@sbi@toot.berlin
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

sbi

@sbi@toot.berlin

I'm the Grumpy Old Ape, father of many, ex of two, long-time user of C++, writing 24/7 software that keeps people's lights on. Expect political, social, environmental, and programming-related posts. And maybe some about cooking, gardening, or raising kids.

Most of this will be in English, but you might have to gloss over the occasional German post.

"I'm not intentionally leftist; I'm just trying to behave like a decent human being."

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ernie, (edited ) to random
@ernie@writing.exchange avatar

How I fixed Google so it doesnโ€™t shove AI into my face anymore.

https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/

new @tedium

EDIT: Nobody cares if you use DuckDuckGo, you do you

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@ironicsans @ernie @tedium I have been using DuckDuckGo for years. Really, that's the easiest way to fix google.
/cc @cstross

Paxxi, to gardening
@Paxxi@hachyderm.io avatar

I never would've guessed that I would have strong opinions on spades but here we are ๐Ÿ˜†
If you do any sort of digging/gardening you owe it to yourself and your back to get one of these https://www.fiskars.com/en-gb/gardening/products/shovels-spades/ergonomic-pointed-spade-grey-1066708

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@Paxxi That one's not height-adjustable, so that's a no from me.

samhenrigold, to random
@samhenrigold@hachyderm.io avatar

i have determined that i simply attract german shitposts. i am like catnip for confused recommendation algorithms. between that spotify discover weekly thing and this, i have no other way to explain why i keep getting 3D animations with german text to speech.

video/mp4

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@samhenrigold As a German, I should be able to understand this. However, despite the fact that I understand every word, and do grasp the (only slightly fuzzy) grammar, I have no idea what this is trying to tell me.

Supposedly, this is what gets produced by what's nowadays counts as "AI": almost convincingly German on the outside, but utter nonsense when you are an insider.

/cc @Paxxi

veronica, to programming
@veronica@mastodon.online avatar

Over the last three weeks I've been tinkering with adding a footnotes feature to @novelwriter. It was non-trivial, as I had to come up with a syntax for it, make the indexer handle it, and add build support into HTML, markdown and Open Document. The latter took a fair bit of tinkering too.

But it is done, and merged! The final diff was +2,181 โˆ’1,338. Quite a lot, although I took the opportunity to clean up and extend some tests. Coverage's now at 99.61% ๐Ÿ˜

#Programming #Python #Sunday

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@veronica How aptly that you added a footnote feature on Sir pterry's birthday!

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

โ€œNo one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.โ€

Hippo 76th birdbath, Terry Pratchett!

veronica, to workersrights
@veronica@mastodon.online avatar

I just realised every week for the next four weeks will be four day work weeks!

Next week has Labour Day, then there's Ascension Day the week after, then it's Constitution Day in Norway, and finally Whit Monday the fourth week.

May is giving us a taste of the four day work week! ๐Ÿ˜Š

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@veronica I only ever have 4 days weeks, because I only work 30h/week, stretched over 4 days. It's great, you should try it.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@veronica Ah. Since I never signed a contract for more than 30h, I never got a pay cut. ๐Ÿคญ

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar
olafurw, to random
@olafurw@mastodon.social avatar

If high-level language means less typing for similar underlying code to run, then AI programming assistants are a high-level language.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@olafurw This assumes that writing the code is the hard part. It would of course seem this way to people who have no idea about programming. However, people who've done this for a decade or two know that the hard part of programming is maintaining the code, sometimes for years, or even decades. And the maintainability of code strongly depends on how it was written originally.

Even non-programmers should have an inkling that AI-generated code will not do well in that respect.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

I'm gonna lead far out of the window here. Please do not push.

While C++ might not be 100% safe, IME memory safety issues etc. are mostly down to malpractice. C++ is hard to do correctly, and you need to learn that you must not use all the freedom it grants you. But it is possible to habitually write code which has so few crashing bugs, that the number is easily dwarfed by the logic errors.
IMO the language's worst problem is decades of bad education, where it has been taught as C with Classes.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

A data point: ~20 years ago I was part of a small team (<10 devs) developing a plugin in C++ with 5m installations. That company is very good at keeping their developers, some of their current devs started there >25 years ago. In such an environment, code ownership doesn't have a negative impact, so it has always been very strong there. Hence you can easily point at some part of their software and call it "this guy's part".
(I still have ties to that team, so I know this still to be true.)

