I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.

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.

Yeah that tracks. I don’t see a lot of 3rd ring people running a soup kitchen. It’s 2nd ring people who aren’t out there to proselytize.

Based on my personal observations, there are sort of like 3 rings to a religion. The outermost contains the vast majority of adherents who are pretty casual in their faith. If they are of some Christian denomination say, they’ll show up for Christmas or Easter services and go their separate ways otherwise. The 2nd ring contains people who attend services regularly but are non-evangelical. They are devout in their faith but not pushy about it.

Then finally, there is this innermost ring of evangelicals who make it their mission to tell you how great it is to find God and can be pushy enough to make a priest cringe. People from the outer rings generally try to avoid this group, but they tend to be the most active online. I guess maybe lemmy has yet to be overrun by them?

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.

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?

This is a big deal. The UN doesn’t throw the term genocide around lightly. And I thank the OP for linking directly to their site to give as unadulterated a reporting as possible.

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.

Personally, I would get an external SSD and try it on there first. At least it’s new enough to have USB3 ports. If you’re comfortable enough with it under the circumstances, you can put it on your main drive. But you may find you need to upgrade the RAM or that it’s just too much of a resource hog in the end? But even if you back away from 14, it’s always nice to have an external SSD kicking around. :)

Yeah you nailed it! It’s generally not a problem at the primary colour level. For example, I have no trouble distinguishing the red and green of a traffic light. But there are, like you say, a lot of ways to mix colours and that’s where we get into trouble.

There is a type of colourblindness that affects your perception of yellow, but the red-green types are far more common in the population. It is also much more common in men than women. This is because the trait is carried by X chromosomes, and for a woman to exhibit it, she must have the gene on both X’s. Men only have one X and one Y, so if you have it on your X, you’re doomed! lol

One thing you may or may not have noticed is colourblind people tend to be more sensitive to subtle differences in shade. This is a compensation the brain works out, similar to how fully blind people develop a sharper sense of hearing. The military even noted that this can help in spotting camouflage on an air photo, and it’s one of these rare cases where colourblind individuals were specifically sought out. It usually goes the other way, though. Like we are steered away from careers as electricians, pharmacists, etc. and I totally get that. It’s not discriminatory. It’s just common sense! :)