Computer guy, occasional gamer, shitty music producer. Denver, CO

https://corytheboyd.com

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • corytheboyd@kbin.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldditch discord!
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    7 months ago

    I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.

    Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.

    Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.



  • Strings became ubiquitously used for a reason, they map really clearly to the way we think as humans. Most importantly, when you’re debugging, seeing string data is much friendlier than whatever data your symbols map to (usually integers, from enum structures)

    No, obviously it’s not the most efficient thing in the world, but it hardly matters, and you’re not getting anyone to stop because you’re “technically right”.


  • It took me a long time to really grok iterative methods like this, but once it clicks, you will absolutely know and feel like you have unlocked a new super power.

    It starts with completely understanding that you are just passing functions as arguments, and those functions are being invoked, in a loop, for each item in the collection. Once you have that concept internalized, you should then learn the difference between filter, map, reduce, etc. The general difference boils down to: 1. How the iterator function changes the value being iterated over (most don’t) 2. What does the iterator function itself return (i.e. map itself, not the function passed into map. map and filter both return a new list, reduce returns the data structure being reduced into)

    I would skip trying to understand reduce at first, though it’s the method you can implement all other such iterative functions with. The derivations like map and filter are just easier to start with.

    And again, seriously, it took me like 2 years to completely internalize all of this, even after CS classes.










  • It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. The problem with replacing things that work with something “better” is that “better” is subjective, so you end up with a new “better” way every few years, and maintaining existing systems becomes a god awful slog. See the JavaScript ecosystem.

    The bash I wrote 10 years ago still works today, and it will still work in 10 more years. The same bash will very likely work on your computer, on a remote server, etc. This is the power of not chasing “better” all the time.

    Try running a Ruby or Node program from 10 years ago today on your computer. Now, try running it on a random Linux server.

    Please do not take this as a slight against Ruby or Node, or any other high level programming language. Bash compared to those is simply apples and oranges, they are not the same thing.

    By all means, if you have a project that requires a Ruby runtime anyway, write operational scripts with Ruby, run them with Rake, etc.

    Want a portable script that doesn’t depend on a complex runtime? Use bash.

    If bash is too limiting, use Perl. No, seriously. Perl is fine. It is about as ubiquitously available as bash, and the standard library likely has what you need to get the job done. People blindly dismiss Perl because some blog post told them to, usually in the context of writing application code. You’re not writing application code, you’re writing scripts. Would you write an application with bash? No.




  • This game, man. Fucking love it. You know that scene in Ratatouille, where the food critic takes a bite and is transported back in time to his childhood? I got this feeling, hard, when this game clicked for me.

    I remember as a kid buying Links Awakening for my new Game Boy Color, the first real gaming system I got to own myself, instead of playing at a friends house. Like all new games I bought at the time, I would open them in the car on the way home to look at the manual, to hype myself up EVEN MORE for this gaming experience I am about to be blessed with.

    If you’ve played both games, you know that the Tunic book is heavily inspired by Links Awakening and other similar game manuals. That shit was wild, as a 33 year old Boring Fucking Adult, I got to feel that same feeling again, and it was glorious.

    And then I played more and caught onto the clues. The whole game, in front of you the whole time, but so cleverly hidden. Can’t say much more than that without ruining it. Be curious, and observant.