jvisick

“Sorry, our unbelievably massive military budget is only for active duty military. Best we can do is schedule you an appointment to talk to someone next year about the benefits you won’t be receiving.”

“If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters. Those values are passed [to Facebook]”

So they don’t associate your official score to your browser, but presumably students who are using that search tool would be searching their real score - or a range close to it.

The headline is fairly leading, but the statement from the College Board is also fairly misleading. They’re not directly selling your official score to advertisers, but they’re indirectly selling data about you that gives a pretty good idea of your score.

Notice the “up to” in their offer. It’s likely commission based and inflated numbers to lure the developer into doing it - to trick them into thinking exactly what you’ve said here.

I’d imagine what they actually pay out after you cave is significantly lower, only then you’ve already sold out your users so you might as well leave their tracking in there.

I love that song!

Just as JetBrains is not representative of every dev, neither are LSPs. Some developers want a specialized IDE for their language(s), some want a highly customized editor with their language servers. As long as you efficiently produce code that works, who cares what other people use?

"To get a base salary of $170k you know you need to work hard as an Engineer, this sucks."

As someone who has worked as a UPS driver and now as a software developer, I can say that the UPS drivers definitely work harder than your average engineer.

That quote is also deftly ignoring the fact that you’re generally paid for the value you generate, not how hard to you work.

“Self-documenting” just means “(I thought) I understood it when I wrote it, so you should too”. In other words, it really means “I don’t want to document my code”

Out of all the modern browsers, it’s always Safari that I end up needing to write compatibility code for. I’m sure the app works fine on Firefox, they just haven’t tested it.

My favorite approach I’ve seen is just units of time -“this task will take a few [days/weeks/months/years]”.

No specific number. Instead, the scale of the task is measured in one of those units and I can give you an estimate but it’s just a guess.

If it’s task that might take “a few days”, it could be done tomorrow or it could take 5 days. If it’s one that takes “a few weeks”, it might be done next week or maybe next month.

I can’t imagine anyone but a total novice disagreeing with this.

I can understand finding pointers hard at first, but I can absolutely not understand trying to argue that they aren’t useful.

No worries, the Democrats will do what the party does best with a majority - pretty much nothing.

Enough to say “see? We’re better than the other guys”, but not enough to even nudge the status quo.

GitHub Copilot is just intellisense that can complete longer code blocks.

I’ve found that it can somewhat regularly predict a couple lines of code that generally resemble what I was going to type, but it very rarely gives me correct completions. By a fairly wide margin, I end up needing to correct a piece or two. To your point, it can absolutely be detrimental to juniors or new learners by introducing bugs that are sometimes nastily subtle. I also find it getting in the way only a bit less frequently than it helps.

I do recommend that experienced developers give it a shot because it has been a helpful tool. But to be clear - it’s really only a tool that helps me type faster. By no means does it help me produce better code, and I don’t ever see it full on replacing developers like the doomsayers like to preach. That being said, I think it’s $20 well spent for a company in that it easily saves more than $20 worth of time from my salary each month.

Sure, but I suspect this is the real motivation for the article:

Windows 11 Pro force-enables the software version of BitLocker during installation, without providing a clear way to opt out

It sounds like many people may be using software encryption without realizing it, if Windows 11 Pro uses it by default.

I don’t think it’s good enough to have a blanket conception to not trust them completely.

On the other hand, I actually think we should, as a rule, not trust the output of an LLM.

They’re great for generative purposes, but I don’t think there’s a single valid case where the accuracy of their response should be outright trusted. Any information you get from an AI model should be validated outright.

There are many cases where a simple once-over from a human is good enough, but any time it tells you something you didn’t already know you should not trust it and, if you want to rely on that information, you should validate that it’s accurate.

Honestly, “it’s better than JavaScript” is a pretty low bar.

I don’t like PHP because I think the syntax is ugly and I’ve only used it on systems that are old and a pain to maintain, but I’ll also very freely admit that I have absolutely not written enough PHP to have an informed opinion on it as a language.

I came across this one just yesterday and while it was convenient at first, I immediately got frustrated when I went to add some parameters and discovered it wasn’t actually curl

Mostly agree. I’m ok with single characters in a one line / single expression lambda, but that’s the only time I’m ok with it.

Admittedly I haven’t been looking that hard, but I don’t think I’ve seen a TV for sale in the past 10 years that wasn’t a “smart” TV.

Building microchips is really hard and Taiwan has held a practical monopoly on the industry for a while now. It’s not that the US doesn’t have educated workers, but it wouldn’t surprise me that it is hard to find many qualified to build the actual facilities to manufacture microchips - most of the US’s involvement in microchips has been designing them and then handing those designs over to Taiwan for manufacturing.

