Notices by Ellie 🐍☃️ :blobsnowedin:​ (noelle@chat.noelle.codes)

oh

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/737431/the-bakery-dragon-by-devin-elle-kurtz/

There's a word I can't remember that means, essentially, "has no side effects, has no randomness, and accepts no input other than user input", and describes a function for which, given an input X, always returns the same input Y, and given an input X1, always returns the same input Y1, which is not necessarily the same as Y.

It's not "idempotent", which is "always gives the same result regardless of input", but I can't think of what it is.

@Polychrome companies LOVE Agile. It provides Metrics by which individual contributors can be judged! It's marginally better than "lines of code committed" and makes developers feel like you know what you're doing!

@Polychrome wow, even longer ago than that - most of the site was shut down in 2005! Apparently the Doctor Who section lingered a little longer than that, but even it only goes up to Matt Smith... It looks like 2014 is just when they put the most recent "this has been archived" marker on it. o_o

Fun fact: the "rules" stating that you can't end a sentence with a preposition and can't split an infinitive exist only because the men who compiled those rules were trying to force English to be more like Latin, which they considered to be the perfect language. You can safely ignore them.

what

why

who thought this was a good idea

this is a storybook for toddlers

@brooke This is because in the pre-Julian Roman calendar, that's where February was interrupted for the intercalary month Mercedonius. (24 days of February, 30? of Mercedonius, 4 more days of February.)

And although the distinction is largely elided these days, Leap Day being February 25th is still important in some places - there's at least one country (Sweden?) where that's in the laws, and some liturgical calendars rely on it.

Maybe tomorrow I'll call and see if I can get my HRT appointment bumped up.

No appointments before May. :(

#mastoadmin This happened to me with a live server, and I've verified it experimentally, and so I pass it on to you:

If you're upgrading to Mastodon 4.3.x, it no longer supports Postgres 9, and it's tempting to export your PSQL 9 database and import it directly into a more modern version like 12 or 16; this is supposed to auto-convert it to the new format.

Please don't. Step upward by one version at a time. The direct upgrade trashes Mastodon's performance somehow.

What's the cyberpunk equivalent of noir's sleazy jazz?

Did you know that liquid butane will float on top of any other liquid? This is because, of the two, it's the lighter fluid.

them: "don't be silly, corporations don't want to replace humans with robots"

me:

@thegibson meanwhile, every Linux program these days: "just run curl https://mysite.blg/definitely-not-suspicious/script-with-unknown-contents.sh | bash and you're all set!"

I'm kind of alarmed and unhappy that so many of the "trans-positive" posts I see boil down to fetishism and bioessentialism.

e: This isn't a subtoot, I'm still thinking about a couple posts I saw on Tumblr a few weeks ago.

@freemo It's from "G.O.A.T.", Greatest Of All Time, used a couple years ago to refer to... I don't actually remember which basketball player, and then Gamers picked it up and decided to make it weird. You usually see it in combination, like "based and goated".

I wish I lived in the world where "goated" referred to furry tf instead of being ridiculous slang for "I like this somewhat"

@Polychrome *points at Microsoft Word 2000's Clippy* game

(Lance Ulanoff is the "William Shatner couldn't find me on Mastodon" guy, and it's fun to make fun of him.)

TechRadar's article about the OpenAI solving basic math thing is by Lance Ulanoff, so it's probably wrong.