FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Wow learning really is magic

Discussing the British Press, and I'm reminded of the time when I had a moderate amount of celebrity in the UK LGBT community, and the press tried to do a hit piece on me.

Now here's the thing. There's a cheat code, and I'm going to explain what it is:

They will contact you for comment.

If you say nothing, they will publish the piece and say you were offered the chance to comment.

If you tell them to fuck off, they will publish the price and say your response was foul and unprintable.

I did neither of these things. I told them that this piece wasn't journalism. It was ridiculous tittle tattle and represented everything that was wrong with a failing and dying industry more obsessed with clickbait than proper reporting. I asked them if they didn't have proper news to report, and said that they should be ashamed of themselves.

They're basically screwed at that point. "We contacted Ms Brown for comment and she said that this was ridiculous tittle tattle and that the reporter should be ashamed of herself."

They're not gonna say that.

I'm struck by something one of my history teachers once said about medieval castles. They weren't meant to be impregnable. They were meant to be annoying enough that an invading army would decide to investigate other priorities instead.

The piece never ran.

If you're a trans person in the crosshairs of the British press, make yourself an annoying target. They're on a deadline, and if you make them conclude that life is too short, they will leave you the fuck alone.

… when you write everything yourself, in very high-level code, and you understand all of it, suddenly you can “printf debug” basically anything.

I can write three lines of code and suddenly I have a symbolic trace of every single Objective-C method call: where it starts, where it ends, what the method name is, what object it was called on, and which class in the superclass chain it resolved to!

so, touchHLE is afflicted by a lot of “not invented here”-ism, which is all my fault. I have reimplemented a lot of stuff that other people would try to get from libraries.

in my defence though, this gives me some superpowers:

• I have a very deep understanding of the whole system! it's hard to overstate how useful that is.
• there's very few dependencies, so the binaries are small and the build times are short, and it's auditable

but there's something else cool, too…

Can we make it a well known rule that by the time a tech fad is all across SF billboards, it's officially peaked and will only decline or explode from now forward?

to be clear, I don't mean "explode" as in "explode in popularity", but "explode" as in "fireball that kills everyone involved in it"

“why don't languages like c++ and java have multiple constructors? they're so useful! i love that rust has multiple constructors!”

the finger curls on the monkey's paw

and i find out about the hell of objective-c designated initialisers

Even if CO₂ emissions decreased annually as much as during the pandemic lockdown, we wouldn't achieve our climate targets.

While individuals made huge sacrifices, the system remained. This shows that individual action will not solve climate change. We need the system to change.

looking into history accuracy of AoE2 is, a trip

suppose I am writing some code that will take a god object containing all the state of an emulator, move out several key components of it, reset their states, and then place them into a new god object that's meant to be almost indistinguishable from a completely fresh one. what's a nice, horrifying metaphor for this. i want a word that conveys the idea of like, organ harvesting from a perfectly healthy subject or something. or some kind of spiritual thing.

Bureaucracy becomes significantly easier to navigate once you realize bureaucrats are human beings and if you send them an overwhelming amount of documentation they'll often decide they don't get paid enough to go through all your bullshit and it's easier to just give you what you need