mbivert

17 ms·

151.
by mbivert 2y ago
Yeah the problem when higher-ups have little care for details is that they may act on an imprecise-to-incorrect understanding of the factual reality ("the map isn't the territory", yada-yada). There's a middle-ground bet
152.
by mbivert 2y ago
I should have emphasized considerably , my bad: the goal was to cover the foreach vs. map type of issues, both being essentially equivalent, and more of a matter of style. What I had in mind was things like removing 20/30 lines of lit
153.
by mbivert 2y ago
Life would be so boring if we made everything flawless, we must find ways to spice it up whenever we feel like it's going too well. I have a friend like that: loves pure functional programming languages; day job? jack of all trades d
154.
by mbivert 2y ago
> Be wary of pride. It's a good habit in and on itself, but there still are objective heuristics to evaluate software quality. Simplicity for example: if to solve the exact same problem, with no (impacting) performance penalty, on
155.
by mbivert 2y ago
Agreed. For example, once you have a good grasp of the codebase, and an overview of the future requirements, you can perform low-risks, local refactorings, so as to ease implementing both current and later features/bugfixes/etc. T
156.
by mbivert 2y ago
Wind can fan flames as well as extinguish them. Unironically, Musk's "turning the other cheek" revamp ("conspicuous acts of kindness") may have been a great way to fully eliminate the long-term threat. I'm far
157.
by mbivert 2y ago
> because of the lack of being able to pass multiple arguments to a template I'm not sure if this I understand the issue correctly, but one can pass multiple arguments, by wrapping them e.g. into a hash ( https://go.dev&#x
158.
by mbivert 2y ago
> Everything I run with sudo is logged so I know how I messed up. FWIW, shells have a (configurable) history file. I'm not sure how it compares to sudo's logging though. I also personally perform little day to day admin tasks (
159.
by mbivert 2y ago
> it feels weird to use the same password for both accounts I'm not sure different passwords adds more protection for single-user machines, especially when sudo(1) can spawn root shells!
160.
by mbivert 2y ago
Makes sense (I keep one warm in a tmux, two shortcuts away at most, so it never occurred to me).
161.
by mbivert 2y ago
I've never understood the need for sudo(1) on single-user, physical machines: I keep a root shell (su(1)) around for admin tasks, and it's always been sufficient.
162.
by mbivert 2y ago
Debatable: 80 columns ease reading, as each line is completely within the cone of vision. It's not enforced in their style(5)[0], but the code mostly and naturally (e.g. short variable names) falls within this limit (random sample[1]).
163.
by mbivert 2y ago
The choice is most likely deliberate: this is a 9front crowd (Plan9's aesthetic choices are rather peculiar). It's what man(1) should display on a 80-column or so terminal.
164.
by mbivert 2y ago
Food for thought: have a look at this paper[0] about structural regular expressions. The author (Rob Pike) sketches in the last section an awk-support. I remember using such regexps a while ago to tweak indented JSON and JSON-like data (t
165.
by mbivert 3y ago
The parent probably meant that UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII.
166.
by mbivert 3y ago
I'm confident that the technical skills can almost (e.g. disabilities) always be trained, given sufficient time. Creativity/inspiration seems to be missing culturally. Consider for example Maths or Physics, where creativity is ess
167.
by mbivert 3y ago
It's definitely not a black and white thing but a (flexible) scale: a noticeable variation of intensity can be felt when practicing an activity demanding an intense visual focus on a specific object (e.g. painting): an stronger-than-us
168.
by mbivert 3y ago
I remember reading once somewhere on the Internet someone baffled to learn that people weren't in control when dreaming. It's amusing how inner-experiences can unknowingly be so wildly different from person to person.
169.
by mbivert 3y ago
There's a middle ground between encouraging women to sexualize themselves, and forcing them to wear a burka. Furthermore, veils & cie are but a superficial implementation of the parent's idea, which is to encourage humilit
170.
by mbivert 3y ago
> Additionally, being asexual is 'wrong' in a life / procreation sense. It's a kind of dead-end personality trait. I think that's a bit too reductive: asexuality ≠ not having kids. Even people who dislike the den
171.
by mbivert 3y ago
I'm confident people understood the causality relations early on. But as time passes, the knowledge was progressively lost, and people were stuck with mis-understood habits: it's the "5 monkeys experiment"[0]. A Chinese
172.
by mbivert 3y ago
I think religions played a too often underestimated positive role in past societies, and I say that I someone who isn't particularly fond of what I would call the "religious mentality". For example in Buddhism there's th
173.
by mbivert 3y ago
It's deeper than that: the vast majority of people believe in science in the exact same way as the used to believe in Christianism. Try asking around for bulletproof proofs of the Earth's roundness. Or communicating the idea tha
174.
by mbivert 3y ago
Exactly! I believe those myths, like the Bible's and others, were used in part to teach people a few basic things, so as to ensure some amount of social stability, hence allowing societies to persist. "Controlling the masses via f
175.
by mbivert 3y ago
(I'm seeing this quite late, my bad). Let me rephrase this: the observation is the translator's; the analysis is mine. Why would anyone chose to celebrate so highly such a childish behavior? That's preposterous. People weren&
176.
by mbivert 3y ago
There are mnemonics to help remember the characters. For example: - 嫉 (jealousy) is composed of 女 (woman) and 疾 (illness, hatred): jealousy is a feminine illness or a manifestation of feminine hatred; - 惑 (to be puzzled) is composed of 心 (h
177.
by mbivert 3y ago
For that kind of things, lead-holders are preferable: you at least get a consistent lead width, despite the wearing, assuming you maintain the orientation of the pencil. An alternative is to sharpen your pencils with a utility knife & s
178.
by mbivert 3y ago
Not necessarily: > A year or two after I'd joined the Labs, I [Rob Pike] was pair programming with Ken Thompson on an on-the-fly compiler for a little interactive graphics language designed by Gerard Holzmann. I was the faster typis
179.
by mbivert 3y ago
Well, there are such tools for C, but wouldn't using them be detrimental in this context? Think, like using a debugger vs. trying to wrap the execution in one's mind: I'not saying that one shouldn't use debuggers, but n
180.
by mbivert 3y ago
As a painter, this is both amusing and terrifying to read. There are simple ways to conceptualize color mixing, for example the primary model, or HSV. Of course, those are models, so they don't capture everything, as mentioned ITT (e.g

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