3
points
powersnail
Joined 2,741 karma
Just a naive coder, grappling through the world. https://powersnail.com
- Just curious, what algorithm is good for laying out images of arbitrary orientations, sizes, and aspect ratios? That seems like a pretty difficult problem. Some sort of variation of knapsack problem maybe?
- I could see a case where the core logic needs to be performant, but the UI does not. The front end could be some menus, displaying (not a giant amount of) data, and a progress bar, while the back end does heavy computing.
And furthermore, if you want fast code writing, you write in the language you already know. For some people, that is Rust.
- > in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome
I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog.
Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good; but it is almost trivial to also support plain text copying as a fallback when it already supports copying of other mimetypes. The problem is that some UI has no support of copying in any format at all.
- I sincerely hope that apple will consider making a phone with a worse camera that is flatter. As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance, the bump is just a dead weight to me. My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera. As long as it runs all the common communication apps reliably, I'm happy. I'll pay $100 more than the standard body version even. But it doesn't seem like apple (or any notable phone brand) thinks this is worth doing.
It's the peril of being a niche customer. I can and have voted with my wallet, but it doesn't nudge the needle anyway.
- That's a very surprising angle of questioning. Are you writing some sort of compile-time-only programs?
- Talking on the phone is the most painful form of conversation for me. The sound quality is often awful, due to the ambient noises picked up by phone, which occurs particularly often for busy restaurants. You don't know if the other side has heard you because you can't see them and there's no visual signal, so there's more back and forth, prolonging the pain. Since you are ordering via the phone, you have to pay by reading out your credit card number. People sometimes hesitate, and you don't know if it's a bad connection, or if they have just paused......
So yeah, I'd gladly pay a bit more to order via an app. When I'm ordering delivery, I'm already paying premium on that day anyway, the margin of which is way higher than 20%, so I might as well go all the way and avoid dealing with something I don't like.
If I'm not using an app, I'd rather run a mile to make the order in person, than make a phone call.
- To clarify: in that anecdote, I'm talking about washing hair in shower, with hot water, with no shampoo.
- > No; you would need to touch people hair after a shampoo shower and after a non shampoo shower to see the difference.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. My girl friend has long hair, and doesn't wash with shampoo every day (which is somewhat common for long-haired people I believe), and the texture after shower is very different.
In college, especially exam week, we had more anecdata. It was possible to see people who 1) had not washed their hair, 2) had washed their hair in a sink with water only, 3) dry-washed with those sprays, and 4) washed with shampoo. It was very easy to tell which they did.
In general, soapy cleaner (or similar substances) is going to help immensely when cleaning oily stuff. And hair can be really oily. Water-only is just not the same.
One scenario I don't have is comparing other soapy products to shampoo. But shampoo aren't more expensive than other soaps anyway, so I never bothered to look.
- > shampoo did nothing to your hair
I don't know the scope of "nothing" in your statement, but shampoo does help remove dirt and oil, in a way that washing with water only cannot achieve, which is the number one goal of using shampoo for most people.
This is verifiable by observing and touching hair of other people's hair before and after shower, which eliminates the possibility of shampoo manufacturers secretly altering what you perceive with your fingers.
- I can think of so many pieces of software that does that: having a local state, having a remote state, and keeping them synchronized whenever internet is available. It's how email apps work. That's how all cloud drives work, and Dropbox is more than a decade old at this point. It's how notes apps work. Etc. etc.
Really can't see how this can be regarded as a recent idea.
- I want to know whether this actually deters thieves. Anecdotally, from what I heard, it seems that phone stealing is very much still a thing in areas with active pickpocketing.
- That matches my experience as well.
Google something, find the documentation, go to the documentation, and "We have moved our documentation to a brand new experience", and the link is to the home page of their new website, so you need to redo the search.
X has been deprecated; Y is the replacement; and they provide the same functionality with a completely different API. It just does not make sense to me why Y is created, rather than having X's implementation replaced.
A lot of documentations/discussions are also written with the assumption that you are migrating from the previous approach. So if you just dive in and don't have the context of what used to be the way, it's sometimes difficult to understand what they are talking about.
