A thing I hate hate hate (but always happens) is when a company distributes "Sample Code" for their API, and you open it up, and what they did was make a series of "Helpful" wrapper classes for the API then write code using the wrapper classes. Now suddenly it isn't sample code for the API, it's sample code for the helper classes. You can't just paste the sample code into your own project, unless you copy the helper classes into every project, in which case why aren't the helper classes the API?
@mcc I’m reminded of the printer driver installation that took an hour to complete because it wanted to do some kind of recursive sed across my entire /Users directory. (I noticed too late to stop it unfortunately)
The problem with udm14* is that Google Calculator is legitimately one of my favorite pieces of software (the natural language unit conversion is so good), and I expect udm14 is going to kill Google Calculator because that's the point
Maybe I should just make my own js calculator with builtin unit conversion.
See https://mastodon.online/ ; it's great, although since similar "give me the old version" flags on YouTube have sometimes stopped working without warning, I wonder how long it will last
@cstross Sounds like the idea that you can combine nationalism and socialism into a single movement. Not sure if it’s been done before, but if it has then it can’t have had that much impact, right?
What could be worse for railway policy than the poor current incumbent Commissioner? Sure! Someone with no knowledge of railways, from a country with no railways and a strong shipping lobby! 🎉
@jon Clearly we need to start lobbying for a Cyprus tunnel. (Although I suspect if that ever happens it’ll only be after Turkey joins the EU and the North Cyprus situation is resolved)
For the first time since 1992 (when I was 12) I’m completely disinterested by the UK General Election.
Sunak and the Tories will lose, Labour in uninspiring, the Lib Dems weedy, Greens weak and SNP weakened, and Reform simply grim. And Brexit is the elephant none of them will touch.
As I’m still a UK citizen I will vote, but it’s with less determination than ever before.
@jon I’m withholding judgement until the manifestos come out, but I’m not confident that there will be a party I’m able to vote for that doesn’t have as an official policy that the world would be better if a significant number of my friends didn’t exist. I have no idea how you positively engage with that, when a vote for the lesser of two evils will just reinforce the evil.
Thinking further about the SNCF ticket office employee in Strasbourg telling me SNCF ticket offices & SNCF Connect no longer being able to sell me tickets to Germany is Deutsche Bahn's fault (it isn't - it's 100% SNCF)…
The employee answered with full confidence. She's been asked this before. The line that it was DB's fault had been used many times
So is it either staff have been told to blame DB? Or they’ve been told nothing, and so make this up to save face?
I follow a style of giving all my collections plural names so that I can type things like "for sprite in sprites" without name collisions. However this then created a large problem when I wound up with, for sensible reasons, a collection named "sprite_data". This lead to the very uncomfortable existence of a singular variable named "sprite_datum"
@mcc I use for datum in data quite frequently. The problem I have is when such loops need to nest, so you end up trying to avoid for hobbits in hobbitses
😡 The town Fehmarn is bringing a court case against the start of building of the line to connect the Fehmarn Tunnel to Lübeck
While I understand their possible concerns about water supplies, I totally do not understand their complaints about electrifying the existing line - because you're going to need that while the tunnel building is delayed by their complaint about the water supplies! #CrossBorderRail
What if, when the Morrill Land-Grant Act passed in the 1860s and the University of California founded its flagship school, instead of putting it north of the bay in Oakland it had been placed south of the bay, in Lawrence where LLNL is now, and thus become the University of California Lawrence,
And thus when its prestigious school of computer science a hundred years later began developing the world's first open-source UNIX it were evermore named the Lawrence Standard Distribution, or for short—
Trying to make a backup + a YouTube playlist of everything I posted in my "listening to today" thread in the last year, and the hardest part turns out to be adding everything to the YouTube playlist. There appears to be no way to just take a list of URLs and add them all to a playlist (there was one, but Google disabled it: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/106340). So for each of these ~250 videos I'll have to open it, wait for it to load completely, pause it, THEN click …, add to playlist, playlist name, add
Why does!! The city of Toronto!!! Make it so hard!! To dispose of minor hazardous waste!!!!
I got a chance to use a car today so I'm like damn I'm gonna get rid of these paint cans and swelling batteries! And now I'm all the way out at the transfer station
They're closed for Easter Monday!!!!
The transfer station is right here but the gate is closed!!!
So I'm trying to install a piece of software on Linux, and I run a "./launch_installer.sh", and immediately it prints a message suggesting it is unpacking a JRE so it can run the installer inside the JRE, and I wonder if I am going to a dark place here
NOTE TO ZOOMERS: That's Java Runtime Environment not the other thing. "Java" is a programming language people used in the 1800s, when programming meant making punchcards for Jacquard looms
If you'd like to do something for me for my birthday, would you please reply to this with—or by other means send me— something with colors you liked? Like an image or a video or a link. Music would also be acceptable if it gives you a strong synesthesiac association with color.
If this request confuses you, here are some examples of images with colors I found striking [Artists: Laurie Barmore, Vian Borchert, Erica Aurahack]. But your reply can be whatever colors you like.
I am trying to take a program that works on Win32 and build it on Linux. An enum with a field named "Always" is failing to compile with a strange error. With a sinking suspicion, I look in the system headers and discover that /usr/include/X11/X.h is #defining "Always" to 2.
The Open Group, what the hell??? I don't suppose X11 has an equivalent of #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN #define NOMINMAX does it … :(
@mcc My favourite cursed C preprocessor fact is that Fortran compilers will optionally use it for Fortran code. And the convention for specifying whether or not it is to be used is whether the f in the file extension is upper or lowercase.
Something I’m always disappointed by in apps is them not gracefully dealing with intermittent internet.
So many feel like they’ve never been tested on slow/patchy connections.
Why not let me:
🔹press like, cache it, and send it when I get internet?
🔹press send on a message, cache it, and send it when I get internet? (WhatsApp handles this one well IMO.)
🔹open the message notification and see as much text as the notif held, & load the rest on reconnect?
@mattgrayyes@25kV This was me yesterday. One app sent three copies of a message (I only hit send once) because the Shinkansen WiFi was patchy. Duolingo had a button to extend my streak but said “go online to do a lesson”, which would have been great had I not been in international waters. (I get that their content is server side, but maybe cache one lesson in case of travel?)
@jon When I was a student I got very into the failed EuroRoute proposal, to the point of finding the Transport Committee reports in the university library. In hindsight, building two artificial islands and massive spiral roads from bridges into tunnel would have been rather less precedented than a rail tunnel
This post is written in code. It is designed so that it will only be understood by the people I want to be able to understand it.
In addition to the letter E, I am now making use of the letter P. This is my third time attempting to use P, and I hope that this one actually takes. I am starting with one hundred so I expect I initially won't be able to tell the difference at all.
@jon Google Maps has very widespread public transport routing; I’m surprised they haven’t looked into directing people to where to buy tickets. Maybe it’s because operators won’t give them a cut for their trouble.
The Interrail app also manages to suggest a route between those destinations, and notes the leg not covered by the pass, but not where to buy tickets.