Notices by Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE (timwardcam@c.im), page 3

@clacke In real life the answer is "you don't write calculations like that because they might confuse people".

Similarly for coding standards. "Do not write code that depends in subtle ways on the priority and association rules of your particular language, because not everybody will know that particular niche flavour of rules. If in even the slightest doubt PUT THE FUCKING BRACKETS IN. And if you're not in doubt, put them in anyway."

(And then turn off any utterly insane linting rules that whine about superfluous brackets. And if you aren't allowed to turn off those rules ... find another job.)

@frameworkcomputer I'm almost never excited about a new version of anything. Almost always a new version of something is just work. Plus it's usually got bigger, so there's the cost of the extra resource to run it.

@goatsarah Doesn't Portugal have a non-standard gauge or something, I think I remember from long ago? On purpose, designed to make it hard to be invaded?

@hyc @tweedge A wifi washing machine can be turned on automatically when your home automation system spots a period of cheap electricity.

I use free electricity for doing the laundry when available, as that's always (so far) been during the daytime, but on non-free days I don't stay up to put the machine on at 2am when the price drops.

@mrFred489 @hyc @tweedge If I had a washing machine that could be told to start a cycle unattended I'd get it to start at 2am - we're on the Flux tariff so fixed prices at fixed times of day.

Today the weather forecast was crap - it was supposed to be cloud and rain, so I charged the battery up quite a lot last night. And then the sun came out and completely filled up the battery ... so I put the washing machine on to use the generated power rather than export it.

@dangillmor @molly0xfff Wot happens if you say to an AI "write a Wikipedia page about me"?

@forteller @Probertd8 @georgetakei But ... if you're in a current call you're holding your phone between your ear and your mouth so you have no idea what's on the screen because you aren't looking at it ... because you're in a call ...

@thomasfuchs Well, really, more sophisticated software *has* taken over. We no longer worry very much about cramming an entire record onto a fixed format 80 column punched card.

@JamesTown_ @paulste @EU_Commission Wasn't it on the side of the bus?

@CloudyMrs How's about if people didn't pollute the world by giving each other unwanted tat in the first place?

@kaybee335 @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott I've still got some. One of my assessed exercises.

This was Conway's Life. It was required to be on an unlimited size board, so was supposed to be an exercise in coming up with a data structure for a two dimensional sparse array, and beyond that we could do what we liked.

I thought it would be fun to design an input/control language and some reasonably clever ways to print the output (this was done as a batch job on a mainframe). The guy who marked it thought I'd gone way beyond what was expected!

@kaybee335 @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott We did our assessed exercises overnight on Friday, when no grown-ups were using the mainframe and it gave a decent turnaround.

Then we'd take it in turns to host the group to breakfast in our various colleges on Saturday morning before going to bed.

Except that as I went to Churchill I never had to pay for the breakfasts - although I did offer, nobody was ever interested in trekking that far out of town.

@ACAElliott @BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe Nothing so sophisticated for me. And I couldn't be arsed to punch line numbers in columns 73-80 of the FORTRAN cards anyway.

@BlippyTheWonderSlug @GreenSkyOverMe @ACAElliott The best bit is when the box of punched cards falls off the back of your bicycle and distributes themselves along a mud-filled gutter.

Boxes of punched cards were were storage was at for students, you didn't get any useful quantities of actual disk space.

@feditips It only works with flags for which emojis exist. The Cornish flag is one that doesn't.

@TacticalGrace_ @lednabwm @MennoWolff I don't know whether I am an "atheist" or not. It maybe depends a bit on whether an "atheist" is

* someone who doesn't believe in a god

or

* someone who believes there are no gods.

But I'm not sure I can answer either of those unless I hear a definition of "believe" and a definition of "god" that I can make sense of. This hasn't yet happened.

@ryanhoulihan Well ... my theory is that haters just luuuurve hating. So if one target is dealt with they move on to the next one. That's what makes them "happy" - certainly nothing else does!!

@ryanhoulihan Nah, it's not an illusion. Putin's 17.4m #brexshitters voted to fuck up other people's lives and got exactly what they wanted. (So they are no doubt deliriously happy now.)

@ryanhoulihan Conservatives have a *lot* to offer people who are fundamentally haters and who get off on seeing other people's lives fucked up.

@drj It's an awful long time ago that I wrote any 68000 assembler - this was during the development of the QL which actually used a 68008.

One booby trap I seem to recall was to do with moving more than one byte at a time via an A register used as a pointer and containing an odd number. Didn't work at all, but I have a vague feeling that this got "fixed" (at the cost of additional bus cycles) in later processors?