@freemo @tripu Don’t investigations need leads though? From what I’m hearing across the pond, it doesn’t even sound like there’s any leads to investigate. Didn’t some Republican governor put out a call for suspicious shenanigans and just got like one report back, of some Trump voter pretending to be his dead mother?
> Does anyone else think that standard advice about finger positioning is designed for people with far longer pinkies than humans actually have?
For example, the image below (from the "touch typing" Wikipedia article) clearly seems to depict some sort of humanoid alien with fingers of exactly equal length.
I may not know what a natural typing position is, but I know it's not *that*
@freemo I once worked on a project where we reserved the right to break anything that didn’t have a unit test. There were many downsides to this, but the massive plus is that we could easily rewrite stuff on a whim, and boy did we do a lot of that
@freemo Writing code is absolutely all about successive drafts. Even working code is usually not the last draft, I almost always redraft what I’ve done to make it clear to whoever will be reading it what’s going/what the important parts are
Best advice I can give to new programers:
* Dont be scared to write it wrong, you can always rewrite it.
When I code i expect to rewrite it.. i usually write a shitty version of the idea just to make sure the idea works then i rework it several times and consider the overall design before commiting. If yuo try to do it right the first time through you wont do anythijng at all, or you will come up with a perfect idea that the second you start to implement you realize doesnt work at all... doing it wrong is how you learn to do it right.
@asterope I thought Apple was trying to sell their devices more as “real computers” recently? Like they have a file browser now. I honestly wouldn’t mind if the built in notes app’s data was accessible on a Mac — I could cron job up something
@bonifartius @amerika No, I totally get where you’re coming from. I too think we have to be careful not to take the tireless effort made by FOSS contributors for granted and should help wherever we can, financially or otherwise. My main issue is with Apple: I spent nearly a grand on this device and it can’t do such basic stuff. I feel like over time computers are becoming devices only capable of white-listed functionality; we’re going back to before WW2… We peaked at UNIX pipes…?
@bonifartius Software is different though — you make the thing once and it benefits infinite people and there are no material costs. Plus, it just feels like the functionality is too fundamental to necessitate paying for. How long before we have to pay to browse files on disk? Or to assemble machine code? Like, I just want to append UTF-8 encoded characters to a block file on disk…
@bonifartius oh absolutely — the fact that you have to pay Apple to even distribute free apps is problematic (the main hurdle to me trying to build my own). I don’t know whether donations often cover that annual cost? But in any case I have nothing against paid apps, just when they try to sell something isn’t new or novel or free apps that block basic functionality. I think the right way is to enhance the experience with paid for
@bonifartius well yeah, I think it’s on the operating system to provide at least a very basic editor, which Apple just doesn’t do. After that there’s room for discussion about whether I need additional functionality that’s worth paying for, and whether there’s space for developers to innovate in new ways, but I don’t think it’s unfair to feel entitled to not need to pay for functionality comparable to Ed
@trinsec That’s really useful, thanks — I’ve tried a lot of them but there’s some there I haven’t. And yeah, I think it’s absurd that an operating system can come without such basic functionality; just bizarre
Just when I’d thought I’d found an app for editing plain text files on iOS they lock me out after opening 5 files. This is unacceptable! I refuse to pay anyone to be able to edit plain text files on my general purpose computer. I will pay for services that innovate, I will not pay for services that provide such fundamental computing capabilities! This is outrageous!
"Fork the Government" - Planet Money podcast https://www.npr.org/2020/12/23/949764249/fork-the-government
Fascinating story about how civic hackers helped Taiwan manage the pandemic. It's amazing how much someone can help by just slapping together an app in a few hours using some public APIs.
So much discussion here[1] about the right tool for maintaining a collaborative set of notes within a development team, and I just don’t understand what .org files checked into git fails to provide
“Google Maps postcode error leads delivery drivers on wild pizza chase” — mapping services should be the business of national governments where citizens have a legal right to recourse when they are discriminated against or wronged by incorrect data. It is a national shame that the Ordinance Survey has faded into obscurity in the 21st century.
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk