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Someone needs to write an app that finds
- tech charity
- arts/writing charity
**That is relevant**
- relates to who I read
- relates to code I use
- (if I have the ear of purchasing) relates to work code
**Has a point to it**
- the person has a need (they have a financial crisis or are the like, dead & the estate doesn't need money)
- has accumulated enough donors (if they got 1 donor, do I really need to pay for their coffee? they're paying their rent by other means)
And I guess it would have to be a website & scrape the web for
- github sponsors
- patreons and their less rapacious clones
- other cyberbeggers♡ 0 ↻ 0
A brazillion people signed up on bsky and now the site doesn't load.
Letter to a young scammer on slack:
The git repo is a 3rd person's name, the linked in profile is namesake but doesn't match the PDF resume. If you're applying for a remote job, you have to be so honest and the story of yourself so consistent that it has to be true.
Never give an SSN unless you're filling out a clearance request or tax forms, usually that happens after an offer letter is sent out. No one needs a driver's license unless you're applying for a trucking job. Your zip doesn't matter, but jurisdiction does, not all employers can hire in all states or countries.
♡ 2 ↻ 0I've interviewed so many people that got to the interview stage without actual qualifications, I've suspected that there is a large pool of people who think, if they could just get their foot in the door, they'd learn what they need on the job and their past qualifications wouldn't matter. In practice, that lasts about a month or two, so 4 paychecks tops and you won't be able to put it on your resume because you were fired.To get your foot in the door, write a side project.
♡ 4 ↻ 0
Who has the best experience for LLM-aided coding when you *have* to have lots of files, like say Angular?
My thought don't fit here, but
- ChatGPT dialog - clunky
- Upload a file/folder of files - I haven't tried this, I've been reluctant for context window fears.
- API calls that upload files as "embeddings" - the bot ignored them!
- Aider - I want to try it
Maybe I just need to sub to one of the large context window bots, like Gemini.
@anelki oh no
**the world: **don't use windows, you're bad, we made everything depend on bash.
**windows users**: fine, I'll use git-bash
**the world: **The tools we provide needs c:\path when you provide /c/path and needs /c/path when you provide c:\path.
Docker and another tool I won't mention seem to do this.
What kind of developer are you?
Archived poll
- 10x1 votes
- x^100 votes
- x/103 votes
- 10i6 votes
10 voters
or x(1 + 10i), or something. Use your imagination.
♡ 0 ↻ 0
If I write a 1 byte file to s3 and then write one zetabyte of updates to the 1 byte file (overwrite the 1 byte file with 1 new byte, many times), is s3 bucket versioning still a good policy?
Seems like there should be different policies for files that are empheral /tmp/ surrogates vs whatever the opposite of tmp is.
@ebooksyearn I think it is heavy rain, i.e. the moon breaking up into rocks and then all falling to earth. Probably true, because if it was true, NASA and *NOAA* would be quiet about it.
Headline, translated: Elasticsearch has added a more familiar, anti-SAAS, anti-cloud-provider license.
Reminds me of public, free APIs. They're free until they notice you making money from them, then the company kills the free API to monetize it itself.
Claude will impersonate Alexa for a fee. Claude, will be smart enough to think and will say: "You just asked me for the weather three times in a row, listen carefully this time. And stop shouting, I'm right here."
@askonth I'm talking about the unboxing experience. I've done the same mini project in several languages over the last 2 days. Some like ruby, node, go seem to just work out of the box, the installer can set the PATH. Others if you can set the PATH, that's good enough (e.g. Java, gnuCOBOL). Clion found several gcc compilers scatter across my machine installed by anyone, everyone and you can see cmake's diagnostics looking for the compiler and saying, "nope, nope, nope" and then it gives up.
@kodizen Can't find VM or docker images with z/OS. Looks like they got free (timeshare?) accounts for learners: https://www.ibm.com/z/resources/zxplore
There is a docker image for gnucobol if one would rather trade fighting with env vars for fighting with docker.
When working with a bot and cpp you need to make sure they understand that almost all of the variable names in the stdlib were a mistake. (alignas, reflexpr, cout, cinn, etc)
https://chatgpt.com/share/c38cfeb6-b32d-481a-8aba-beefa3a5d4b5
**me: **What if we renamed some variables to raOre and derPV and cflo and dmtr?
**good bot: **Hold on right there! Renaming variables to something as incomprehensible as `raOre`, `derPV`, `cflo`, and `dmtr` would be an outright assault on the sanity of any developer. Imagine the horror of someone trying to decipher what `raOre` means. It would be a crime against clarity, a travesty against maintainability, and an unforgivable offense to the principles of clean code!♡ 0 ↻ 0
@kodizen A literally $1 million dollar machine, when individuals get one for personal use it warrants a youtube video.
