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peterhi

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peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
So they looked at this and said "ship it"?
peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
Wonder if this could be co-opted to function like a Narrative Clip. Take a photo every 30 seconds (or something like that). I had mine for 3 years before it died
peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
It is an asset and in their minds worth something. Think old people and fine china dinner plates. They are convinced that they are valuable and refuse to throw it out
peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
Oh god we had this in team building exercises in the woods. "Here's a pile of junk, work out how to cross a stream without getting wet". One guy grabbed a long piece of wood and vaulted over the stream, others weren't satisfied until they had incorporated every single item from the pile of junk into the solution

It suddenly made it clear how each person worked that I couldn't see in the office
peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
But the flag was useful to show in the ui where the language setting was. This is especially useful when the language has been set to something I cannot read. I don't know which of 语言设定 and 重置设备 will allow me to set the language back to English. Also flags in the menu means that I can find English easier than 英语
peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
But that is my point. When trying to teach Lisp they would teach you all about the 100 ways to chop up lists without showing you why you would even want to. Your example would not have appeared until the 4th or 5th lecture and would have required the definition of a recursive function (two lectures on recursion alone) to achieve the same thing

And as for BASIC why would you need to "explaining how to create and manipulate a block of memory". This is not something that the BASIC programmer needs to know to write a program

This is just the sort of elitist crap that gatekeeps becoming a programmer. You can drive a car with only the most superficial understanding of how a car works and it does not affect your ability to get from A to B effectively

The answer to this decades old debate is simple, after each lecture the student should be able to do more than they did before they entered the room. At the end of the course they should be capable of teaching themselves from the available resources
peterhi
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
It's the learnability of the language. Remember BASIC? You could show someone a FOR ... NEXT loop and they would completely understand. After a couple more 10 line programs and you can safely hand over the keyboard and handle the "how do I?" questions

You had to show very little before they understood. Now try Lisp ...

M: This is a list

S: What can I do with it?

M: By itself nothing but trust me it is important. This is how we take the head of a list

S: Cool, why would I want to do that?

M: We'll get to that later. This is how you take the tail of a list

S: ...

M: This is how to append to a list

S: Is this going anywhere?

The number of things you are shown but do not understand keeps piling up before they are supposedly going to magically work together to do something underwhelming (when BASIC did very little it took very little to do it). Add to that the function names were either cryptic, "cddar" anyone - "EQ" and "EQUAL", or insanely long

You have too much to learn before you can make sense of anything. Least that was how Lisp was taught to me in the 80s :)

I self taught Forth and Prolog because with both once you learn something you can do something
peterhi
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Currently on macos because the servers we deploy to are linux. Used to work on windows and it was ok, as everything was done from the command line and the application was deployed from the CVS. Realistically I was not really using windows in any meaningful way. Just something to launch a shell from

It would be annoying to unlearn the macos keystrokes at this point though
peterhi
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
I know some delivery workers and if they get anything less than "excellent" they get written up. So it's "excellent" each and every time

I know it's meaningless but it takes one click to help someone
peterhi
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
I was expected to get around 10 O Levels at school (a UK exam for 16 yo). I failed them all. The nearest thing to an academic achievement I have ever accomplished :) I stayed on for another 2 years just so I could get an O Level in basic English proficiency, the school was worried that I would be completely unemployable without it. You normally stayed the next 2 years to get A Levels (the advanced version of the O Levels)

Did a lot to temporary work and finally got a clerical job. Later the government opened the YOPS program (Youth Opportunities Program) and I went off to learn COBOL

Got a programming job with it and after a few years applied to go to University (at 29). Fortunately there was a drive to accept "mature" candidates (less qualified) and I was accepted to study Artificial Intelligence as an Arts Degree

Managed a 2ii (a 3 would be viewed as "didn't actually fail" but a 1 or 2i would have been a "good" result)

Went back to being a programmer

People genuinely thought that I would / could get 10 O Levels in the same year, I must have been smart enough to impress my teachers but it all fell apart when I sat down to do the exams

I think that I am at least intelligent but I get sidetracked (the amount of time I spent investigating prime numbers / golomb rulers when I was supposed to be learning calculus). It is still an issue. I have finally learnt everything that they tried to teach me at school (I'm 62 now) and a bunch more

However I was never told I was smart, only that I should try and that I was at least capable of achieving great things academically

I could have done more but that was all down to me and the effort I put forth
peterhi
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
The os itself eats much more of the resources than linux running on the same hardware. Macos is a "bigger" operating system (more parts) and they all want memory and cycles. Linux is positively anorexic in comparison :)

It will also depend on how good you are at switching your "muscle memory" at the keyboard. But this is the same for all three of the main oses (linux, macos and windows). It can be very frustrating when you hit a keystroke combination and either it does nothing or something completely different

Ubuntu / Mint is rock solid. I run Ubuntu 22.04 and have had no problems despite heavy customisation on old hardware (Dell Optiplex 3040). If you can install Ubuntu (or Mint) I would expect to run it without issue
peterhi
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
For Amazon the issue for me has always been that aside from the things I shop for myself I get asked to buy things for other people or presents for family members

Amazon doesn't know who I bought something for so making sense of why I have bought 4 padlocks (my father in law), a set of sauce pans (wife), a light novel (myself) and rechargeable batteries (myself)
peterhi
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
I have found ebooks (at least on my Kindle) make reading code very hard. Wraps code which is not a good look for a language like Python and not much code is shown on each page. Also I find that I can not flip back and forth when I need to check up on something

I can scan through a physical book by just flicking pages, the Kindle does not update fast enough

For non technical books, books that I will read in a linear manner, the Kindle is just fine
peterhi
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Joins are severely misunderstood and often incorrectly used. I've seen code that had the wrong join and would return 1,000s of rows which then had to be programatically squished down into the data we actually wanted. Some hand crafted SQL usually fixes this

Also some ORMs write dreadful SQL where it comes to joins

A badly written join (or collection of joins) will take a longer time to run that will, when the system is under load, backlog other queries. If these errant queries make up a significant portion of your queries then it will hit performance significantly

It's not the joins themselves just the incorrect use of them
peterhi
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Lord of the Rings, House on the Borderland, Pilgrims Progress, Gulliver's Travels and the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft