I think I can appreciate where you’re coming from, but in the context of the article it was legitimately necessary to address the topic somehow; it’s not like it was written apropos of nothing as a commentary on transsexuality. As a CIS person, I also have a “percieved gender” with which I identify.
Would “post-transition gender” be a more sensitive term, or less?
Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.
Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.
It’s definitely bad design, but in a pinch it is readable in landscape mode for me. Alternatively, if your browser has a “force desktop mode” option, that often makes badly-written websites useable, if annoying.
That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would’ve been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.
What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn’t see a single person saying, “How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?”, even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, “How can we wrest this code out of this guy’s hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I’m too busy) so we don’t have a single point of failure?”
I’d argue that you do need to be good at math to be an effective programmer, it’s just that that doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of quadratics, integrals, and advanced trigonometry, but I think you do need to have a really solid, gut-level understanding of basic algebra and a bit of set theory. If you’re the sort of person whose head starts to swim when you see “y=3x+2”, you’re going to find programming difficult at best.
Whatever it may have become in later years, Alan Kay, who is often called “The Father of Object-oriented Programming”, outlined the message-passing idea as the main concept he was driving at, originally.
He also says that he probably misnamed it.
Here’s a discussion in which the man himself makes a (small) appearance: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/46592/so-what-did-alan-kay-really-mean-by-the-term-object-oriented
I am currently working on a game for the Atari 2600, and you just gave a good outline of my code. And I love it.
I tend to agree. I think this attitude is something of a holdover from the early days of computer science, when of academics from all the other, existing fields, mathematicians were usually the best fit. Now that we have formal computer scientists, computer engineers, and software engineers, this is no longer the case.
In my experience, when someone from a purely mathematical background tries to program or explain something for programmers, they often (but not always, to be fair) insist vehemently on sticking to methods and algorithms that at best confuse the issue in a programming setting, and sometimes even run counter to how the computing hardware works, reducing performance. In these situations the rationale given is usually something along the lines of, “Listen, we mathematicians have been doing it this way for X hundred years, so that’s the way it should be done!”
I love low-level stuff and this still took me a little while to break down, so I’d like to share some notes on the author’s code snippet that might help someone else.
The function morse_decode is meant to be called iteratively by another routine, once per morse “character” c (dot, dash, or null) in a stream, while feeding its own output back into it as state. As long as the function returns a negative value, that value represents the next state of the machine, and the morse stream hasn’t yet been resolved into an output symbol. When the return value is positive, that represents the decoded letter, and the next call to morse_decode should use a state of 0. If the return value is 0, something has gone wrong with the decoding.
state is just a negated index into the array t, which is actually two arrays squeezed into one. The first 64 bytes are a binary heap of bytes in the format nnnnnnlr, each corresponding to one node in the morse code trie. l and r are single bits that represent the existence of a left or right child of the current node (i.e. reading a dot or dash in the current state leading to another valid state). nnnnnn is a 6-bit value that, when shifted appropriately and added to 63, becomes an index into the second part of the array, which is a list of UTF-8/ASCII codes for letters and numbers for the final output.
I thought that this was going to be a play on the phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” but it’s just a very short piece about Dunning-Kruger aimed specifically at some C++ concepts.
Maybe, but it’s gonna be more like SkyNet with electrolytes; it’s what terminators crave.