C# is what I primarily write at work, and it’s honestly great to work with. The actual business logic tends to be easy to express, and while I do write a some boilerplate/ceremony, most of it is for the framework and not the language itself. Even that boilerplate generally tends to have shorthand in the language.

1 hundredweight = (1 qt * 32) + 100.7, of course. It’s very intuitive.

By necessity, when you’re in the debugger your code has already been compiled either way, no? Or am I missing something here?

This isn’t executing your code as you’re writing it (though it does support Edit & Continue), this is preemptively executing the next lines in your code when you’re already paused in the debugger - which means it’s been compiled and already running.

Yeah, and those blood suckers are the richest assholes out there

Personally, I think that if you’d rather write foo?a:b than foo ? a : b, you’re probably insane

Never read again? These can’t be modified, but they can be read. After all, it’d be pretty useless to store data on a medium than can never be read.

But didn’t you know? The poor cops are scared! Why would they check if a suspect is armed when they can just kill them and say they thought they were in danger?

Here’s the original report: https://securelist.com/stripedfly-perennially-flying-under-the-radar/110903/

It doesn’t specifically attribute this to the NSA, and it’s very hard to definitively say who created what malware anyways.

That being said, if you read through the report, the details on this really scream “state actor” most probably. The level of modularity, the infrastructure of the C2 server, and the detailed & flexible spying capabilities all point to some government agency more than anything else.

In my experience, inheritance is really handy in the right situation. But far more often, inheritance is just a quick way to code yourself into a corner or just a waste of mental energy in the wrong place.

Just wanted to give props to this super informative comment. Thanks for the write up and relevant links!

“Dependency injection” is just a term for providing a function or method with its dependencies rather than making the function go and gather them itself.

It’s (typically) done through parameters, but it’s still more specific than just invoking a function. It describes how that function was written and the reasoning for certain parameters. To the other commenter’s point, you’ll have a hard time communicating about your code with other developers if you refuse to use the term dependency injection just because you don’t like OOP.

The choice between Linux and Windows is not just about ideologically choosing open vs closed source software.

If you don’t want to use closed source software, don’t use VS Code - but if you want to use Linux, and you want to use VS Code, those two choices are totally compatible and perfectly valid

It’s not just because of nonsense, it’s more that it doesn’t really matter what you do - the only thing stopping someone with physical access to your machine is their level of determination.

At some point, there’s no stopping the laws of physics. Your data is physically stored there. You can do a lot to make it really difficult to access it, but the best you can do is full disk encryption with a sufficiently strong key, and only store that key on external hardware that isn’t accessible to the attacker.

Even then, you better make sure that your encryption key wasn’t hanging around cached anywhere in memory before you shut down your computer.

I agree! I don’t think 3?”stuff”:”empty” should work at all because I think it’s an insane way to type a ternary :) I’m also very open to admitting that it’s just my own strongly worded opinion.

I think that in most cases, syntactically significant whitespace is a horrible idea - the one exception being that you should have space between operators/identifiers/etc. I don’t care how much, and 4 spaces should have no more special meaning than 1, but I do think that using a space to indicate “this thing is a different thing than the thing before it” is important.

WASM’s biggest holdback is that it cannot directly access the DOM. Until then, JS will still have a prominent place in building anything rendered in a browser.

At that point, just make a typescript engine so people don’t have to build their TS projects anymore

It’s not a question of performance - it’s just the fact that you need to use JS to modify the DOM in WASM. Until there is access to the DOM from WASM, there simply will be a place for JS in nearly every web app and it’s not because it’s fast, it’s because there are still certain things just need to be done using JS.

My point is really nothing to do with performance and I agree with the video you’ve linked: WASM is fast enough today. Whenever you can truly stop using JavaScript, I’ll be the first in line. You can already use WASM and eliminate huge portions of JS - but for anything beyond a very simple UI, you always end up with something that needs to be called in JS.

You could do HTMX and WASM, but they both have the same problem in that they generally replace elements in the DOM as opposed to interacting with existing elements in the DOM, and most rendering on both HTMX and WASM actually happens through JavaScript calls.

In either case you’re limited to only interact with the DOM at the level of abstraction that the framework provides through “behind the scenes” JavaScript calls which will always be a subset of the DOM manipulation that is possible by directly using JS. At least, until there’s a standard DOM access API for WASM.

What bike do you use and would you recommend it? I’ve been looking for an e-bike recently since I work so close to home, but I haven’t found any that seem reputable and a good value. I’m definitely looking for one that’s easily repairable and not paired to a specific brand’s software or proprietary parts.

Granted, I’ve only been passively looking (I.e. when I see an ad or doing a quick google search sometimes), but from what I can tell most of the advertised bikes are just the same handful of models with a different logo slapped on it and dubious claims about its performance.

You’ll never understand why people want to check out the latest app from a major tech company?

I get it if you aren’t interested personally, but it seems strange to not understand why people would want to try it.