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

And guess what? We noticed a very strong correlation between the style of coding used by individual people and the kind of bugs that caused. Code which dealt with raw pointers and manual memory management tended to cause crashing errors and logic, while other code mostly only caused logic errors. This knowledge enforced my coding style, and I began a streak of not committing a crashing bug into production that lasted almost 10 years (until I took over a crappy piece of code in another company).

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

While my tests caught one or two crashing bugs per year, for almost 10 years, programming solely in pure C++, I never ever committed a crashing bug into production.
(Years later, in another company I was handed a crappy piece of code which I was supposed to rid of crashes, and I did commit a crash or two fiddling with this until it was decided to scrap the whole thing and have me re-write it. That took a few weeksโ€”a fraction of the time they had already invested into fixing it.)

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Another data point: For almost a decade I have worked in a team that developed real-time C++ software controlling expensive energy hardware running on (rather beefy) embedded devices. Besides us there was team writing software in Java which controlled lots of such devices. Guess which team had to lock up for days every other year trying to hunt down a memory leak?
We had written a framework abstracting away the gritty C interfaces underneath, and got rid of such problems after that was done.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

So, yes, you can habitually write pretty safe code in C++. For that, you have to have good sources to learn C++ from (back then, mine was Stroustrup, Meyers, and comp.lang.c++.moderated), try hard to learn what are good practices and what are bad ones, and be diligent in your coding.
None of that is easy, but it is not magic either. If I can do this, so can you.

(Here ends the rant.)

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@jens Here, the few crashing bugs I've seen over the last 12 years were caused by bugs in low-level parallelism employed on PLCs. (Or by memory leaks in Java codeโ€ฆ)

Patricia, to random
@Patricia@vivaldi.net avatar

Hey, anyone had a lot of juniors they have trained/mentored at work whoโ€™d like to have a chat with me one of these days? I think I need some advice. Itโ€™s funny how I always have new stuff to learn.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@Patricia In Germany, you can learn programming as a three year apprenticeship, and I had been teaching three (or four?) generations of apprentices programming at a company I worked for in the 90s/2000s. I've also mentored a bunch of interns and students who worked with teams I was part of.
I'm not sure if you want to get into contact with me or the mentored. I can do the first, and might be able to motivate a few of the second.

teresabuecker, to random German
@teresabuecker@social.dev-wiki.de avatar

Wenn du nicht mehr nur das eigene Wechselmodell im Kalender hast, sondern auch noch, wann die Freundinnen der Kids bei welchem Elternteil und in welchen Stadtbezirk sind und wann deine eigenen Freundinnen ohne oder mit Kids Zeit haben.

Time Management for Mortals, oder so. ๐Ÿซ 

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@teresabuecker Und jetzt multiplizier das mal mit zwei vergangenen Beziehungen, und dann mit mehreren Kindern aus jeder dieser beiden Beziehungen.
stรถhn
Ich bin sehr, sehr froh, dass meine Kinder inzwischen alle alt genug sind, das selbst managen zu kรถnnen (bzw. ist die Hรคlfte inzwischen sogar schon ausgezogen).

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

One of my sons got his earlobes pierced, so I got him a pair of miniature Soju bottles to wear. So far he cannot yet wear anything but what the piercer put in, but he loved the idea of wearing these.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

There's currently 300k people out in Berlin rallying against the right-wing AfD party and other Nazis. That is one of the biggest protest events in Berlin ever.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Proper spacing is sooo important.

The Korean text "์ฃฝ ๋Š” ๋‹ค๊ณ ์š”", machine.-translated into "it's porridge".

vitaut, to random
@vitaut@mastodon.social avatar

Got myself a present

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@vitaut Uh, this is quite old, isn't it? I have that, too, somewhere.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Dear people in the northern hemisphere: It's getting better again; beginning today, the days are getting longer again.

pamelafox, to random
@pamelafox@fosstodon.org avatar

I should just start every day with a live stream as it gets me to actually change out of pajamas.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@pamelafox My team holds the daily standup meeting remotely sitting in front of our computers. It serves the same purpose.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

@pamelafox Ah, I see.
But it seems my standards are just lower: Being a bearded old man I don't paint my face and my pajamas definitely do not look like street clothes. So here, "getting all lammed up" just means I brush my hair and put on halfway decent clothing. ๐Ÿคญ

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