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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2024

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  • That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that it’s well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like

    if uplo == 'U':
        # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices
    else:  # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean
        # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matrices
    

    edit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they don’t show up in fortran





  • also, how are you liking bitwarden?

    I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I don’t even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.

    it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

    I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is … IDK maybe I should start grifting?

    But for real, I have considered writing my own:

    • VPN client where we don’t have to jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client, or finding out that their client runs like ass in Linux (Proton)
    • Password Manager
    • Config editor, so I don’t have to edit /home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.conf every time I want to change something. “Oh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one.” It’s tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isn’t this fucking solved with toml files already?)
    • An Android reminder app that isn’t some stupid Taylorist metric-worshipping bullshit.

    PS: There is Goldwarden which I know absolutely nothing about but looks neat. It does suggest that you could just write your own that is bitwarden compatible.



  • Y’all, with Proton enshittifying (scribe and wallet nonsense), I think I am never going to sign up for another all-in-one service like this. Now I gotta determine what to do about:

    • Proton Mail
    • Proton VPN
    • Proton Drive
    • Proton Calendar

    and I’d be forced to reassess my password manager if hadn’t already been using BitWarden when Proton Pass came out.

    Self-hosting is a non-starter (too lazy to remember a new password for my luggage). Any thoughts? Are other Proton users here jumping ship? Should I just resign myself to using Proton until they eventually force some stupid ass “Chatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself to”?




  • As I’m reading the article, linked by David Gerard in the community created by David Gerard and moderated by David Gerard:

    Oh shit David wrote this?

    Seriously though great piece. Loved the closing paragraph.

    But in the end, gravity still works, and a balloon can be inflated only so much. The bitcoin bubble is an artifact of market manipulation and has no more economic substance than the Hawk Tuah coin does. The U.S. government may be ripe for plunder, but other nations need to take steps to shield themselves from the impact of rug-pulling on a global scale.


  • I think you would need to deliberately choose a mathematical problem to solve, otherwise the most difficult thing you’ll come across will be binary representations of numbers and why floats are FUCKING BULLSHIT (seriously though they can be tricky if you think they are just “numbers in a calculator”).

    If you want to really understand programming language theory, or computer science more generally, you will definitely need mathematics. But if the goal is “I want to tell this chip what to do,” you don’t need to learn a lot of math, in my opinion.

    Edit: also, if you need help with any math, feel free to DM me. I am a former math teacher and sometimes teach algorithms (basically screaming “what is your induction variable”) at the undergraduate level.