@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

#gardening #digging

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˜

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

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, 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

@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)

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".

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.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

"Men and women going out together, that's a date!"

I do not subscribe to such stupid ideas. I have gone out with make and female friends, and it was great, because we are friends. When any meeting with the opposite sex becomes a date, my life would become much poorer for it.

sbi, (edited ) to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

A question to the C++ community here:

Which standard library features and which core language features might throw exceptions?
(I am going through a library trying to find all the places where we need to look twice for exception safety. I have identified all the places we throw exceptions, and what code is affected by that. I am now trying to find where other code we use might throw, and what is affected by this.)

Please boost for greater reach.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Tesla is employing 11,000 employees in its relatively new factory in Grรผnheide, southeast of Berlin. It's just been found out by German news that the factory has a really unusual amount of registrable workplace accidents. (In Germany workplace accidents are registrable when they lead to employees having to be on sick leave for more than two days.)

In their first year, the factory ordered an ambulance or helicopter 247 times. That is several times as often as comparable German car manufacturers.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Dear web designers,
If you make it hard for me to pick the option where all non-essential cookies are forbidden, I just reopen you website in private mode, where cookies will be be deleted once I closed that tab. Good luck recognizing me again if I am ever unlucky enough to click another link leading to your website.
You deserve this.

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Yet more stupid management decisions. sigh I think I've had enough by now. The nice little startup I once joined was bought 3 years ago, and apparently I'm not cut out for big corporations and their stupidity. It drives me up the wall and makes management resent having to talk to me.

I am officially back on the job market now. If you need an experienced C++ programmer give me a shout. I don't mind coming to a Berlin office once a month, but purely remote is also fine.

(Please boost.)

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

In spring 2022, after having been in too many discussions about batteries, energy storage, and renewable share in energy grids, I decided to write a Twitter ๐Ÿงต on the subject, trying to collect what I have learned in the last decade. I think it's high time I transferred this to mastodon, as long as I still can at least read Twitter. Also, there are a few things I wanted to improve on that thread, so this is my chance.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

But you cannot charge a fully charged 5MWh battery any further and will only ever get 5MWh out of it. And once discharged, you need electricity to charge it again, rather than just refilling a tank. Plus, batteries have a much lower energy density than fossil fuel. The latter is why most batteries are not well suited for storing considerable amounts of energy: A 10MWh battery plant is the size of a school's gym, while a 1MW diesel generator plus 10h worth of fuel easily fits into a container.

A diesel generator in a container on a truck trailer.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

The TL;DR:
i) Due the need to do primary control (frequency response), a 100% renewable grid is impossible. You need either combustion engines or batteries to run your grid.
ii) Batteries are not great for storing significant amounts of energy, but they are very well suited for frequency response.

sbi,
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

Let me reiterate: By putting up wind and PV farms, and hooking up battery power plants to our grid, we can significantly reduce our fossil fuel usage at a profit within just a few years. This is proven technology, which has been in the field for years or decades, and comes at a relatively low safety risk. (Compare this to nuclear power plants, which are rather expensive, take a decade or two to build, and take whole nations as backup to get insured because of the risk of a meltdown.)

sbi, to random
@sbi@toot.berlin avatar

And thus our journey begins in Warsaw.

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