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swordsmanluke

@ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

Posts
4
Comments
262
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Court blocks $1 billion copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users’ piracy

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  • Oh man, story time!

    I like to stab people competitively. One of the risks you run is that they stab you back.

    About 20 years ago now I was sparring with a pal of mine. We were using shinai - a Japanese sparring sword made of four slats of bamboo lashed together with leather. My pal drew back for a pull thrust and I deflected it with a move where I stepped back and lifted my blade to direct the thrust above my head.

    ... Only I forgot to step back. Instead of redirecting the thrust harmlessly above myself, I brought the tip of his shinai directly into my right eye. (Stupidly, I wasn't wearing any protective gear.) The inch-wide tip smashed my eye down and collided with the back of my eye socket.

    I hit the ground, blind, weeping blood and in the most pain I've ever experienced.

    Fortunately, I kept the eye.... but I was seeing triple due to the swelling in my socket. So I bought an eye patch and wore it until I healed.

    During my convalescence I happened to have a really shitty day. It was a cold winter day and I was running late to work. My car ran out of gas a mile short. I had to run the last mile in the cold and wet, already late and getting more frustrated every moment.

    By the time I reached the parking lot for my shitty retail job, I was in a foul mood.

    ... Now at this point in my life I wore a frankly excessive amount of black leather. Black leather boots. Black leather jacket. Black leather gloves. My pants were black too, but they were at least denim.

    So imagine if you will - a six foot tall man, wearing all black leather and an eyepatch, stalking angrily across the parking lot with a baleful expression.

    People were getting the fuck outta my way. Gazes averted, people turned their heads and just dipped.

    ... Until The Boy. A pale haired kid of about five or six was being towed out of my path by his mushroom- haired mother - but he was rooted to the spot. Staring at me with unabashed excitement, he slipped free of his mother's grasp and shouted, "Look Mom! A Pirate!"

    I started guffawing, bad mood instantly gone. Mushroom-Mom grabbed her kid and started dragging him away. I called after them "It's okay!" But with a mumbled "No, it's not", she dragged the boy into their car and fled.

    ... And I went to work, Pirate King of the K-Mart.

  • I had to design a simple general purpose language for university, so I tried creating "ZoomerScript" with Jetbrains MPS

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  • Compilers are a specialized topic - and syntax design is fiddly - but it really is no harder than any other sort of program. A lot of the hard theoretical work was done back in the sixties and seventies. You don't have to start from scratch. These days it's "only" a matter of implementing the features you want and making sure your syntax doesn't leave itself open to multiple interpretations. (just as arithmetic, e.g. '5 × 4 - 1' requires some rules to make sure there's only one correct interpretation, so do language syntaxes need to be unambiguous to parse. )

    Don't get me wrong - writing a language is a lot of work and it's super cool that OP has done this! I just want to stress that language development is 100% doable with an undergrad degree. If you understand recursion and how to parse a string you already have all the theory you need to get started.

  • Removed

    Let's try a different approach: what lesson COULD be learned as confined by the premise of a popular game (board/card/video)?

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  • I legit think that Secret Hitler should be a required part of high school government classes. It so perfectly demonstrates the risks of both government action and inaction.

    You can pass a law with the best of intentions, trying to root out dangerous elements but those same laws can be turned against you. Think about what your worst enemy could do with a given law before you demand its passage.

  • How do you deal with saying (sort of a) goodbye to someone you (respect/love) a lot

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  • You sound like a great person working hard to build yourself a bright future. The best thing you can do for your teacher is to keep at it.

    I used to teach (martial arts) and there's nothing a good teacher loves more than to see a student applying themselves and growing - even if it's outside of their subject (Though that's nice too.)

    Others' advice here is spot on. You can love/respect/ appreciate someone in an entirely non-romantic way. That's normal. I have teachers in my past that I still think about gratefully 30+ years later. Teacher-Student relationships can be very healthy mentorships, but due to the handful of pedos taking horrible advantage of the students in their care, it's safest for students (and schools) to ban overt friendships. (And it is depressingly common. I was student to three teachers in three schools - in different states even - who were eventually arrested for abusing their students.)

    So - to avoid accidentally getting your teacher in trouble - you should avoid using the L-word. But 100% write then a letter or note thanking them for their positive impact and encouragement.

    For the rest - do your best to learn at school, even if you get a bad teacher and your old friends try to drag you down. It's going to suck sometimes. You can do it. Do your best to keep learning, in or out of school. Everything you learn - from algebra to making a killer peach cobbler - will help you somewhere down the line.

    I know because I've seen it firsthand.

    My Dad came from an abusive household. (His dad liked to use baling wire as a switch.) By the end of his high school career, Dad was heavily into drinking, he'd lost multiple jobs by getting into fist fights with coworkers and was only on track to graduate because he lived in CA during a time where the school system literally refused to fail anybody. So Dad graduated with a D average and swore he'd never set foot in a school again.

