Ephera

joined 5 years ago
[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 40 points 2 weeks ago

Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don't want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.
It's just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it's been a few versions, so maybe they've fixed it. It's always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.


To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that's supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.
The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn't work.
The second time, I couldn't click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.
And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.

Instead, I've slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it's definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, this discrepancy really irks me in programming, too. It's really good at known problems, like student homework or whatever task a middle manager will throw at it to see how well it works.
But because of the nature of software – if there is a solution, you can easily share it with everyone in the world – it's kind of our job to work on anything but known problems.

Yeah, there's gonna be some known parts, where it may be able to assist, similar to a library or StackOverflow. But if it can put together your whole solution without tons of human input, chances are that solution is already out there and you should be using it instead.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

Ah, thanks, I hadn't read that far. It says this:

A 1941 Commerce Department survey found no significant expansion of retail sales due to the change.

With this as source: https://www.nytimes.com/1941/05/21/archives/thanksgiving-goes-back-to-old-date-in-42-president-says-change-did.html

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Damn, what a concept. If people buy extra in this time period, it is 100% crap that they don't need. Otherwise, they would be buying it, no matter when it gets stocked. So, the way to combat an economic crisis is to produce more garbage. Incredible.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Bash fucks me up so much, too. You just put the parentheses there to say that something is a function, not for actually declaring the parameters that can be passed in...

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml -3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah, we just have two ear canals. Stereo is basically all your brain will get.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

I've seen it argued that the best way to create lightweight software is to give devs old hardware to develop on.

Which, yeah, I can see that. The problem is that as a dev, you might have some generic best practices in your head while coding, but beyond that, you don't really concern yourself with performance until it becomes an issue. And on new hardware, you won't notice the slowness until it's already pretty bad for those on older hardware.

But then, as the others said, there's little incentive to actually give devs old hardware. In particular, it costs a lot of money to have your devs waiting for compilation on older hardware...

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago

Then those indigenous people need to figure out their morals. Chances are, they are embedded in a context where this is a lot easier, because they don't have factory farming. They are part of the food network and take only as much as nature can recover.

You want me to be the arbiter of all morals? Well, there's my take. Indigenous people hunting are not the problem. Other parts of the hivemind might have a different view on that, though, and I'm not gonna apologize for their take.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

They just dumped them there in the 60s and 70s before there was regulation...


Edit:
Here's two links, if you want to read up on it:

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago
[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago

It should be said, though, that this really is just a general rule. Some frameworks and programming languages are definitely less efficient than others without providing more versatility.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, the complaint isn't so much that we should be talking about rape all the time, but rather that we should stop shaming consensual sex.

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