- > It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.
This whole thing is about destroying already bought vehicles to intimidate potential new buyers, and thus lowering future sales. Not that I support the vandalism, but I think that's the kind of logic they are applying here.
- It seems like what is happening is not Firefox now making a pivot to the privacy unfriendly side, but Firefox has already been selling data, but in a manner that---for whatever strange reason---they didn't consider to qualify as "selling data", and hence the original Terms of Use included the promise of "We never sell your data". Then lawyers came along and told them that this just wouldn't fly legally, and they have to change their terms now.
Even now, Firefox still doesn't consider what they do "selling data", and they are forced to change the wording only because the laws are weird.
Frankly, I just don't see how sharing data to partners to make yourself commercially viable can be construed as not selling data. In their own words, what Firefox does is:
> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.
We could argue about whether the laws are slippery or over-reaching, or how responsible or not Firefox has been handling user data. We could argue about how much anonymization and aggregation of data reduce privacy concerns.
But to argue that the above action is not "selling data" is in my view not a reasonable position.
- I also don't experience any noticeable torsion at the elbow. Putting my hands in front of my chest is a perfectly relaxed posture for me. Typing is not that different from writing in terms of where my arms and hands are (other than the two-handedness).
That said, I do move around a lot instead of keeping my hands always on keyboard, so maybe that's why I don't experience the typical fatigue at joints associated with keyboard usage.
- Ergonomics is really personal. I’ve tried a few ergonomic chairs, and they are all too big for my body. At the end of the day, the trusty old ikea wooden chair works the best for me, despite the lack of any adjustability, because it is the right size to begin with.
When standing, I strongly agree with the article that getting some sort of rug is good for comfort. I have a very furry rug for it.
Moving around often is the most important factor, which is easy for me because I like to walk around while thinking.
I find trackballs very tiring on the thumb. Vertical mouse is quite comfortable. Ergonomic keyboard seems unnecessary to me, because I type with straight wrists on a normal keyboard anyway.
- The "attach the entire file" part is very critical.
I've had the experience of seeing some junior dev posting error messages into ChatGPT, applying the suggestions of ChatGPT, and posting the next error message into ChatGPT again. They ended up applying fixes for 3 different kinds of bugs that didn't exist in the code base.
---
Another cause, I think, is that they didn't try to understand any of those (not the solutions, and not the problems that those solutions are supposed to fix). If they did, they would have figured out that the solutions were mismatches to what they were witnessing.
There's a big difference between using LLM as a tool, and treating it like an oracle.
- Different industries have different standard procedures. A huge portion of the world's internet relies on FOSS software, and none of those are insured.
Community reputation is the current _de facto_ standard for consumer-facing software, even for stuff sold by big corporations. There's not much else to rely on.
What's particularly interesting, is that the replicas really do look like the actual food. Some replicas are so good, that I would not be able to tell that it is fake even by close inspection. One of the gyoza replica got the doughy body, the crispy bottom, and oily surface that is visually indistinguishable from a real one. Even the touch is somewhat real.
I'm not saying seeing those replicas gives me a better appetite; that's doubtful. I just appreciate the crafts.
The other side of the coin is that the actual food do look like the replica/photos, so it's not a bait-and-switch scheme. The people who prepare the dishes---be it a chef or a worker at a fast food chain---all seem quite accurate. Not that all dishes always look beautiful; but they do look consistent. Your plate of curry over rice might be plain, but it will look exactly the same as the previous order (and also as the photo), even if it is created entirely by hand. It's kinda amazing in its own right.
> Meanwhile, in restaurants without visual clues, you can only let your imagination go wild and guess what you're going to have. Once the plate is put in front of you, two surprises awaits you: does it looks like what you imagined and is it good? > > At least that's the experience I'm looking for in restaurants.
Well, you still retain the second part of the surprise: "is it good?". But yeah, it will ruin the first one, because of the accuracy. It's not something that particularly bothers me, but I can understand why you want to avoid the spoilers.