In Sweden, about 40,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.
The Made In Canada Facebook group now has 1.2 million users, which is pretty insane considering the population of the whole country is 41 million.
I think if there’s a silver lining to the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs in North America, it is that it will hasten adoption of ebikes, which imo solve more problems than EVs in any case.
His point that ebikes replace cars—not conventional bikes—tracks for me. Mine has basically replaced our second car and I use it, as he indicated most people do, for commutes and short errands.
His point that an ebike has an energy footprint comparable to a 4000 mpg ICEV is an incredible metric. I wonder where he pulled that from? I know that my ebike battery has 1/150th the capacity of what goes into a Tesla. Granted, I wouldn’t expect a comparable range so there’s a bit of apples to oranges there. But if you then work in that EVs are already much more energy efficient than ICEVs, I guess you could arrive at a number like 4000.
Whatever the case, my experience with ebikes is that they are pretty close to free transportation in terms of operating costs. There may be a few unexpected expenses beyond the initial sticker cost of the bike in terms of accessories (particularly high quality locks) and some winter gear if you’re in a colder climate, but those are one-time purchases for the most part.
Interesting. I had never heard of LilyPond before. I do a lot of music scoring using abc notation and even wrote myself a GUI to help with that, but it’s interesting to see that there is another script language for generating sheet music.
Interesting. I wonder what the thinking is here? It’s almost like a really poor manual password hash. Here’s something derived from my date of birth. Store that instead of the actual date. Pretty weak though.
In fairness, I remember a time when everyone smoked in Japan and flicked cigarette butts all over the place.
I can’t speak for others, but the python3 transition wiped the smile off my face for awhile there.
I suppose it depends on the language? For the most part I think you’re right. Exceptions are only used (if at all) in situations where a program diverges unexpectedly from its normal flow. But take a language like Python. They’re just everywhere. Even your plain old for loop ends on an exception, and that’s just business as usual.
This could be why Obiwan wound up a hermit? (Programmers of my generation at least talk about “Obiwan errors” because his name sounds like “off-by-one”.)
There were breaking changes between C and C++ (and some divergent evolution since the initial split) as well as breaking changes between different releases of C++ itself. I am not saying these never happened, but the powers that be controlling the standard have worked hard to minimize these for better or worse.
If I took one of my earliest ANSI C programs from the 80s and ran it through a C++23 compiler, I would probably need to remove a bunch of register statements and maybe check if an assumption of 16-bit int is going to land me in some trouble, but otherwise, I think it would build as long as it’s not linking in any 3rd party libraries.
I think the thing with C++ is they have tried to maintain backward compatibility from Day 1. You can take a C++ program from the 80s (or heck, even a straight up C program), and there’s a good chance it will compile as-is, which is rather astonishing considering modern C++ feels like a different language.
But I think this is what leads to a lot of the complexity as it stands? By contrast, I started Python in the Python 2 era, and when they switched to 3, I was like “Wow, did they just break hello world?” It’s a different philosophy and has its trade-offs. By reinventing itself, it can get rid of the legacy cruft that never worked well or required hacky workarounds, but old code will not simply run under the new interpreter. You have to hope your migration tools are up to the task.
The thing about the MPW Shell is it was sort of the only game in town if you actually wanted a command line with the classic Mac OS. (There’s an awesome little emulator called SheepShaver if you ever want to explore it btw.) Well, I suppose there was A/UX. I thought it was a miracle when that came out. You have to realize in those early days a good chunk of the operating system itself was actually baked in to ROM. (You had to do desperate things to squeeze a GUI out of such limited resources as existed back then!) So to this day I have no idea how they managed to spin off a 'nix despite that.
Anyways. I wonder, if you made some sort of template format today, to what extent you could write some sort of conversion tool that would scrape a man page or whatever to rough it in and then you could tweak it to get what you want? man pages aren’t super standardized in their format I guess, so it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. I like to use Python’s argparse when rolling out scripts myself, and its --help format is pretty rigid given that it’s algorithmically generated. Might be more plausible with something like that? I had a quick look just now to see if you can drill down into the argparse.ArgumentParser class itself to pull out the info more directly, but it seems a rather opaque thing that doesn’t expose public APIs for that. Oh well…
This reminds me of something from my ancient past. Back in the early-ish days of Apple, there was a development system called MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) which included its own little kludgy shell.
The weird thing about it though was while you could enter commands on the command line like in any shell, you could prefix them with the word commando (presumably a portmanteau of “command” and “window”) and this window would pop up showing various buttons, checkboxes, etc. correponding to command line options. When you ok’d the window, it would generate the command line for you.
I’m rather hazy about how all this worked, but I think there was some sort of template language to define the window layout if you wanted to add commando support for your own tool? And presumeably, as you say, you could restrict what’s possible with the window interface as you deemed fit?
I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)
Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.
Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.
If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.
We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.
This was a struggle for me going from hobbyist programmer to working at a company. I tried to tone it down. Really. But eventually I got “promoted” to having my own office with a suspiciously thick door. Hmm…
True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…
Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It’s obnoxious.
1st reaction: lmao
2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!
I have some vague recollection of a hacker convention from the 90s where people were challenged to come up with wireless networking in a one night coding marathon. (This was long before wifi.) So some dude used speech synthesis to get a machine to say “one zero one one zero…” and another to assemble the binary data into packets using speech recognition. It was hilarious, and the dev had to keep telling people to shut up and stop laughing so he could complete the demo.
But anyways… what I’m trying to suggest here is you might have the best luck if your notification sounds contain spoken commands and you use speech recognition to trigger scripts? That tech is pretty mature at this point.
I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple’s Pages has long since abandoned.
I saw a meme going around about our guy in Canada who met a similar fate. It compared him to a toilet, noting that while both are full of shit, the toilet at least has a seat.