to brag the bar to a specific part of a page. But this is fairly rare, because how do you know what part of a page you want to go to before you’ve seen it?
Currently on my Firefox there is indeed no scrollbar displayed. If I use my mouse wheel a thin version appears to indicate progress while scrolling. If I move my mouse to the edge of the screen a wider version appears which is easier to interface with on the rare occasion I want to do that. This is an optimal interface given the hardware I have available.
On a phone or table the scrollbar will not be interacted with my clicking on it. It only appears to indicate progress.
The old scrollbar design is obsolete. Doesn’t make any sense on touchscreens and is a waste of screen space on desktops since people have scroll wheels now.
Obsolete doesn’t mean it no longer works, a horse and carriage still functions after all. Obsolete simply means there’s more optimal options available because of improvements in technology. The scrollbar on Firefox right now is more optimal because of newer technology. The scrollbars pictured are obsolete no matter how much nostalgia you might feel for them.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
If you cap rent, you have housing shortages. If you cap interest rates, you have out of control inflation.
It seems UBI is a product of people on the left buying into the supply side economcis theories which hinge on the idea the work is meaningless and it’s only through a largess from the wealthy that people have money. This is a competing idea within the flawed supply side economics framework where UBI is a proposed way to have people receive a largess from the government instead of from the wealthy.
Everything you consume comes from someone doing work somewhere. Those minimum wage jobs don’t exist because companies are being charitable. They exist because there’s work that needs to be done. They’ll tell you that they’re “job creators” and those jobs would be eliminated if minimum wage were increased, but that’s all a lie. UBI leading to some Star Trek paradise is another lie meant to distract people.
Increase minimum wage, form more labor unions, and working conditions will improve. There’s known solutions to these problems, we should implement these solutions instead of the solutions proposed by wealthy people like Andrew Yang.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Those jobs still need to be done though. Seems to me the problem is that minimum wage is too low, it isn’t a living wage. So it’s bizarre to me that the emphasis isn’t on simply raising minimum wage. UBI feels like something everyone knows won’t happen, it’s just an excuse to be angsty.
- Comment on Elder scrolls 1 month ago:
Its the epitome of technology that as it improves some things become obsolete.
Pretty much every mouse has a scroll wheel on them now. I very seldom click on a scroll bar now. So the design has changed with that consideration in mind.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
I mean… kinda?
I think you’re putting too much evil intent behind the motivations though. Supply and demand isn’t some made up excuse. If the prices were to stay the same and everyone had more money, then there would be shortages. It’s not as if a factory can instantly increase production and the supply chain can instantly get the products on the shelves over night. There are real world factors involved in increasing production.
So what happens is prices increase for many products and this results in inflation. Nobody wants inflation, not even the wealthy. So the central bank will want to tamp down that inflation and the lever they use for that is increasing interest rates. So you wanted to put that UBI towards a mortgage or a car payment? Well a lot of it will be going towards the increased interest on the money you’re borrowing.
And the thing about inflation is that it doesn’t really get reversed. So the inflation from the initial shock to the economy would take a bite out of UBI (and also the income besides UBI). Your employer may be less likely to give you a raise to offset that inflation because you have UBI. and the fix for the inflation will mean paying more interest on a mortgage.
So yeah, UBI wouldn’t gain people much. It’s mostly just a poison pill promoted to kids by wealthy people like Andrew Yang so you don’t push for an increase in minimum wage. An increase in minimum wage would be a direct transfer of wealth from businesses to employees. They don’t want this so they promote UBI which isn’t actually feasible to distract from minimum wage increases (which almost everyone supports) and make taxing the wealthy less likely (which is also supported by most, but not when it’s to pay for UBI).
- Comment on Still wanna know 1 month ago:
It’s a creative choice. The show is from the perspective of the children so many adults are portrayed to be so distant that you don’t even see their faces.
The first instance of this trope I can recall is the Charlie Brown cartoons where you neither see the teacher at all and can’t even understand what the teacher is saying. It’s just an off screen voice saying MWAW MEH MWAW MEH MWAW. But the children do understand the teacher, but the teacher is just a weird presence that the children have to appease.
Basically the adults don’t understand what’s going on with the world of the kids. They’re aren’t all that relevant to the story but if they aren’t portrayed at all then you’d wonder “where are the adults?” So they exist but aren’t important to the story.
Also children can imagine the adults to be their own parents if their faces aren’t shown. Makes it feel like the children in the show could be the siblings to the kids that are watching.
- Comment on Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4 1 month ago:
It’s taken over my desktop. Everyone else can deal with an OS that’s constantly trying to sell them shit they don’t want if that’s what they prefer.
- Comment on Zionists doing a rave to block aid trucks at Ker Shalom crossing while Palestinians are starving 2 months ago:
Like I say, hypocrisy depends on context.
You’re using a tragic situation your own little masturbatory gotcha play on right wing on what right wing people say about your protests. Interesting how you thought that was ok, isn’t it? 🤔 🤔 🤔
- Comment on Zionists doing a rave to block aid trucks at Ker Shalom crossing while Palestinians are starving 2 months ago:
All the leftists in any other situation would be applauding protesters taking direct action.
I don’t really agree but perhaps we should respect their wishes this one time. 🤔
It seems hypocrisy depends on context, doesn’t it?
- Comment on Zionists doing a rave to block aid trucks at Ker Shalom crossing while Palestinians are starving 2 months ago:
Your social media feed wants you to think that, but the reality is that these protesters are the far right ultra orthodox types that vote for parties that are the furthest right of the governing coalition. Yay for proportional representation where you can form the government by making a coalition with the furthest right parties, right?
- Comment on Who would win? 2 months ago:
It’s not the acorns that are the problem, dude. It’s the fucking squirrels. They’ve been stashing them away… waiting for the right time.
You think the acorn that hit the cop just fell from a tree? Don’t be naive! There a was a squirrel behind the grassy knoll that launched it at the cop.
- Comment on US concerned NASA will be overtaken by China's space program 2 months ago:
SpaceX is already a thing. What is it with Elon Musk and the letter X?
- Comment on US concerned NASA will be overtaken by China's space program 2 months ago:
Their station has like three modules (with plans to add 3 more) and capacity for 3 people. The ISS has at least 16 modules (maybe over 30 depending on what you count as a module) and capacity for over a dozen people.
Like many things from authoritarian countries, it looks nice but isn’t even close in terms of capabilities.
- Comment on US concerned NASA will be overtaken by China's space program 2 months ago:
Theoretically private programs would be an increased cost over a NASA only program since private companies want a profit margin.
But Congress being what it is tends to require NASA programs to create jobs in a lot of different voting districts across the country which leads to an insane amount of inefficiencies.
We can’t have nice things because of pork barrel politics.
- Comment on efficiency 2 months ago:
Is it more than the price of a hard drive?
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 2 months ago:
Microsoft, please google “dystopia”
“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that. Perhaps you want me to Bing “dystopia” instead?”
- Comment on Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI. 2 months ago:
Ehh… I think manipulating people on the internet is so easy they don’t need to dig down to that level.
Though for security reasons things like “we should blow up the government” that the person later deleted probably are tracked.
- Comment on Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI. 2 months ago:
So make it like the current iteration of Twitter?
- Comment on Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI. 2 months ago:
Well there’s copyright law. There’s already lawsuits happening so we’ll have to see how this shakes out.
But even if the AI companies lose the lawsuits, I think it’s likely they’ll still have access to content where the T&C of the site says they’re allowed to sell the data.
- Comment on Reddit started doing what they always wanted to do, sell user content to AI. 2 months ago:
A devil incarnate that makes a lot of puns.