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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I know what you mean. I’ve been doing higher level development for a couple decades and only now really getting into embedded stuff the past year or two. I dislike a lot of what C makes necessary when dealing with memory and controlling interrupts to avoid data races.

    I see rust officially supported on newer ARM Cortex processors and that sounds like it would be an awesome environment. But I’m not about to stake these projects with a hobbyist library for the 8-bit AVR processors I’m actually having to use.

    Unfortunately I just have to suck it up and understand how the ECU works at the processor/instruction level and it’s fine until there are better tools (or I get to use better processors).

    ETA: I’ve thought also that most of the avr headers are just register definitions and simple macros, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to convert them to rust myself? But then it’s my library that’s probably broken lol


  • I didn’t expect to like Balatro as much as I did. I’m a big fan of deck builders but the poker theme was not super compelling to me. But wow, I’ve had a blast with it. Just boils down to a really good set of mechanics and some ridiculous fun builds. I don’t think it will hold my attention as long as like Slay the Spire or Monster Train but it was well worth the price.




  • The original dragons dogma had poor quality of life features and its arguably a large part of the appeal. No fast travel, no multiple saves. If you didn’t like your little ai character you had to advance pretty far to change it (and the same with fast travel, it sort of existed and was a surprisingly cool unique system but you had to get through a lot of the game for it). I’d compare it in a lot of ways to the first dark souls as far as not following gaming industry trends.

    I was hoping dragons dogma 2 was more of the same honestly, I don’t think I care if travel stones can be purchased or whatever. Is it a bad game for those that liked the first one?


  • AI has been a field within computer science since at least the 1950s. It encompasses algorithms for making decisions, which is why so many technologies are labeled this way. “Intelligence” may seem like an odd choice of terminology (some people conflate it with sentience or similar), but general machine intelligence is one goal of this study, and the applications of AI are putative steps to that end.

    Back when those guys started talking about what methods could get us there, things like decision trees, symbolic manipulation, neural nets, were all potential pathways that were on the table. So these get included in the field because that’s where and to what end they were produced.

    Another thing is that intelligence can be narrow in its domain. A character in a video game that needs to move from point A to point B can do so following something like the A* pathfinding algorithm. In the domain of graph traversal/pathfinding, it’s hard to imagine something much more intelligent (or fit to solve the problem) than A* despite being a simple algorithm.

    But yeah, as a marketing term it is kind of silly since most people don’t know what it means. It remains a useful categorization for a broad field of study/research in CS though.






  • Yeah, I find it works really well for brainstorming and “rubber-ducking” when I’m thinking about approaches to something. Things I’d normally do in a conversation with a coworker when I really am looking more for a listener than for actual feedback.

    I can also usually get useful code out of it that would otherwise be tedious or fiddly to write myself. Things like “take this big enum and write a function that converts the members to human-friendly strings.”



  • Not to mention meds to suppress expression of autism traits and behavioral therapies like ABA that make daily existence a constant effort. But hey, they make it less awkward for allistic people to share spaces with autistic people. Or god forbid, have them accept that some folks have different ways of engaging with the world.


  • As the gp poster I didn’t mean to sound like I’m dumping on rural life. I grew up in a rural area, riding four-wheelers and roaming the woods till the sun went down. One of my best friends started a family around the same time I did and opted to buy some acreage a decent commute away from town. They ride dirt bikes with their kids on literal mountains in the backyard, have a chicken coop and machine shop, deer wander up and eat their vegetable garden. It’s super rad and I wouldn’t mind having gone that route either.

    I really didn’t dig the suburbs and having to drive literally everywhere though. On the balance I liked the diversity in the city and having easy access to metropolitan amenities. I’d never shit on the rural route and it may well be where I end up, I just thought it was wild how much blowback I got from wanting to raise a kid in the city.


  • I know you mean software applications, but another very common application of C is almost any device that uses a microcontroller unit (which is probably dozens of things you own right now). It is incredibly adept at interfacing with processing units at a level close to the metal.

    That’s also why you’ll see OS kernels and low level system tools and libs in C as well. It provides a good balance of functionality and abstraction so you can scaffold from register manipulation and interrupt functions up to high level code very quickly.

    It also provides a good application binary interface (standards of interoperation with other languages) so you’ll find a lot of applications may be written in C++, Java, Python, etc. but they use a decent amount of core functionality implemented in C.



  • I’m a software developer with about twenty years in the field, spending my first half of that working in a Unix environment. I have tried so hard to make Linux my home desktop solution. I’ve come back to it every five years or so, hoping it’s finally figured out the UI/UX thing.

    Things I like:

    • no comercial motivation
    • intrinsically programmer-oriented
    • free with available sources, as deep as I care to dig

    Things I don’t like:

    • High barrier to entry (which distro?)
    • Poor support for newer hardware (not a fault of Linux but a reality)
    • Too much competition in very basic facilities like package managers and desktop environments
    • Well-intentioned but largely unhelpful community support due to the above points

    I’m back using Linux again (Fedora) because at the moment I’m doing a lot of embedded and SoC work, and again I love the dev experience. But so far it seems like not much has changed wrt how fiddly daily driving can be. I can’t stand W11 for a lot of reasons, but I’m constantly tempted to try my luck with WSL as a better compromise.


  • I don’t think I disagree with what you are saying, but America’s history has not followed the premise of this paradox. That is, America does not unilaterally extend tolerance to the intolerant. Abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, these things were not resolved by “live and let live.”

    Americans tend to allow intolerance to some critical point, which then turns into conflict and usually violence until things simmer down to an acceptable level of intolerance once more.

    Legislation does skew progressive, as you point out. That’s another example of society not tolerating the intolerant. And the real-world solution to this paradox: tolerance need not extend to the intolerant. But to explain the paradox in terms of the article you linked, you must start from a different premise.