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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 31st, 2025

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  • People are good and care about good things.

    We have trouble understanding what’s going on because the average person can’t comprehend the levels of greed that modern Wall St capitalism selects for.
    Just like the average person cannot comprehend a million years, the average person can’t appreciate the level of avarice some of our rich and powerful operate at. Only a few of us have interacted with people that broken.
    There a tons of good people and good businesses out there. They are currently victims to levels of avarice we can’t bring ourselves to admit exists.



  • sturger@sh.itjust.workstoFunny@sh.itjust.worksMy personal hero
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    8 months ago

    So, have any of you ever been in Ikea during a fire alarm?

    We were shopping in an Ikea a year or so ago, in the furniture section. It’s just a bit past the entrance to “the maze”. A screeching fire alarm goes off. For about 10 minutes, everyone – including the Ikea employees – just ignore it and continue doing whatever. Then the Ikea employees start saying, “Please exit the store” or somesuch. That’s when I dawns on me that exiting the store is not as easy as it sounds. We could see no marked fire exits. The employees just said the “follow the arrows”.

    Everyone knows how hard it is to get through an Ikea at the best of times. What about during a fire alarm? Well, I’m looking for the “shortcuts”, but they are not clearly marked. We do make it to a stairwell (I’ve been in this store a few times) and manage to avoid traversing the entire top and bottom floors. We’re faced with a pair of big doors marked, “Not an exit” or somesuch. We push through those doors and they dump us out at the front of the store, near the registers.

    Now we’re at the front of the store, with no idea how to get out. Toward the front of the store, we see some exit doors. We try to push them open, but they’re blocked by carts on the outside. We finally get the carts pushed out of the way and people pour out into a small parking area. Note, that this Ikea has a parking garage under the store, so if the building were actually on fire, we’d be fucked because this second-level parking area we’re standing in is very close to the building and gives no easy exit to the ground and away from the building.

    If there was actually a fire with smoke, people would have panicked and it would have been a deadly shit-show getting out.

    Fuck going to that Ikea again.


  • You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:

    • “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
    • “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
    • “No, you don’t want to do that.”
    • “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
    • etc.

    I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.



  • Honest question: I haven’t used AI much. Are there any AIs or IDEs that can reliably rename a variable across all instances in a medium sized Python project? I don’t mean easy stuff that an editor can do (e.g. rename QQQ in all instances and get lucky that there are no conflicts). I mean be able to differentiate between local and/or library variables so it doesn’t change them, only the correct versions.


  • … I start high level (Python, Lua, GDScript, etc), then move the slow, stable bits to something faster. That’s a really effective flow, and at the end, I get a great scripting interface for my game.
    That’s the way to do it. “Premature optimization being the root of all evil” and all. Something that is slow but works is always better than something fast that doesn’t.”

    But then, given the complaints, I’m not actually sure they do want to build a game, I think they really want to build a language, and maybe an engine.
    And there’s nothing wrong with that. I personally find no interest in programming for programming’s sake. I need a problem to solve first. But what if I don’t have a problem to solve? Create one! Generating a problem is a valid way to let myself “enjoy” the combined agony/pleasure of programming.



  • [Begin Soapbox]

    1. If your idea of demonstrating your programming creds online is bashing Python for being “too slow”, you’re just revealing that you don’t understand your job as a programmer.
    2. A programmer’s job is to figure out a good language to use for the application. Notice I didn’t say, “the best language”; because there isn’t one.
    3. Python too slow for your application? Great. Uncheck that box and investigate any of the innumerable other languages out there.
    4. There’s not a good language for your application? Some Really Good programmers create their own language. Other Really Good programmers just use assembly for fuck’s sake. If Margaret Hamilton can land people on the Moon in 1969 using 16kB of government hardware, you should be able to code a video game with computers several billion times more powerful. Or just ask ChatGPT to do it for you. I’ve read good things about it online.
    5. Never underestimate the utility of just requiring everyone to buy faster hardware to cover up crappy programming/business decisions. It’s been done since the first caveman programmed a computer by striking two transistors together.
    6. Most programmers have to make due with what they’re provided with at work. If you’re at work, get back to it and figure out how to solve the problem. That means stop your posing online about “there’s no programming language good enough for my application”. If explaining to your boss that you need a different approach didn’t work, work on your resume instead.

    [End Soapbox]