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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s gotten a lot better in recent years tbf in terms of those kinds of resources. Beginner recommended languages like Python are still a pain because it’s super easy for a beginner to bork how they set it up, but on the whole there’s plenty of online code sandboxes and other ways to get started.

    Your point is definitely valid though. Why on earth would we want someone who’s just showing an interest in programming to write their own compiler??? Wtf? If someone wants to get into baking you don’t send them out into the fields for 6 months to grow some wheat.

    When I was a kid I mucked around with html and css to make some GeoCities sites. I decided I wanted to learn how to code so I got a book from the library called “how to code games for beginners” or something. The thing never told you how to set up an IDE or compile the game. So I was just frustratingly typing out the code examples into notepad without a clue as to what to do. I think this was during the dialup era so it wasn’t like there was a wealth of info online.

    I ended up abandoning programming for quite a few years. It just seemed like nonsense because writing graphics libs for C in notepad does feel like nonsense to a child. I wonder what life would be like if I had some better resources at that moment in time and decided you continue pursuing it.




  • Something with enough context to write sensible test cases for a large codebase. It would be great if you could write test cases for a couple of domains, then ask it to write cases for a third domain following the same general style as the first. It would ideally have a conversation about what things to mock/stub and what things to keep.

    I personally think 5 years isn’t enough time to get to that point with something that works really well. It’s tricky enough to get a junior up to speed with doing it sensibly, but cutting down on the time it takes to build a good test suite would mean we Devs can spend a lot more time on features and improvements.




  • Yeah there were multiple times when the allies could have pushed Germany over before they started steamrolling. When they remilitarised the Rhineland, as you said when they occupied the Sudetenland, and even when they invaded Poland.

    France started pushing into Germany once war was first declared and there was basically nothing in front of them. Most of the tanks etc were in Poland. If they had continued pushing then it might have all ended there. Instead they pulled back to the Maginot line and the rest is history.



  • To counter this I used to visit some factories for a big contract manufacturer in the UK. They would often make say lasagne for the supermarkets and for the “premium” brands. Whilst they were all made in the same place, the “premium” brands products had much better quality ingredients in them and different ratios of the good stuff (say meat) to filler (say pasta sheets).

    For some things it’s the exact same materials, but for many it’s different. You have to do blind taste tests to see which ones you prefer.





  • I hate this trend of saying “SLAMMED”, or “HOUNDED”, or “ATTACKED” etc in news articles where the stories are just “a couple of people with a dozen followers between them posted slightly negative tweets about topic xyz”.

    My parents were bitching about how Adele was “HAMMERED” online because she said “I am proud to be a woman” or something. Turns out it was just two complete nobodies tweeting about how that’s trans exclusionary or something with 1 heart each.







  • Yeah it appears on chrome as well. There isn’t any evidence that it’s purposely “slowing down” anything. I had a quick glance at the Reddit thread (been avoiding it as much as possible, but had to visit in incognito to confirm the source for this outrage) and it looks like it’s part of a small script to check if an adblocker is present and disabling video ads from playing.

    It’s possible FF have a delay in playing that first video, but also the test methodology isn’t super reliable because of caching.