Companies updating their websites

bleistift2@sopuli.xyz to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 437 points –

Meme transcription [Kid drowning in pool]

In the background a person plays with a kid in the pool. The person is labeled “Companies updating their website”. The kid is labeled “The company logo”.

In the foreground a kid seems to be drowning. It is labeled “Useful information”.

In a second panel a skeleton sits at the bottom of the pool. It is labeled “The copyright year”

30

At least in Europe the year after the copyright statement has no meaning, and even the copyright statement itself is useless. Since if not stated otherwise, no rights are granted by default.

I thought everyone does ``

No no, we do

time_t t = time(NULL);
struct tm tm = *localtime(&t);
tm.tm_year + 1900;

Everyone writes their web server in plain C, right?

The cool thing to do now is to write it in Rust, only using the standard library.

And I hate it. Nice concept, but I don't like neither, the language nor compiler.

It's okay to be wrong

  • The C compiler, when I parse a &(float) as (long) (it's actually an evil floating point hack to run Quake III on an X86_64 CPU emulated in Scratch running on Spotifys Car Thing) (This would never be possible in Rust)

std::mem::transmute

Yes, but

  1. it's unsafe, therefore not really Rust I'd argue

  2. it doesn't look as good

float Q_rsqrt(float number) {
   long i;
   float x2, y;
   const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

   x2 = number * 0.5F;
   y = number;

   i = * ( long * ) &y;
   i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );
   y = * ( float * ) &i;

   y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );
   return y;
}

It’s a very different vibe. I remember my first seg fault in C - kids days are missing out!

Well, everyone who’s coding their websites is, yeah. Seeing how almost 10% of all websites use Elementor now and are built by people without an understanding of coding concepts, there are probably plenty of websites that don’t output their copyright year dynamically.

Also:

they: you can find the solution for your problem here

clicks on the 'here' link

404

This happened at my work with internal docs as we switched from an ancient intranet to a new service that had a ton more features but no backwards compatibility so all the pages got updated to PDFs with helpful links that went nowhere and it caused chaos for like 3 months.

Tangentially related, I remember at one of my jobs being tasked (several years in a row) with updating the copyright year in all our source files' headers.

it's probably a red flag if your website can't do currentYear() in the footer.

that's actually an anti-pattern. the purpose if a copyright notice is not to declare the current year to each visitor, fyi.

Yes, it's actually to notify people who aren't part of countries with membership to the WTO of the first available year of public declaration of distribution without restriction, however, putting "1997" on your website makes it look old so people put current year to make it look new.

It's only legally distinct in Aruba, Eritrea, Kiribati, Micronesia, North Korea etc... so it's almost entirely useless.

I meant it's a red flag if someone can't spin up the code and is making an intern change it by hand every year.

Or have a single general footer that they all refer to.