Then I must be among the manliest of men. :)

I learned all the different ways to use the keyboard in Windows and never looked back. The best of both worlds, although relearning everything now that I’ve switched to Linux is proving a challenge. I’m starting to think that the Linux GUIs don’t have true keyboard accessibility.

!squirrels@lemmy.ca

Not if he’s off screen. It’s only a visual cue if it’s captured by the video.

If you have a separate video of the guy falling over dead, you can use that video to get a window of time to view in the other video, but one video that captures only parts of the scene can easily leave you with no visual cues.

Reviews have to be balanced to circumstance. There is a big difference between putting out the sales brochure and the notice on the bulletin board. Likewise in coding a cryptographic framework for general consumption and that little script to create personal slideshows based on how you’ve tagged your photos.

As a general rule, wider distributions, public distributions, and long-lived distributions need more ambitious reviews. If the distribution is wide, public, and permanent, then everything needs very detailed scrutiny.

I have found some success in starting with and occasionally revisiting review goals. This helps create and maintain some consistency in a process that is scaled to the task at hand.

That only makes sense. We are having a conversation, not creating literature.

I would argue that “should of” is just a naive written rendition of the spoken contraction “should’ve”. They are homophones, so it’s a completely understandable error among those without the relevant education or background. I know only English and was in Grade 9 at a different school before someone corrected me.

In that spirit, I will call attention to your first sentence, specifically the comma. In my opinion, that can be improved. One of three other constructions would be more appropriate:

• I am really happy when people are quite strict in code reviews. It makes me feel safer and I get to learn more.
• I am really happy when people are quite strict in code reviews, because it makes me feel safer and I get to learn more.
• I am really happy when people are quite strict in code reviews; it makes me feel safer and I get to learn more.

The first of my suggested changes is favoured by those who follow the school of thought that argues that written sentences should be kept short and uncomplicated to make processing easier for those less fluent. To me, it sounds choppy or that you’ve omitted someone asking “Why?” after the first sentence.

Personally, I prefer the middle one, because it is the full expression of a complete state of mind. You have a feeling and a reason for that feeling. There is a sense in which they are inseparable, so not splitting them up seems like a good idea. The “because” explicitly links the feeling and reason.

The semicolon construction was favoured by my grade school teachers in the 1960s, but, as with the first suggestion, it just feels choppy. I tend to overuse semicolons, so I try to go back and either replace them with periods or restructure the sentences to eliminate them. In this particular case, I think the semicolon is preferable to both comma and period, but still inferior to the “because” construction.

I’ve clearly spent too much time hashing stuff out in writers’ groups. :)

I have read more than is probably healthy about the Chinese room and variants since it was first published. I’ve gone back and forth on several ideas:

• There is no understanding
• The person in the room doesn’t understand, but the system does
• We are all just Chinese rooms without knowing it (where either of the first 2 points might apply)

Since the advent of ChatGPT, or, more properly, my awareness of it, the confusion has only increased. My current thinking, which is by no means robust, is that humans may be little more than “meatGPT” systems. Admittedly, that is probably a cynical reaction to my sense that a lot of people seem to be running on automatic a lot of the time combined with an awareness that nearly everything new is built on top of or a variation on what came before.

I don’t use ChatGPT for anything (yet) for the same reasons I don’t depend too heavily on advice from others:

• I suspect that most people know a whole lot less than they think they do
• I very likely know little enough myself
• I definitely don’t know enough to reliably distinguish between someone truly knowledgeable and a bullshitter.

I’ve not yet seen anything to suggest that ChatGPT is reliably any better than a bullshitter. Which is not nothing, I guess, but is at least a little dangerous.

Do these people know something I don’t? I can’t imagine how the mutterings of the mob can be valuable beyond providing a place for us to connect.

And for those intending to use this to improve customer service, I can’t imagine how putting yet more barriers between the decision makers and the customers will help anyone other than the decision makers.

Ok, thanks! That looks like a good start for me.

We’re getting closer to winter. I’ve got most of those preparations done. “Just” have to finish building the heater for my shop. My programming based project list is coming together: learn me some Rust, contribute some documentation to a project I’m following, look deeper into the potential of the Accessibility tree. That should keep me busy for a while!

Looks kind of simple to me at first glance…

Well, it has been a decade since I’ve done anything other than dig holes (literally), drive school buses, and work in my shop. :)

Thanks for the jump start. I’ll add this to my ever growing list of tech stuff I’d like to tackle in my retirement.

Thanks. This is the first I’ve heard of the Accessibility tree. A quick look kind of spooked me, but I’ll dig deeper.

Old fart warning!

Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.

I remember when that is how the web worked. All that markup was to define the structure of the document and the client rendered it as set by the user.

Some clients were better than others. My favourite was the default browser in OS/2 Warp, which allowed me to easily set the display characteristics of every tag. The end result was that every site looked (approximately) the same, which made browsing so much nicer, in my opinion.

Then someone decided that website creation should be part of the desktop publishing class (at least at the school I taught at). The world (wide web) has never recovered.

The paradox is that people don’t actually implement agile methodologies but rather try to shoehorn them into their waterfall mindset.

After several decades and several methodologies in a number of fields, I’ve concluded that very few actually think methodologies are useful. It’s always pick and choose or mix and match the various elements. This is all driven by the belief that my business is a special little flower and needs it’s own custom little process that only I can invent.

Sweet! That means I can encrypt my code to keep prying eyes away.

Or maybe just a powder balance. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Dad did a lot of reloading his own ammunition. We kids had fun doing things like weighing our names (weigh a small piece of paper to get the tare, weigh again to get the loaded weight, subtract) and other miniscule things. As I recall, it was accurate to less than a grain (0.065 gram).

One of the things we did was weigh different shapes of paper to calculate area. Start with a sample of a unit area. Cut out a funky shape and weigh it, then do the math.

The last assembly I could understand. Well, pretend to understand.

All those assembly language instructions are just mnemonics for the actual opcodes. IIRC, on the 6502 processor family, JSR (Jump to SubRoutine) was hex 20, decimal 32. So going deeper would be really limited to not having access to the various amenities provided by assembler software and writing the memory directly. For example:

I started programming using a VIC-20. It came with BASIC, but you could have larger programs if you used assembly. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, so I POKED the decimal values of everything directly to memory. I ended up memorizing some of the more common opcodes. (I don’t know why I was working in decimal instead of hex. Maybe the text representation was, on average, smaller because there was no need of a hex symbol. Whatever, it doesn’t matter…)

VIC-BASIC had direct memory access via PEEK (retrieve value) and POKE (set value). It also had READ and DATA statements. READ retrieved values from the comma-delimited list of values following the DATA statement (usually just a big blob of values as the last line of your program).

I would write my program as a long comma-delimited list of decimal values in a DATA statement, READ and POKE those values in a loop, then execute the resulting program. For small programs, I just saved everything as that BASIC program. For larger programs, I wrote those decimal values to tape, then read them into memory. That let me do a kind of modular programming by loading common functions from tape instead of retyping them.

I was in the process of writing my own assembler so that I could use the mnemonics directly when I got my Apple //c. More memory and the availability of quite a few high level languages derailed me and I haven’t touched assembly since.

Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought “Fahrenheit 451” was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.

“Brave New World” struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).

It’s been too long since I read “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.

I don’t see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as “neutral” demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.

Fair enough. What evidence have you got that it’s any different than what humans do? Have you looked around? How many people can you point to that are not just regurgitating or iterating or recombining or rearranging or taking the next step?

As far as I can tell, much of what we call intelligent activity can be performed by computer software and the gaps get smaller every year.