Notices by Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw: (isagalaev@mastodon.social)

Also, established a monthly donation to @spritely. Consider doing the same!

Opinion poll: does it still make sense to donate to Software Freedom Conservancy? Are they legit?

@davidrevoy okay, there's one thing that my perfectionist's brain just can't get over! On the left two panes there's a short part of the blade sticking out of the hilt, but on the right two panes it's not there. So I can't figure out which kind of damage it is: did the blade break apart or did it fall out of the hilt?

P.S. I'd probably be working at this place you drawn, right?

@SteveTux @davidrevoy I've seen that one. It does feature the blade stub, but it just adds to one side of the inconsistency. :-)

Looking for a #Python library that would cache the most fresh responses of HTTP requests and only return cached ones in case of connection or server errors.

requests-cache doesn't do the trick: it either returns stale responses or crashes on connection errors.

Doesn't have to be HTTP-specific, really. Think of it as a general memoization with failover. But lru_cache from stdlib also doesn't work as it prefers the cached value over the available fresh one.

Last chance before I write my own!

@inthehands I think their vision layer is okay. It can reliably identify and classify objects and their placement. It's what to do with this information that has always been the problem: you've got this car over there moving that way and that car standing over here. What input you apply to pedals and the steering wheel? This part turned out to be harder than vision. And now they're trying to solve it with AI as well. Which just swaps one set of edge case for another and can't be debugged.

@inthehands first of all, thank you!

Now, reading through this thread prompted a related but different thought: the current generation of Tesla's self-driving AI eschews codified decision-making in favor of learning how to drive based purely on humans. Which should obviously be a bad idea if your stated goal is to devise a better-than-human behavior. But everyone is just closing their eyes and saying "well, I guess they know better what they're doing". They don't.

@phiofx @CodingItWrong it feels like you're talking more about "making easy shortcuts" rather than "designing a most simple solution".

I never heard the term "evolutionary design", although this is apparently the way I design software (and try to teach others to do it). Here's a perfect, short and to the point, explanation of the concept by @CodingItWrong: https://codingitwrong.com/2024/01/29/brief-summary-of-evolutionary-design

Also a good reminder of what the word "refactoring" actually means, despite it being widely used to refer to any arbitrary reshuffling of code.

Recent from Armin Ronacher is worth a read: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/12/1/the-python-that-was/

It strikes a note with me, although I don't agree on a couple of points.

Like, "runtime errors flying left and right [..] because bad types were passed". No, most of the errors were and still are from wrong *values* being passed. Also mutable state, tight coupling and incomplete understanding of the domain. Unless your kind of programming is implementing some formal spec, types will only catch the most trivial errors.

#python

@delroth please beware of the word "obvious" relating to any field of knowledge. There's a lot of us out there for whom none of this was (or is) obvious.

@vruba but isn't it a solved problem by now? Nobody writes new software that's not unicode-aware (and it would be hard to do, because all the systems and languages do it by default now). Converting old software is another matter of course, but that's not specific to Unicode.

@LauraLangdon @meredithw I understand it's a spectrum, but the way you put it means all creative people are technically supposed to be treated for this "disorder", which is not the view I'd endorse!

@LauraLangdon @meredithw I don't either. Granted, I don't know what you meant by "neurosparkly", but we were talking about ADHD, and the last D is meaningful. So to clarify, I can't subscribe to thinking of all creative people as having ADHD. And looks like we're in agreement on that?

@LauraLangdon @meredithw "chaotic genius"? :-)

@meredithw never thought of it as related to #adhd. Most creative people I know go through this. "The problem of a blank sheet" I heard it being called.

@aeva funnily enough, I remember a poll on Mastodon (pre Musk migration) where Firefox turned out to be the majority browser, which surprised me a lot. May be it's time to run a new one.

@craigmaloney is there a TL;DR on what happened? I only noticed some mentions of its CEO being "owned" over the last week.

@zeborah @Jdreben indeed! I missed that implication.

Also, thinking further, UV (and up) becomes irrelevant, as at smaller wavelength it should scatter fast due to all the micro-stuff in the body of the water. On the other hand, scattering doesn't mean it's invisible. There should be plenty UV in the first 10 meters…

Anyway, don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud :-)

@lothar @zeborah @Jdreben oh, I'm well aware of that one :-) But if UV vision was giving advantage, life would likely adopt that. I'm just trying to figure out why it doesn't (apparently) give any advantage.

P.S. As for X-Ray and generally higher-than-UV energy radiation, the answer, I think, is pretty simple: it didn't exist on Earth in appreciable quantities until humans started producing those.