merc

joined 2 years ago
[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 hour ago

Wouldn't changing your birth name require time travel?

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 hours ago

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago

actual, Constitutionally defined treason?

The kind where you actually have to be in a state of war with another country? A war that was legally declared by the US congress? Since the last time the US declared war was during WWII, and every enemy country in that war was defeated, I don't think "actual, Constitutionally defined treason" is possible today.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

You sound like someone who frequently accidentally brings up the emoji keyboard when you're trying to go to the end of the line here on Lemmy.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I've done that, but that's ugly.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Also, you can use this for more than just arithmetic. The first thing in the list is the name of the function, and everything else is something that you pass to the function. So you could instead write

(plus 1 2 3 4)

Which would be like plus(1, 2, 3, 4) in other kinds of programming languages.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

So, if 2 5 8 5 - × + is "RPN" does that mean that the LISP version is Polish Notation?

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Brackets and Orders, not that anybody calls "(" a bracket or "^" an "order".

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

You don't necessarily have to do parentheses first. What matters is that the things inside the parentheses are a group that you can't break apart. If you have 10÷2+3-2*(2+1) you can do the division first 5+3-2*(2+1) then the addition outside the parentheses 8-2*(2+1) It's just that before you do the multiplication of the term outside the parentheses, you have to handle the parentheses group, so you get 8-2*3 -> 8-6 -> 2

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I got really angry because the prettier code formatter insists on removing parentheses, making things less clear. Because it's an "opinionated" formatter you can't tell it not to do that without using ugly hacks.

Sure, logically there are times when you don't need them. But, often it helps to explain what's happening in the code when you can use parentheses to group certain things. It helps in particular when you want to use "&&" and "||" to say "do X only if Y fails".

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Depends on the language.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 24 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I don't see anything unprofessional there. Just naughty words. But, the naughty words are somewhere where they warn you that the code below doesn't behave as expected, or complain because there isn't a better way to do something. That seems like the best time to use strong language.

Cleaning it up is a great idea in theory, but in practice almost everybody has higher priority things to be doing. Leaving a comment in the code for why something is ugly is the best thing you can do when you don't clean something up, so that someone coming along after you doesn't struggle with it. We have no idea how many "naughty" comments are no longer there because the issues they addressed were cleaned up.

 
  • At least 200 people have died
  • The plane crashed into a doctor's hostel, injuring many people on the ground
  • One passenger survived, with injuries minor enough he was able to walk away
  • The plane was a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner
 

1:20 AM EST

210/266 polls reporting

| Name | Party | Votes | % | |


|


|


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| | Bruce Fanjoy | Liberal | 27,220 | 50.4 | | Pierre Poilievre | Conservative | 24,927 | 46.1|

 

Stocks have almost returned to where they were 5 days ago after his latest change to the tariffs.

 

I need some new earbuds, and live in a place with severe winters. I want to be able to access the controls using gloves or mittens if possible.

The online reviews I've seen all assume that you can just touch the earbuds with bare hands, but when it's well below freezing, that sometimes isn't possible. If I have to take off a mitt to use my earbuds my hand might not warm up until I can get back indoors again. Earbuds that work with touchscreen-capable gloves aren't good enough either. I've never seen touchscreen-capable gloves that keep your hands warm at -40C.

Any suggestions?

 

First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they're buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.

Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won't have any effect for people buying used homes.

 

Currently the PM doesn't have a seat in the house. If he visited the house, he'd have to go to the visitor's gallery.

It's an interesting situation. The PM is the leader of the federal liberal party, but he's not a member of parliament. But, does he need to be? Is the PM sitting in the house of commons just a tradition that nobody has challenged yet? Could the PM delegate things inside the house of commons to their deputy-PM and then do things like give speeches, attend diplomatic functions, etc.?

The US has a very different system where the president isn't part of the legislative branch at all. But, typically presidents don't twiddle their thumbs waiting for something to do. Being the head of state keeps most presidents busy. It makes me wonder if technically Carney could choose not to run for office, and just spend his time doing head-of-state things rather than legislative things.

 

"Sports Interactive regret to inform that, following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and shift our focus to the next release."

 

This sounds like a disaster.

For those who don't know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to "scout" them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.

By releasing in March 2025, they're going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they're giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won't be much remaining interest in playing a game that's almost out of date.

They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they've done it before. They could have called "Football Manager 25" something like "Football Manager Next Gen" and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there's a FM 26 coming out so soon?

 

Maybe the "great" America that Donald wants to take us back to is the 1860s?

 

Note: National Bank of Canada is a commercial bank, not the Bank of Canada which is Canada's national bank. Um. Which is Canada's central bank.

The graphs in the presentation are the key takeaway for me. But, some key words:

"Canada is caught in a population trap that has historically been the preserve of emerging economies. We currently lack the infrastructure and capital stock in this country to adequately absorb current population growth and improve our standard of living."

...

"To put things in perspective, Canada's population growth in 2023 was 3.2%, five times higher than the OECD average."

...

"But to meet current demand and reduce shelter cost inflation, Canada would need to double its housing construction capacity to approximately 700,000 starts per year, an unattainable goal."

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