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pixelscript

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pixelscript , to memes in But it's all about convenience

Did you seriously just post a GNU/Linux interjection unironically?

pixelscript , to asklemmy in What app you americans use for personal conversations?

SMS/RCS for friends/family in meatspace, Discord for friends in cyberspace.

Snapchat still seems to be a default conduit of communication for my family members and their respective friends. I do not have Snapchat and never will. They are mildly annoyed at my stubbornness.

I have yet to meet a single soul in my local circles who is willing to install any messaging platform over any concern of privacy or security. These are very simply not important factors to any of them. It’s upsetting. But, y’know, lead a horse to water, etc.

Discord continues to be a choice platform for my online friends circle. I don’t know so much about any of them, but I almost never use it for 1:1 private messaging. It’s there for the rare aside conversation. But its primary form of use for me is as a big town square in servers with dozens of people. It’s essentially my version of going to the mall after school or to the local pub after work.

pixelscript , to asklemmy in can anyone tell me wtf this is?

Huh. So that’s why they’re found in Minecraft strongholds.

pixelscript , to programmerhumor in Me: I can code. My Friend: Oh You must be really smart! Me: Yes… but no.

Yeah, how much time you get to dwell on it will depend on lots of factors and the needs of your client/employer.

I happen to work at a place where timeframes for fixes are quite lax, and the codebase I’m working with is slowly being recussitated from a decade of bad decisions from a D-tier web developer. (Dreamweaver was involved… let’s leave it at that.) I can imagine if you have a codebase that was somewhat competently designed from the start and/or your client/employer has a “I need this fixed yesterday or else your ass is FIRED” urgency, you don’t have time to dwell on such things. But it helps to have the experience that at least lets you do it a little bit rather than not at all.

pixelscript , to programmerhumor in Me: I can code. My Friend: Oh You must be really smart! Me: Yes… but no.

We hired a greenhorn dev several months ago. He had two years experience at a larger company. I only have about five so far and my company doesn’t really pay all that well to field great talent, so I wasn’t hoping for the world. But we were expecting at least something a little above entry level experience.

The guy did know how to write basic code. Frankly not to the degree I hoped for, though. Also lacked all auxilliary skills like effective use of version control, logging in to remote servers over SSH, documenting code with doc comments. He doesn’t even write particularly legible code without the formatter to fix it for him. Very sloppy with spacing, braces, etc.

But those are all of little concern. Those could all be taught. It meant more effort needed to be spent in onboarding than we wanted, but it could be done. Helps that he has a very positive oulook on constructive criticism and he uses it to improve.

One thing that I don’t think I can teach him in any reasonable amount of time, though, is how he mentally tracks the structure of the program he’s working on.

When I program, every time I change anything, I construct a mental web of everything this piece of code might affect when changed, and the ramifications it might have. I think of neighboring code and concepts looking for patterns, and whether the new thing I’m adding or changing could be better expressed differently to leverage those patterns. I think of the future trajectory of the module or feature, and whether it would be advantageous to bake-in a certain kind of forward-thinking extensibility now rather than after it becomes partially entrenched later. And most of all, I think of how someone completely unfamiliar with this code might read it, and how I can improve the way it is written to make the most important parts stand out clearest.

And when I’m debugging code, even if I see the problem and think I immediately know the solution, I still take time to read the surrounding code. I try to piece together the original bugged code’s intent. Is this onvious-looking problem the real problem? Or is it a poorly documented, poorly structured mess that looks like it wants to do one thing but is intending to do an entirely different thing? This hesitation has saved my ass on several occasions.

New dev doesn’t do any of these things. He pulls a bug ticket, figures out what module or function is the supposed source of the problem, and bangs on it until the effects of the problem disappear. Little research done to understand what the intent of the code he’s altering wants to do, and even less spent on figuring out what downstream systems will be affected. And once he achieves his singular result, he just pushes it as-is. No cleanup pass, sometimes forgets to format it the way we ask him to.

To be fair, it’s a big new codebase. I can’t expect him to reason around things he is not familiar with, nor would I think it reasonable that he study the entire codebase before touching it.

I also don’t think these things can’t be learned. I had to learn them at some point, after all. But I do believe that people like myself and one of my fellow devs are more predisposed to picking these programming soft skills up, whether it be through nature or nurture or some combination. That, and I don’t think these kinds of soft skills can really be “taught” in the traditional sense. These are wrenches you can only really learn to dodge after being hit by a few.

pixelscript , to asklemmy in if you standardise one thing, what is it and why

I mean, there IS a universal SQL standard that all of the major dialects are supersets of. It’s only when you get into the funky stuff that you start finding dialect-specific syntax and features.

pixelscript , to programmerhumor in Should have run slower.

I got an application that runs through a big calculation that has to pass several sanity checks along the way. If any check fails, the input parameters are tweaked and the calculation starts again from the top, iteratively approaching the ideal solution. Do-while is perfect for this.

It beats recursion in non-tail-call-optimized implementations (JavaScript…). And while this could be done just as well with a comon while loop plus a flag variable, I like the way the syntax of do-while naturally reads as, “Do [thing]. … Did it work? No? Do it again”.

I’d still argue it’s redundant. If they got rid of it tomorrow I’d refactor and cope with no complaints. But as long as it’s around, I like using it.

pixelscript , to asklemmy in Do you think lemmy would be as popular as reddit?

Your points about the Fediverse being immune to enshittification feel like echoes of what we’d say about the world wide web twenty five or so years ago. The web itself is somewhat of a federated platform. Websites are analogous to instances. And while it would be dubious to claim that the entire web as an infrastructure has enshittified (though Google sure seems to be trying…), I think it’s not controversial at all to claim that the biggest players alive on the web have.

