Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)

This is an extinction event for multiple gaming communities, by the way. Just really breathtaking to see every company simultaneously going "you know what? we didn't actually need our core product offering".

Anyway, apparently Twitch has decided 've given them too much video content to display ads on (short weekly streams sporadically on and off— I didn't think it was *that* much), and given me 2 months to get my 10 years of videos off of their service. In the short term, I guess I need to find somewhere to stream when I next stream Unavowed on Feb 1. Currently leaning to making a second YouTube channel? :( Is PeerTube a thing which is remotely viable for real use at this point and how would it work

The sign I'm REALLY having a bad day programming is when I start on each build changing the color of something visible on screen or introducing a unique typo to some text visible on screen because I otherwise don't totally trust the code that is running is the code I built

I need for Mastodon to know about the IINE Kitten Controller

https://bsky.app/profile/pablo0151.bsky.social/post/3lifwvnlo5c23

Something you learn almost immediately upon becoming a professional software developer is that it is *entirely normal* to spend an entire day debugging only to discover the solution is to delete 1 single line of code. Despite this being obvious to everyone in software, no matter how many years I stay in software I findit never stops feeling discouraging

An opinion I have is that the humans have spent too much time thinking about "what if someone built a machine that is equivalent to a human" and not enough time thinking about "what if someone built a human that is equivalent to a machine"

Law 2 is per Amy Worall, law 3 is per the Witch of Crow Briar.

I do not endorse these laws, but I would consider them "utopian", in the sense that a culture which endorsed these laws would be a culture organized along a clearly-formed ideology. You could easily imagine a spec-fic story about a culture that believed in these laws. Note these laws are necessarily laws for human designers, as the existence of a machine which can enforce them is ideologically inconsistent with law 3.

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Based on replies in this thread, here is an alternate proposed "three laws of robotics".

1. A machine must never show an advertisement to a human, or through inaction allow an advertisement to be shown to a human.

2. A machine shall never use more power to perform a job than would be used by an equivalent human.

3. A machine must never present or refer to itself as though it were human, or through inaction allow a human to mistake it for one.

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For Law of Robotics #2 I'm considering "A machine must never mine a bitcoin, or through inaction allow a bitcoin to be mined"

Proposed new Laws of Robotics:

1. A machine must never show an advertisement to a human, or through inaction allow an advertisement to be shown to a human

If I think of a second Law of Robotics I'll let you know

I have a Rust module named "reader". It has a single exported function , which returns a Result<ReaderResult, ReaderError>. ReaderResult is the payload on success and ReaderError is of course an error.

Questions:

- I think idiomatically it would be Rustier to name ReaderError "Error"? Is that right?
- …what is the idiomatic thing to name ReaderResult? Result<ReaderResult,…>" just feels wrong.

Is a UTF-8 BOM in the middle of a UTF-8 string an error? Like is that valid UTF-8?

Another thing that I tend to lock up on at the start of Rust projects:

How do I input one UTF-8 character at a time from a file, while buffering at some reasonable rate, *while keeping track of newlines myself myself rather than inputting strings one full line at a time*?

Is this crate

https://docs.rs/char_reader/latest/char_reader/

Still the most reasonable/modern way to do this?

Me: "I should a new programming language" [does it casually, almost literally in my sleep]

Me: "I need to decide whether to name my docs directory `doc` or `docs` [freezes paralyzed in indecision for half an hour]

If I am writing miscellaneous documentation for a command-line tool written in Rust, is there a "community best practices" for what path/name/format I write my text docs in?

Question for language design people:

Imagine a language which uses newline as a delimiter. It has the idiom of ending a line with \ in order to extend it.

Imagine a line ends with \,
and then the next line is *completely blank*,
and then the line after that contains content.

Do you expect:

The line merges with the blank one after it and the line after that is a new line?

The blank line is ignored and the \ line is merged with the next non-blank line?

Designer's choice?

Here is a thread about COBOL and fascism.

https://mstdn.social/@marick/114003086139363760

In the time since I linked the petition above, Ireland has gone from under 50% to above the threshold! Spain is also now getting very close.

https://siorc.eu/notes/a4885f3ath9b00pu

The petition is up overall 26,000 votes in the last ten days. I don't know whether it can hit a million by May, but turning more countries green definitely sounds viable.

Note: Above post is also heads up Ireland https://hachyderm.io/@kanongil/113952584253412845

I would say "I wish someone would pay me to work on an all-Rust OS kernel" but I'm afraid such a wish would be answered by "sure you can work on the kernel for our 'AI'/home surveillance device"