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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • I feel like the “we don’t know what this function does” meme is kinda bad. There’s no reason beyond maybe time crunch why you shouldn’t be able to dissect exactly what it does.

    Despite this, the notion of a load-bearing function is still very relevant. Yeah, sure, you know what it does, including all of the little edge case behaviors it has. But you can’t at this time fully ascertain what’s calling it, and how all the callers have become dependant on all the little idiosyncracies that will break if you refactor it to something more sensible.

    It has been several times now where a part of my system of legacy code broke in some novel fantastic way, because two wrongs were cancelling out and then I fixed only one of them.










  • It’s kinda neat when you do, though. For the obvious reason, of course. But I find also that it has the extra feature of showing you all at once just how many accounts you really have.

    For most people who use the Internet, I expect it’s easily dozens, perhaps over a hundred. It is truly no wonder why people reuse passwords or rely on simple algorithmic tricks to remember passwords, there is literally no way the common person could develop a unique secure password on their own for all of these services and recall all of them. A secure password manager is truly the only reasonable solution.


  • Of the people who say anything about it, there seems to be two mutually exclusive camps of people on Lemmy in regards to how it should be structured.

    There’s those who want it to be a drop-in replacement for whatever platform they migrated from (Reddit, ususally), with everything cultured in one simple, easy-to-browse place where there’s enough activity to support diversity, just without the enshittification, even though the centralization they crave is exactly what invites the enshittification…

    …and then there’s those who specifically want the site to stay fragmented, because that’s the whole point of federation, it keeps out all the riff raff, and prevents the platform from losing what makes it so great. But many of them complain about why it isn’t growing as fast as they’d like it to, despite the fact that the fragmentation of community is by far the single greatest barrier preventing the mass adoption they yearn for.

    Each one seems to want a piece of what the other has.


  • I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

    Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

    I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

    Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/


  • I’m surprised I’ve yet to hear of a homebrew industry of completely cutting out the microcontrollers and soldering in a Pi or something to drive the raw display. I don’t predict it to be easy, but it doesn’t seem completely unobtainable?

    Flashing a custom bootloader would be even better, but I assume that hasn’t been done because they got that shit cryptographically locked down at the chip level.


  • I think my purest moment of gaming bliss was experiencing completely blind the last handful of worlds in Super Mario Odyssey while buzzed with a few whiskeys. God, my soul was in orbit with that experience. Pure, unfettered joy and whimsy through and through and cinematically epic when it wanted to be. I wouldn’t call it the best game ever or even my favorite game ever, but god damn it, it struck me just right way at just the right time. It was something truly special.

    More games I will cherish will certainly follow, and have followed. But for that specific set of vibes and circumstances, I don’t know if I’ll ever top that peak from playing a video game ever again.




  • I only actively seek games I want to play. I have negative desire to hoard games I know I will never open. I probably wouldn’t take the clutter even if they paid me to take it. Steam or Epic.

    My Steam library is caked up with a bunch of decade old Humble Bundle packing peanuts and frankly I kind of wish it wasn’t.

    On the rare chance a game I’ve been wanting to play is the free givaway, I might take it if it’s on Steam just because I’m already invested in that platform. If Epic was the one giving it away I probably wouldn’t bother. I don’t need my games library splintered across multiple launchers. I’m already annoyed at having the one. I’d prefer no launcher at all.


  • The first four of them are “just how floats work”, yeah. Has nothing to do with JavaScript.

    typeof NaN
    // "number"
    

    Classic, yes, very funny. “NaN stands for ‘not a number’ but it says it’s a number”. But for real though. It’s still a variable that’s the Number type, but its contents happen to be invalid. It’s Not a (Valid) Number.

    The next three are just classic floating point precision moments.

    The Math.max() and Math.min() ones are interesting. Seems that under the hood, both methods implicitly have a fallback “number” that it compares to any argument list you give it that will auto-lose (or at closest, tie) with any other valid number you can possibly give it, so when you give it nothing at all, they leak out. Honestly, makes sense. Kinda ludicrous it needs to have defined behavior for a zero-argument call in the first place. But JS is one of those silly languages that lets you stuff in or omit as many arguments as you want with no consequences, function signature be damned. So as long as that paradigm exists, the zero-argument case probably ought to do something, and IMO this isn’t the worst choice.

    Every other one is bog standard truthy/type coercion shitlery. A demonstration of why implicit type coercion as a language feature is stupid.