Sundar @digital_carver@social.cleverlibre.org

@cadadr@mastodon.sdf.org
> Of this I announce: for boys and girls the herbal magic is not allowed, as from
it will be sent the body parts in hellfire.

I wish today's medical textbooks were written like this. "Don't prescrible dexochleron and misteblaron together o**r it will be sent the body parts in hellfire**".

One thing that strikes me after following @metanumbers is how many large numbers have just two factors. I had this intuition that most large numbers have several factors, but that seems generally not true.

I just completed Day 12 of #AdventOfCode in #JuliaLang.

Hard day with little time for AoC, but I managed to squeeze it in - and the problem was interesting enough to be rewarding, to make it feel worth it. Got to explore Julia's typing and multiple dispatch a little bit along the way.

I just completed "Adapter Array" - Day 10 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/10 in #JuliaLang .

* I was surprised to learn there's no "count unique values" function in base Julia (equivalent to `uniq -c` in shell). The `StatsBase` downloadable package is needed for that.
* How have I never used `sort` in Vim before?! I always thought I'd need to use the shell's sort command since that's the Unix-y way, but `:sort n` works like a charm.
* One thing Advent of Code does better than other coding challenges is state the problem very clearly. Good examples, clear question text, and every assumption made explicit.

Common phrases in Non-fiction writing, translated:

"in part because of":
This may not be the major reason or even a significant reason, but this is the one I'm gonna focus on because it helps my narrative look more convincing.

Common phrases in Non-fiction writing, translated:

"commentators have argued that":
Here comes my opinion, but to give this a sheen of objectivity I found a few other people who agree with me.

@freemo
Or worse, when a business person says "I've got the idea, you just do the coding" (and 90% of the time the idea is "facebook for XXX")

@amdt
One can do both, as appropriate to the situation. For anyone who doesn't RTFA, it's not a new variable you set and then hope and pray people respect it (like on the Web), it's a proposal to standardize already existing variables that the tools provide for this purpose. The decision to use/not use the tool is often out of the developer's hand and is a business decision based on many factors. So if you do end up stuck with the tool, it's better to have a single predictable interface for this rather than hunt down the configuration every time for every tool.

@guenther
IJulia/Jupyter is pretty good, and almost indispensable for most real-world Julia projects. But this JuliaCon got me excited for when Pluto (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAF8DjrQSSk) becomes stable and polished. It fits my mental models better and seems to be taking ambitious steps beyond what Jupyter does, in the right directions.

That's one thing I miss in AoC compared to Project Euler and others, there's no "Aha!" moment when solving the challenges, no particular insight gained from thinking about and coming up with the solutions. Seems like I should treat this more like a replacement for a mini-project one might do to learn a language, with straightforward code (which still takes work, just not the focused, creative type of mental work that coding challenges usually require), rather than as tricky puzzles with interesting solutions.

I just completed "Handheld Halting" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/8 in #JuliaLang.

Spent way too long on Part 2 thinking there must be an interesting non-bruteforce way to solve it. reddit also seems to be concluding there's no neater way of solving it, just straight up try everything, which is disappointing.

I just completed "Handy Haversacks" - Day 7 - Advent of Code 2020 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/7 in #JuliaLang.

I wanted to do something interesting using Julia's multiple dispatch, making each outer bag a function and the inner bags the parameters, but it would have needed too much macro munchkinry and ended up in the "too clever for its own good" type code. I'm not trying to be [Mel the Real Programmer](https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html) after all.

@Jobias
Cool, maybe I'll try that out for one of the days.

@Jobias
What language are you doing them in?