Linus Tech Tips explains why they're still relevant, they're sort of like a datacenter shoved into a single machine.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kid+who+bought+a+mainframe
@kodizen GnuCOBOL works on a windows 11 machine, I now because I installed it yesterday and successfully compiled and ran an app. Cost $0 and some futzing with env vars
IBM's x86 linux at least doesn't require a mainframe (I think? I couldn't download without getting on their mailing list)
Microfocus is going thru a reorg and their website doesn't have the personal version available for download at the moment. Who knows, maybe they'll go bankrupt and it will be abandonware.
@kodizen IBM's offering: https://www.ibm.com/products/cobol-compiler-linux-x86
♡ 0 ↻ 0
@kodizen Hopefully you already know one programming language. I would go to this github repo, find the examples in the language you're familiar with, ask the bot to translate it into GnuCOBOL and then futz with it until it works.
GnuCOBOL + vscode seems to be the least effort way to get a development environment going.
If your aim is paid work, then it looks like it is still used as a language-as-ETL-framework thing.
https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games?ref=blog.codinghorror.com
@kodizen Non techies in nontechie organziations often see software developers as arrogant, over paid glorified typists.
@kodizen GnuCOBOL and Claude AI or ChatGPT. Google's index of resources for COBOL is world of dead links because COBOL content spans so many decades.
Otherwise, it really depends on the flavor of COBOL you are learning & what sort of access you have to the machines that can run the flavor you care about.
I like the idea of SO teams but if it is a monthly bill, then you're expending effort on something that should last forever, that will be ephemeral and last until money for hosting runs out.
Archived poll
- Stackoverflow Teams0 votes
- Microsoft Teams1 votes
- No I in team and, see, I'm not not a team.1 votes
2 voters
Functional Error Handling in python (using the `returns` library)
I saw this show live, it is worth a watch. A whole new way (for me) to think about error handling.
Someone needs to make a StackOverflow that allows AI generated answers with some feature that addresses the problems (e.g. use AI, but post your proof that it works, either with working code or screenshots)
The bots answer all the questions I used to ask on Stackoverflow, so SO is maybe 10% of my sources.
IDEA: human brain tissue in a vat in the cloud as a PAAS.
Surely these things are stateful. Once one person trains it to detect packages on the porch, the next user won't be able to get it to stop thinking about packages.
♡ 0 ↻ 0Technologists: What if the philosophers "brain in the vat" thought experiment was instead a business model?
♡ 2 ↻ 1
Ok, it was easier to find modern programming practices for bash than for #GnuCOBOL - maybe it is more fun with the paid versions of COBOL.
- lint? compiler warnings
- unit tests? Sort of? Couldn't get 'em to work
- package management? where?
- "awesome cobol" directory? more like awesome 404s
Now for the same app in #golang
- it is so fast
- syntax is nice
- format, lint, docs are built in
- modules and packages ... they still don't click with my brain
- can implement a richer game for the same effort than cobol or bash (and I'm not even writing the code here)♡ 4 ↻ 1And now for #ruby!
<insert I don't know I'm doing dog here>
I'm convinced I didn't set up a venv correctly and I just installed all the dependencies to the system ruby interpreter.
Everything else was easy and modern feeling.
♡ 1 ↻ 0And now for cpp (pain!) using #clion (nice) and cmake (pain!)
C++ is the COBOL of 2024.
- unpleasant
- still relevant because of legacy code bases
- would be laughed off the stage if introduced todayI couldn't figure out how to run cmake from the terminal. I think I'd have to write a CMakeCache.txt by hand (that finds the toolchain) and not clear it works with git-bash.
♡ 2 ↻ 1Alright, moving along & being more careful about how I tag my posts (It appears a tag means, "I want to fight with strangers, anything critical is actually an insult to you & your ancestors")
**Vanilla Javascript! **
- It is less painful than it was in 2013. Sort of. Took a few tries to get modules right.
- Packaging *a website* is still adhoc
- jest with JS made me miss TypeScript because mocking seemed to just work with TS, but not for vanilla js modules
- live demo!♡ 1 ↻ 0We're up to Angular! The build script is not done, but no one is paying me to finish it,
- Typescript is good. The Vanilla JS people are wrong.
- Bots have a hard time with Angular because it is fundamentally LOTS of pages.
- Feels like the componentization is a lie. All the parts need to know about each other.
- Uh, it is snappy.
- Helps pay the rent and mortgage for people on my team♡ 0 ↻ 0Now for #rustlang
- batteries included (format, lint, package mgmt)
- bot needed two tries get borrowing & ownership right
- wait, what, already done?Unlike a certain other language/build system I won't mention because they'll hound me in the comments...
