rlamacraft @rlamacraft@social.cleverlibre.org

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12617212-800-science-the-day-the-sweet-track-was-built/ "The oldest known man-made footpath in Europe the 1800 metre-long Sweet Track across the Somerset Levels in southwest England – was built from oak and other timber felled in the winter of 3807/3806" ... "British archaeologists now have a continuous tree ring chronology for the period 4989 to 381 BC. This can be used to date timber at prehistoric sites throughout England." The fact that we can pin the year that a track was constructed nearly SIX THOUSAND years ago is just incredible!

One of the most frustrating things I find about working in software development is that there is a greater competitive advantage to using the same tools as everyone else even when there are better tools, when one considers their technical merits, for the task at hand. The cost of development velocity as everyone learns something new, the cost of onboarding new hires to something different, the cost of a smaller talent pool willing to learn, the cost of making mergers and acquisitions more difficult all out weigh the benefits of improved reliability, longevity, and general quality of product. For an industry that is commonly referred to as a "technology" industry, there is really very little actual motivation for innovation.

One thing I like about property-based testing is that sometimes writing a test suite that verifies the complete correctness of a system can be quite onerous or may be quite fragile and thus be expensive to maintain but instead I can assert just some key properties that are easy to verify, for example that a returned string matches a regex. It won't guarantee that the system continues to behave correctly, but it gives some confidence at very little cost.

@akshayde @GeePawHill Bullet dodged! Can only imagine the mess they must have

"It was a great disturbance in the UK, as millions of phones suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced." Someone had a fun day at work https://youtu.be/24RRz7VmrfA

I hate Java. I've literally spent the entire day chasing down an issue caused by a null pointer. How, in 2023, is this just accepted as normal?! I honestly find it quite depressing how much better software development tooling isn't given a chance because most devs are just too lazy or incapable of learning anything new. Companies that adopt better tooling eventually move away from it because it makes hiring and mergers much more difficult. So instead we're all stuck using tools that were garbage decades ago

Love to hear stories where technology is genuinely improving lives. Apparently smart speakers are very popular amongst traders in India who can neither read nor write https://restofworld.org/2023/india-sound-boxes-paytm-phonepe/

"Buckingham Palace also unveiled a new emoji, of the St Edward’s crown, to mark the coronation weekend." I didn't realise the Palace was a member of the Unicode Consortium... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/09/king-charles-iii-coronation-procession-route

@freemo as I understand it, the issue is not that money was paid but that because his lawyer paid the money and her going public would have damaged the campaign it is being seen as undeclared campaign finance

@fitheach I‘ve been aware of it for some years but only recently did I realise it’s a fully fledge programming language, with some pretty handy syntactic sugar for assignment

I hate flow.js. In what world is this acceptable typed code??
```
function foo(x: string): boolean {
return x === 0;
}
```
Normally TypeScript isn't any better but in this case, TypeScript does correctly complain.