Yeah, you can always make your own scrappy little website. But you’ll be an island few to no users will want to visit and support if you’re competing with the other players. That, or you catch on and grow to the point where you yourself become the villain.

I see two roads for the Fediverse. Either it never grows past some filter and remains scrappy, or several large instances for the biggest platforms will dominate, sap up the market share of attention, and then use their weight to pressure how the protocol is maintained in the future, embrace-extend-extinguish style.

Also, “no profit motive”? Where critical masses of people gather, entrepeneurs surely follow. Someone will figure out a way to monetize hosting a Fediverse instance. Hell, Threads tried, sort of. That alone won’t immediately enshittify the whole Fediverse. But given enough time and growth, well, see above.

pixelscript , to asklemmy in Do you think lemmy would be as popular as reddit?

As long as algoritmically driven centralized content pipelines remain popular, the Fediverse in general will not capture the mainstream.

Say what you will about Lemmy and Mastadon et al being “straightforward and easy to use”. I’m sure it is for you. But there’s a reason most mainstream platforms treat their users like absolute cretins: the majority of mainstream users are, and they both enjoy and expect being coddled and catered to by the platform.

The very notion of Lemmy being sharded into “instances” and what that means is so antithetical to the common preconceived notion of what a social media platform is to most people. “Oh, it’s not just all here in one place?” And yeah, federation greases the wheels a lot so no one even has to think about instances… until a community you like is suddenly rendered inaccessible via defederation.

Also, content discovery on the Fediverse is admittedly kind of ass. Only those who both know what they want going in and where to look for what they want really get anything out of it. Most centralized social media platforms are relentless content recommendation engines because people don’t actuslly know what they want until they’ve had it brought to them. An algorithm that at least attempts to adapt to what you want to see more of is a key part of that. Lemmy does not have this (nor should it).

All that said, the fact that Fediverse platforms like Lemmy filter “common people” in these ways is, from what I can tell from here and elsewhere, a feature, not a bug. By being here at all, you prove a kind of baseline competency and a willingness to put in effort to learn the system that sets you at the forefront of most social media users. Most of us like it that way and are happy to keep growth of the community stunted in exchange for it.

Of course, all of the major platforms were in those shoes at one point. Will the Fediverse be the ship everyone leaps to next when the current platforms become so enshittified that even the main stream hates it? Maybe. But wherever the main stream goes, enshittification inevitably follows. The mainstream success of the Fediverse will synonomously be the death of the Fediverse as we know it. I for one would like some more time to hang out here before then.

pixelscript , to programmerhumor in If Programming Languages Were Games (Comic)

Alexey Pajitnov. He worked for the government, and made Tetris in his spare time across several late nights at his shared workstation. It was a hobby project made out of boredom, not something designed for any ulterior purpose.

He was a fan of those toy puzzle games where you have to fit shaped tiled pieces into a rectangular grid, so he decided to program a version of that for his workstation. When he succeeded with that, he found it rather boring to play with. So he spiced it up by making pieces fall from the top (to add challenge) and made them clear away when you completed rows (so the game would last longer). That’s pretty much it. Dead simple. Everything else from the iconic tile colors to the music were added by licensees later down the line.

pixelscript , (edited ) to asklemmy in What was one thing your teacher did that you still can't forgive them for?

Who said anything about putting heads down? I wasn’t pissing about reading a book or playing games on my laptop during lecture, I was paying attention. Head up, eyes locked, watching.

“Classroom expectations”? The only reasonable expectation here is that I pass the class. Whether the teacher thinks patting my head, rubbing my belly, and jumping up and down whilst doing so is the ideal way to acheive it is irrelevant. Especially so if it is demonstrably to the contrary. Literal data for this exists in the form of grades displaying the trend.

My response can’t be “but Joey is passing my class.” As much as I would like it to be.

Maybe my anecdote is no longer reflective of modern institutions where teachers are increasingly restricted and scrutenized over dumb factors they don’t even control, but I find this quite a strange take, because a different middle school teacher of mine in the same school played this exact card to great effect. It is not immediately obvious to me why you couldn’t.

EDIT: Sitting on that response for a moment, it seems that to some degree you read it as if I was being disruptive in class, or otherwise not paying attention and setting that example to my peers. In these cases I would take your side. You have a responsibility to teach students the soft skills of proper attention and listening comprehension.

I was not violating this. My whole debacle was very specifically the putting pencil to paper part. In my view, notes are strictly an assistive tool. If I demonstrably did not require this tool to perform (evidenced by grades), and even moreso performed worse with it (further evidenced by grades), I do not agree that I should be forced to use it, specifically at a time where students are arguably old enough to start making choices like study strategy for themselves.

And I am not sufficiently convinced that this specific kind of selectivity is sufficiently toxic to your teaching position that you have to cast aside your better judgement to not rock the boat. But perhaps things really are that dire now. If they are, well, I guess that’s just a bummer for both of us. :/

pixelscript , to asklemmy in What was one thing your teacher did that you still can't forgive them for?

A middle school social studies teacher of mine gave me detention on numerous occasions because I refused to take notes in his class.

Partway into the year during parent-teacher conferences, where parents met with teachers to discuss their children’s performance in class, the issue was brought up.

“Pixelscript is having some difficulties in my class. He is not taking notes during lectures. I’ve given him detention several times.”

“Well that’s strange, it says on his report card that he has an A in the class.”

“Well, yes, he does extremely well on homework and tests, but you see, he doesn’t take notes…”

“…Are you kidding me?!”

The greatest irony of the situation was that on the few occasions he forced me to take notes, it lessened my comprehension, because focusing on writing in real time during the lecture actively harmed my understanding of the lecture. God forbid a student actually listens to what you have to say…

pixelscript , to linux in Dotfiles matter! Please stop dumping files in users’ $HOME directories.

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