    ... And then he decided he wanted to do better. At 18, he gave up his entire friend group and started hanging out with some people who were more like he wanted to be. It was awkward at first - he was coming from a very different perspective than these other dudes had. To their credit, they always included Dad and let him hang out with them. And slowly, Dad began to change. He mellowed out and quit drinking and fighting.

    Dad worked in factories after high school. Eventually he and my Mom married and I came along. Dad worked a number of blue-collar jobs for the first years of my life. Iremember him saying though that when he had downtime at work, he made a point of going to other parts of the factory and asking to watch and learn their tasks. As a result, he survived a number of layoffs through the years and for those times he didn't, Dad was often rehired at better pay in better roles shortly afterward.

    Eventually, he tired of factory jobs and decided to return to school. To become a lawyer. That became the next 12 years of our lives. There were whole years where I'd see Dad only first thing in the morning at breakfast. He'd go to school all morning, work swing shift into the night and get home long after little I was already in bed.

    It was an incredible amount of work. But he stuck to it.

    I was sixteen when Dad finally graduated and became a lawyer. He's a pretty damn good one too.

    I'm definitely not saying you should become a doctor or lawyer or whatever - do what you want to - but please know that you don't have to listen to people who want to drag you down. You can work hard and wring what you want out of life.

    Surround yourself as much as you can with people who encourage and support each other. Learning that people can encourage and help each other purely for the pleasure of seeing the other pain succeed - that may be the best lesson you can learn from your teacher's example. Lean into it. Find good people. Make yourself one too.

    And you will do amazing things.

  • Who do you think Batman could take down, DC or not?

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  • How much time does he have to prepare?

    Batman is not only a world class fighter, he also owns weapons, chemical and biotechnology manufacturing companies. And as a billionaire anything he can't build he can probably buy. He's also paranoid and clever AF and has made multiple contingency plans to take down not only villains but every hero he's come across.

    Batman can take down anyone the current writers want him to.

  • Lemmings who have a ringtone with vocals... why?

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  • Are you really taking about computer servers sending SMS alerts that triggers a barbershop quartet ringtone?

    Well, I use the PagerDuty app, instead of pure SMS, but otherwise - yeah!

  • Lemmings who have a ringtone with vocals... why?

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  • My normal ringtone doesn't.

    But my PagerDuty tone is a barbershop quartet singing that server is on fire. If they're gonna get me outta bed at 3 in G.D.A.M. at least they can sound nice.

  • "the Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one."

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  • Season 1 is wildly uneven. Some episodes are a TV-14 Seth McFarland raunchy comedy in space and others are Star Trek, but with real people. If you don't enjoy the (admittedly purile) sense of humor, The Orville probably isn't for you. The show never completely abandons that tone even as it explores more classic Trek style writing.

    There are some episodes though, like S01E08 which are played almost totally straight and those are the ones that feel the most like a TNG revival to me.

  • Are there any games like Diablo but not Diablo because Diablo?

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  • Funnily enough, Diablo was originally a rogue-ish game inspired by the likes of NetHack. The engine was even (technically) turn based - there's a pretty cool anecdotes about how they made it real time over the course of a single weekend with some clever hacks.

    I don't know if it was ever supposed to have permadeath outside of the hardcore difficulty setting though.

  • Street Fighter Vs Mortal Kombat

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  • Alas, I am a lifelong Soul Calibur stan.

    I got into it back when SC-II was the only game in the arcade I could beat on a single quarter.

    I have played every game in the series - even the awful ones.

    I love the stupid, overwrought storyline.I love the wild assortment of weapons the characters bring to bear.Though... I'd be okay if Ivy calmed her tits. Just a bit. Lady is one good sneeze away from a traction bed.

    I'm hoping Bamco makes enough $$$ from Tekken to throw a few dollars to their other fighting game franchise.... but I kinda doubt it.

  • What "Great on Deck" titles have you been enjoying?

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  • I do a surprisingly large amount of my gaming on the steam deck these days. My poor PC lies abandoned. Anyway... here are some great games that I've played recently on the deck. Some of them are Yellow - usually to use the keyboard for something minor.

    • Dead Cells: Roguelite action platformer
    • Tekken 8: best entry in years
    • Beneath Oresa: wildly stylish roguelite deck-builder
    • Roguebook: another roguelite deck builder - by Richard Garfield.
    • Talos Principle 2: Puzzles and Philosophy
    • Chants of Sennar: explore a mysterious tower and learn the languages - and lost history - of the inhabitants.
    • Doom & Doom Eternal: you know these
    • Tunic: Zelda Classic - but with deep puzzles
    • Inscryption: deck-building horror puzzler... that is soooo much deeper than what it seems.

    A final, hesitant recommendation for

    • Dome Keeper: Roguelike Mr. Driller meets Paratrooper, with a tight one-more-run game play loop that is insanely satisfying.

    But.. the menus don't work right for me in docked play - the A button is only randomly accepted. ... but it works fine in handheld mode. (The controls work fine in-game as well, it's only menus that have trouble.)

