The great thing about writing software is that after you spend 3 days figuring out a simple solution to a complex problem you're left with no evidence as to what you did with the rest of your week.
"You wrote 15 lines of code?"
"No, I wrote 4500 lines of code. Those 15 were the ones worth keeping."
Watch out if you use iTerm2 on a mac. The latest version (3.5.x) integrates OpenAI/ChatGPT. It looks like you have to set keys to use it, but I don't want it even in the mix so I'm sticking with the 3.4.x release.
Any european competiton to OpenAI is welcome , good to see Mistral coming with a new model for programming, Codestral. https://mistral.ai/news/codestral/
Last night I experimented with KVM and VirtManager. With the exception of not being able to figure out resizeable drive images without the CLI I think I'm most of the way to being able to replace VirtualBox as my emulation environment. #programming
The TidyDensity package now includes new functions to calculate the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) for various distributions, streamlining model quality assessment. Use functions like util_negative_binomial_aic() to automate AIC calculations, ensuring precise model evaluation.
I've just seen a #programming pattern in #PHP where a method could return two lists of things. Instead of doing that, it takes as a parameter a callable, and passes the two lists to the callable. Instead of:
[$a, $b] = getLists($param);
// Act on both lists.
we have:
$callable = function($a, $b) {
// Act on both lists
}
actOnLists($param, $callable);
When you isolate a function that causes problems and can’t deduce the problem, rewrite the function differently. At least you’ll have different problems.
A nerd nostalgia thread of possible #RetroComputing interest:
From 1993-1994, I was a “technical assistant” in the RF Engineering department of #Comcast#Cellular. Back then, Comcast was a scrappy regional cable #TV operator making its first foray into #mobile telephony, not the multinational #telecommunications and media behemoth we know today. (1/6)
I had previously whipped up an #Excel#VisualBasic for Applications (#VBA) Erlang B function to calculate #cellular tower quality of service (#QoS), so my other big project was modeling #Comcast Cellular’s network call capacity for an overdue upgrade from the (analog!) #1980s-era Advanced #Mobile Phone System (AMPS).
My first corporate #programming lesson: toy code will be expanded regardless of scalability. (4/6)
Java’s records are a bit like Go’s interfaces. You think you’d be using them for everything, while in reality, they’re good for like 2-3 cases. Indeed, in those 2-3 cases, they’re really saving the day, but using them everywhere “just because” will result in an incomprehensible mess.
Matt (@messerman) and Mike (@nebyoolae) discuss Application Programming Interfaces and how you're using them all the time (most likely) without evening knowing (probably).
The next time you find an if-else in your code where both the "if" and the "else" return from the function that you're in, you could think of that "else" as unnecessary.
Can anyone recommend some good programming blogs (in the realm of lisps, emacs, guix, technical deep dives) that offer RSS feeds? I've already got https://wingolog.org/ from @wingo which is pretty much the exact genre of blog I'm looking for. https://ianthehenry.com/posts/ from @ianthehenry is also a good one (although the RSS feed doesn't seem to work with GFeeds :).
I just think it would be cute to have a selection of RSS feeds to browse through :)