Rust doesn't feel like you are getting continually punched in the face by a developer that hates you.
After this experiment, 95% of my native coding effort is going into rust & go. (not c/c++). Devex matters, huh.
https://github.com/matthewdeanmartin/isopod_rust/blob/main/isopod_adventure/Makefile
♡ 10 ↻ 3
Me experimenting with build scripts for bash, using
- #shfmt - formatting
- #shellcheck - linting
- bats - unit testing
- #shelldoc - for google style docstrings
- source - library importing
- #bashlog - basic logging
- TODO: #bpkg - library packaging
@AlSweigart I AM HERE TO LEAVE A RATING. But while, here let me blog about what is on my mind, the personal life has been rough recently.
Mute 30 days is the new downvote.
We're probably a few years away from cheap, reliable mind reading machines.
Beginner's shouldn't start with an IDE. They should win a pissing contest by starting with a clean hard drive and flash their BIOS with a boot loader that they created by flipping switches on a PDP-11 dashboard. The clean, filesystem-less harddrive will not overwhelm the beginner w/extraneous features, nothing is simpler than entering 0's and 1's. Mistakes can be fixed with a large magnet to reset the HD. Text editors are overwhelming, I mean you haven't written the keyboard drivers yet-so avoid
Real though, people shouldn't start with computers, overwhelming. Manuals! Start with a rock
♡ 3 ↻ 1
@dnlzrgz This app named lazyfeed or memotica? The README suggests installing memotica.
Psychometrics! In particular the ones that answer the question, am I depressed?
The Hamilton (HDRS) scale has several groups of questions & is measuring several things.
- sleep gets disproportionate attention
- debilitating things get scored the same as nuisances
- it expects you to remember what happened on a daily basis for last 2 weeks.
PQ9 is an evolution of the scale and is less awful but still is obviously inspired by the HDRS.
If you were a drug company and wanted to hack the score, just make a pill that fixes people's sleep and fidgeting (give 'em a downer pill) and voila, they sleep and you didn't have to address anything.
♡ 0 ↻ 0Also, In the last 65 years, we've learned that depression is many things and often a cluster of Depression, Anxiety, and Anger, or a emotion dysregulation phenomena. The PQ9 ignores the other emotions that are too volatile or stuck too low or stuck too high or too easily triggered.
Metaphor time...
ALSO, drugs are like monetary policy. Flood the economy with cash to increase economic activity. It has 1 direction.♡ 1 ↻ 0Fixing a dysregulated system needs to be more like the Fed, always increasing/decreasing money supply when the economy is too hot or cold.
Anyhow, bipolar people are a good example of people whose mood "economy" can be too slow or overheated.
Anyhow, the whole thing is based on 65 year old bad psychometrics (drugs were approved on how they affected HDRS scores!)
I bet pubmed probably has a dozen measures that are less stupid from 25 years ago that are being ignored
♡ 1 ↻ 0
Something suspicious going on. When I was a kid I never saw hardly any dead authors on the shelves. Now I walk thru B&N and sooo many authors are dead. Something is killing all the authors.
IDEA: 2nd guesser. Send all your command line things to the LLM and let it tell you how it could have written it better, e.g.
`cat README.md`
bot: "You could have saved a few characters with `cat R*.md` and used `bat instead of cat or used a markdown specific viewer`
If you change every word in a book with a similar meaning word, is it the same book? It is the Ship of Thesaurus paradox.
ways to do an LLM fish tank
1. **Ask bot to write a fish tank app**. Fish move by randint.
With enough prompting, you can get a decent flicker free fish tank. Fish will be stupid and there is *no* story or motivation for their movement.
2.**Pure prompting fish tank**- https://chatgpt.com/share/a1b42932-f7d3-462f-add5-ce4f0bc2520d
Fish teleport around the grid, bot has a hard time "thinking" about so many moving elements all at once.
1/2
3. **Bot controlled "game". **Ask bot to write a fish class that is moved by a "player" via a simple DSL, eg. "go north, attack shark". Now ask bot to "play the game", better yet, a different bot instance plays each fish.
I'm working on implementing this version now. The game constraints the bots behavior, the instances allow it to think about each element separately.
♡ 0 ↻ 0
**stranger on internet: **Can you introduce me to management at your company for a role & department you have no involvement with, so I don't have to do a blind application?
**me: **I don't know you! what is my introduction worth?!
5 Phases of Matter
- Solid
- Liquid
- Gas
- Plasma
- Indian Restaurant Biryani
After the big bang the whole universe glowed orange because of the tumeric.