  • How do you HOPE you will die?

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  • As part of a destructive process of digitization.

  • How do you HOPE you will die?

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  • Until a group of elderly men in loincloths show up and hand you a sword.

  • How do you HOPE you will die?

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  • ... but it's a really weird alley.

  • Looking for interesting ideas to work on for side-projects as an aspiring backend developer

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  • Welcome! You've just started out on the path off mastery. The first step is deciding to take ownership of your growth and to begin independent study.

    But... All the practice in the world won't help if you don't know what you want to learn. Before you pick a project, decide what skill(s) you want to learn in particular.

    A list of a few candidates for skills considered "backend"

    • software design patterns
    • <any given language/web framework>
    • infrastructure tools (dbs, docker, etc)
    • api design
    • SOA vs Monolith tradeoffs

    I recommend picking a specific topic and build your project around that. Pick anything you like! It doesn't even need to seem useful - everything you learn will make you a better dev - and doing fun side projects is much more motivating than doing "homework".

    As an example, here are some of my past side projects and what I learned from them:

    • A terminal multiplexer for a head-mounted PC ** Rust; ANSI escape codes; async software design

    • A CNN to identify Lego bricks ** keras; NN layer types;

    • A Ruby gem of useful language abuses ** edgecases of the ruby language; interface design; a little FP

    • A match 3 game ** Godot game engine; gdscript; ux and game design

    • a python FP wheel ** Functional Programming concepts

    • an LLM-based software writing agent ** LLMs - how do they work?

    Each of these was targeted to help me dive into a specific area and improve my skills there.

  • You die and go to Heaven and Hitler is there. In fact, everyone who ever lived and died is there. Are you offended?

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  • Agreed! What's the level of personal responsibility for sins (or virtues!) vs our surroundings or flukes of neurology.

    The older I get the more tragedies I see and fewer villains.

    In Mormon theology such influences are considered as well! The flip side of understanding your own sins is that others will understand them too - so if you killed someone during a psychotic break beyond your control, your victim will see and understand exactly what happened. It's the truest form of empathy. Seeing through the eyes of everyone you ever interacted with, for good or ill.

  • I’ve just turned 40. What advice would you older lemmy users give me?

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  • Exactly. It's in you and just a matter of luck whether it flares up or not

  • I’ve just turned 40. What advice would you older lemmy users give me?

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  • There's a lot of great advice in here, so here's something a little more obscure - Get. The. Shingles. Vaccine.

    Most insurance won't cover it until you're 50. Pay for it out of pocket.

    I had the shingles at 40. It's a close 2nd for the most pain I've ever been in. (For comparison, 1st place goes to the time I took a training sword to the eye. It squished my eye down and smacked into the back of the socket. Nearly lost that eye.)

    It's the same virus as chickenpox. A herpes variant like cold sores, once you've caught it, it's with you forever.

    You'll get huge, burning blisters all along the pathway of whichever nerve the virus has taken residence on. And some nerves go to quite sensitive places indeed. The pain is akin to a hot iron pressed unceasingly to your skin. For weeks.

    For me, it was the right side of my face and neck. I developed Bell's Palsy and couldn't move the right side of my face at all. Though my facial control eventually came back, I've lost some hearing in my right ear.

    It's cheap at any price - Get vaccinated.

  • You die and go to Heaven and Hitler is there. In fact, everyone who ever lived and died is there. Are you offended?

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  • I was raised LDS and while I no longer practice any religion I still think the Mormon concept of heaven is an interesting one.

    (Imma skip some of the finer details here for clarity - but I'm happy to explain further if anybody has questions.)

    Mormons believe that (almost) everyone goes to heaven - eventually. Upon death, evil people go to Hell until they repent their sins. After truly repenting and recanting their hateful ways, their soul ascends to heaven. The LDS concept of Hell isn't one of physical tortures - Hell is simply a perfect understanding of your sins - your own shame and regret, from truly understanding the pain you inflicted upon your spiritual siblings.

    So ol' Adolf would be left to stew in a celestial timeout, alone with the weight of his sins - from every petty insult to the pain of every child slaughtered by his command. Damned to remain there until he is truly, utterly sorry. Not the false sorrow seeking to relieve the pain of a guilty conscience, but the harrowing sorrow that comes only with the true recognition of one's own responsibility and the willingness to do anything required to make amends and never sin again.

    Any Hitler who emerged from Mormon Hell would be a very different person from the one who went in.

    [Digression: regarding "almost" everyone going to heaven - if you want to be truly eternally damned in Mormon theology you have to follow a simple, two step process.

    1. Have a "perfect knowledge" of God - e.g. meet Him face-to-face.
    2. Act against Him anyway.

    Mostly it's Lucifer and his minions that qualify. Maybe Judas Iscariot too. Such souls are damned to "Outer Darkness" from which there is no release. Still not a place of fire and brimstone though.]