FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

I respect screaming babies on airplanes because they're the only ones providing honest feedback about the overall air travel experience

my teachers used to say they were preparing us for jobs that didn't exist yet, and in hindsight they were probably hoping for "nuclear nano space-robot technician" and not "person who makes a small amount of money putting enormous amounts of personal information on the internet"

Apple Vision Pro vs Meta Quest: head-to-head comparison

Number of 3.5mm headphone jacks:

Apple Vision Pro: 0 Meta Quest (2019): 2

The Meta Quest (2019) wins the specs fight by a landslide.

biblically accurate angel investor

A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.

Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”

(holding glass of coke zero) girl breakfast

periodic reminder that it is EXTREMELY cool that safe rust supports mutable reference iterators, because it involves implicitly encoding a compiler-validated proof that every element in your collection is yielded at most once, even when yielding from both ends

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=7b27bacf16f707dbff3c9e944db5af8f

The “wide Lightning” connector on the Vision Pro battery pack was just a mini-boss. Cue the boss music…

Software engineer: really when you get down to it computers spend most of their time just rendering text

Lay person: oh I guess that must mean it's real easy to render text since that's all computers do, right?

Software engineer: haha no it's impossible actually

Me: I bought an elephant for your room.

Them: Thanks!

Me: Don’t mention it.

😭 Trying to post a screencast of #Mastodon being broken, and Mastodon refused to let me upload the video because it claims that it's 1000fps.

@mattwilcox When I hear complaints from these companies over tracking and privacy regs, it all sounds like "Matt, my business is *predicated* on punching people in the face. If we stop allowing companies to punch people in the face then an entire industry of face-punching companies will die off!"

"Matt, tracking on the web, it's just how it is. If we get rid of it so many companies will die off."

There were companies before tracking tech. There was advertising before tracking tech.

Tracking tech is just how they can pay the least, to get the most. It's not a right. It's not a given. It's not required.

How did it work before? You made good products and the stuff that was most popular rose to the top.

Ban tracking tech. Hamstring predatory and scammy products that survive on targeting.

(girl who has only played source games before, walking outside in europe irl) getting some real “half-life 2” vibes from this

current mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KVtgzOTqDw

@whitequark @jacqueline Not yet. It's one of those things where despite being the obvious solution (being able to say "this is my bitfield, this is the position it occupies, and here's the attribute that says it should be treated as a single 32 bit write with 0 padding and not three 8 bit writes"), nobody will believe me until I implement it and tell everyone to quit fucking around with my data in some implementation-defined manner and let ME have a say over MY bits and bytes in a portable manner DAMNIT--

... It'll be a while. I'll be working on higher level things like defer and Transparent Aliases and Unicode Functions in the meantime; might not see it until the 203x cycle. Maybe Rust will get a nose to smell at that point and stop emulating the dogshit practices of C for structure layout and control and start looking a bit more like Ada.