You mean like the comment fields we’re using right here on lemmy?

As others have pointed out, it’s usually some markdown that’s embedded within the text. Lemmy is using a format that’s actually called “markdown” if I’m not mistaken, or a slight variation/subset thereof.

I’ve gotten used to the double-star for bold and what not to the point that it annoys me when some message client or whatever doesn’t support it. I share code snippets with people fairly often, and the code markdown is particularly useful to maintain its legibility.

You can always combine integer operations in smaller chunks to simulate something that’s too big to fit in a register. Python even does this transparently for you, so your integers can be as big as you want.

The fundamental problem that led to requiring 64-bit was when we needed to start addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It’s kind of similar to the problem of the Internet, where 4 billion unique IP addresses falls rather short of what we need. IPv6 has a host of improvements, but the massively improved address space is what gets talked about the most since that’s what is desperately needed.

Going back to RAM though, it’s sort of interesting that at the lowest levels of accessing memory, it is done in chunks that are larger than 8 bits, and that’s been the case for a long time now. CPUs have to provide the illusion that an 8-bit byte is the smallest addressible unit of memory since software would break badly were this not the case, but it’s somewhat amusing to me that we still shouldn’t really need more than 32 bits to address RAM at the lowest levels even with the 16 GB I have in my laptop right now. I’ve worked with 32-bit microcontrollers where the byte size is > 8 bits, and yeah, you can have plenty of addressible memory in there if you wanted.

I watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.

I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?

literally good for you

I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it’s good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.

I guess the MAC address guy is up next. 48 bits may not go so far if every light bulb is going to want its own.

Imagine if you were the guy who made the call on IPv4 addresses…

Falsehoods About Time

Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.

Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.

Falsehoods About Text

I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!

So the next captcha will be a list of AI-generated statements and you have to decide which are bat shit crazy?

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?

“Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,”

Seems like a lot of extra disk thrashing that would shorten the life expectancy of an SSD? Like it would be considerably more than your usual background chatter of daemons writing to log files and what not. Unless I’m misunderstanding this?

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.

I think I could get very nervous coding for the military, depending on what sort of application I was working on. If it were some sort of administrative database, that doesn’t sound so bad. If it were a missile guidance system, on man! A single bug and there goes a village full of civilians. Even something without direct human casualties could be nerve-wracking. Like if it were your code which bricked a billion-dollar military satellite.

Speaking of missile guidance systems, I once met someone who worked a stint for a military contractor. He told me a story about a junior dev who discovered an egregious memory leak in a cruise missile’s software. The senior dev then told him “Yeah, I know about that one. But the memory leak would take an hour before it brings the system down and the missile’s maximum flight time is less than that, so no problem!” I think coding like that would just drive me into some OCD hell.

I have only written potentially life-threatening code once in my life. It had to do with voltage/current regulation in the firmware of a high-powered instrument used by field workers at the company where I work. It was a white-knuckled week I spent on just a single page of code, checking and re-checking it countless times and unit testing it in every conceivable way I could imagine.

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?

Fair enough. I’m just looking for some independent confirmation as this is pretty big news.

Is this official though, or wishful thinking on the part of Cameron?