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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • He’s hiring a ghost writer because they are very cheap.

    When a person dies, they stop needing earthly rewards. And, because a lot of great authors and writers have died, there are a lot of candidate ghost writers, like Martin Amis, Truman Capote and Barbara Cartland. A good spiritualist can summon the right auteur from beyond this mortal coil for any compositional need you have!


  • All junior devs should read OCs comment and really think about this.

    The issue is whether is_number() is performing a semantic language matter or checking whether the text input can be converted by the program to a number type.

    The former case - the semantic language test - is useful for chat based interactions, analysis of text (and ancient text - I love the cuneiform btw) and similar. In this mode, some applications don’t even have to be able to convert the text into eg binary (a ‘gazillion’ of something is quantifying it, but vaguely)

    The latter case (validating input) is useful where the input is controlled and users are supposed to enter numbers using a limited part of a standard keyboard. Clay tablets and triangular sticks are strictly excluded from this interface.

    Another example might be is_address(). Which of these are addresses? ‘10 Downing Street, London’, ‘193.168.1.1’, ‘Gettysberg’, ‘Sir/Madam’.

    To me this highlights that code is a lot less reusable between different projects/apps than it at first appears.





  • You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.

    An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.

    Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.






  • I don’t think that the anti-oop collective is attacking polymorphism or overloading - both are important in functional programming. And let’s add encapsulation and implementation hiding to this list.

    The argument is that OOP makes the wrong abstractions. Inheritance (as OOP models it) is quite rare on business entities. The other major example cited is that an algorithm written in the OOP style ends up distributing its code across the different classes, and therefore

    1. It is difficult to understand: the developer has to open two, three or more different classes to view the whole algorithm
    2. It is inefficient: because the algorithm is distributed over many classes and instances, as the algorithm runs, there are a lot of unnecessary calls (eg one method on one instance has to iterate over many instances of its children, and each child has to iterate over its children) and data has to pass through these function calls.

    Instead of this, the functional programmer says, you should write the algorithm as a function (or several functions) in one place, so it’s the function that walks the object structure. The navigation is done using tools like apply or map rather than a loop in a method on the parent instance.

    A key insight in this approach is that the way an algorithm walks the data structure is the responsibility of the algorithm rather than a responsibility that is shared across many classes and subclasses.

    In general, I think this is a valid point - when you are writing algorithms over the whole dataset. OOP does have some counterpoints encapsulating behaviour on just that object for example validating the object’s private members, or data processing for that object and its immediate children or peers.





  • modeler@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCalculus made easy
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    5 months ago

    I must not use jargon.

    Jargon is the mind-killer.

    Jargon is the little-death that brings total confusion. I will face the jargon. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the jargon has gone there will be clarity. Only sense will remain.


  • This is a brilliant idea - not just because it solves the problem of too many homeopaths but because of the way homeopathy ‘works’.

    Homeopathy is the idea that “like treats like” (the homeo is latin for “the same”). So typically the homeopath looks at the symptoms of the disease, finds some poison that causes the same symptoms, then dilutes the hell out of it.

    In this case, what are the symptoms that homeopathy causes? Dumbness. So the ground up homeopath pills would be ideal for treating homeopath users and practitioners. And the Gwyneth Paltrow crowd. So many birds with one stone!


  • As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:

    Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:

    • Small bands of people skirmishing with neighbours to
    • Towns sending small raiding bands to
    • Cities fielding an army for a summer campaign to
    • Empires furnishing professional armies and sending them on multi-year campaigns, to
    • Nation states using advanced logistics to maintain millions of soldiers in the field for years at a time.

    Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.

    Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.


  • I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.

    In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.

    In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.

    However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.

    I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.

    By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.