Fair, though I guess my interpretation was that void* is kind of like a black hole in that anything can fall into it in an unsettling way that loses information about what it was?

We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.

I’m with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won’t you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.

What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that’s what I’ll be remembering on the way home.

The city where I live has a musical instrument lending library. I don’t know how common these are? Ours started when a cherished local musician passed away and his eclectic collection became the library. Over the years, more people have donated instruments and there is an annual festival to raise funds for their upkeep. (As a local musician, I’m actually playing at said festival today.)

Anyway, it works just like a regular library. You get your library card and check out an instrument and it doesn’t cost you a penny. And there are all kinds of videos online these days to give you pointers on how to play. I guess if you get really serious, you’ll probably want some one-on-one tutoring, but if you’re just doing it for kicks and don’t have any plans to join a band or whatever, you can just have some fun and see how far you can get on your own?

I don’t live in Scotland, but I can’t even imagine what it must’ve been like to have that close referendum followed by Brexit only a couple of years later.

What I’m wondering about right now though is Irish unification? That seems to be building up some serious momentum from everything I’ve been reading.

One thing most text editors can do is print. I was shocked the other day when I couldn’t print a readme from vscode when someone asked for hard copy.

This is why I fear activating any AI features in the IDE.

Compiler/interpreter: Can’t find variable farfignewton.

Earlier:

Me: Declare variables near, far

IDE: Oh! You mean farfignewton right? I found that in some completely unrelated library you didn’t write. Allow me complete that for you while you’re not paying attention.

This was a struggle for me going from hobbyist programmer to working at a company. I tried to tone it down. Really. But eventually I got “promoted” to having my own office with a suspiciously thick door. Hmm…

Well, Shortcuts comes from the iOS world and is a relatively recent addition to macOS. Automator originated in macOS and I don’t think it has made it over to iOS at this point?

That’s not even the full extent of it though. Before Automator, there was Script Editor, which could also create script applications, but that doesn’t seem to work so well anymore. Automator has become the preferred approach for that. But Script Editor is still around and is useful for looking up AppleScript dictionaries. These tell you if a given application offers special scripting support, and there are also a few general dictionaries like StandardAdditions that are worth a gander. I wish AppleScript existed for iOS.

And then there’s the command line approach of using crontab to open your files with the open command. And osascript lets you run any AppleScript from the command line.

True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…

Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It’s obnoxious.

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

Oh yeah, I remember CompuServe. I believe it was its own separate network from the Internet, though they had an email gateway at least. Maybe towards the end they became an ISP like AOL did? My memory is fuzzy on that.

I do remember they invented gif files which then of course spread to the Internet. But it was a mess because the compression they use was patent-protected. CompuServe had paid royalties on it, but the Internet was, well, the Internet…

Can’t remember the exact year but I imagine it was sometime in the mid-90s?

I used to play MUDs on a community BBS and one day the admins said they were testing out an Internet portal. Before long, they became the first ISP in town. It was weird because until they eventually upgraded to DSL, they had this quirky dialup script you had to use that navigated past the BBS part to get you on the Internet. For all I know, the BBS may still lurking around somewhere to this day?

I have some vague recollection of a hacker convention from the 90s where people were challenged to come up with wireless networking in a one night coding marathon. (This was long before wifi.) So some dude used speech synthesis to get a machine to say “one zero one one zero…” and another to assemble the binary data into packets using speech recognition. It was hilarious, and the dev had to keep telling people to shut up and stop laughing so he could complete the demo.

But anyways… what I’m trying to suggest here is you might have the best luck if your notification sounds contain spoken commands and you use speech recognition to trigger scripts? That tech is pretty mature at this point.

I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple’s Pages has long since abandoned.

For me it often goes one step further. I remember a song or maybe hear it somewhere and think what a great tune! Haven’t heard that in forever.

And then what happens is it triggers a flood of other memories from that same time period when it was popular. Then, just as I’m starting to get all wistful, I suddenly recall how I used to hate that song! Like wtf?!?

Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.

I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.

I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.

I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you’re looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it’s much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?

There is an issue with templated code where the implementation does have to be in the header as well, though that is not the case here. C++20 introduced modules which I guess were meant to sort out this mess, but it has been a rocky road getting them to be supported by compilers.

Looks like we’ve got a Java programmer here taking C++ for a spin.