Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.

Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.

Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.

cacher does, but cache as in “cache-toi !” (go hide!) and “je me cache” (I’m hiding) are pronounced “cash”.

Besides, “correct” pronunciation in a different language is pretty meaningless. The word may have come from French but we’re speaking English, not French.

Also, it might not be a loan word so much as a legacy-of-foreigners-taking-over word (c.f. the Normand invasion of Britain), which doesn’t tend to help the language’s users care about respecting the “original” pronunciation. I’m not certain when exactly cachet entered English.

“What was Windows even doing for us?”

Beautiful 🥲

Pretty good review!

I’ve not yet been to all the new planets. What I have seen lines up well with the characterization of Wube strategically disabling the things in the base game / on the starting planet (“Nauvis”) that I grew accustomed to. Instead of simply adding ever more lengthy production line recipes, they have forced us to approach many existing production lines in a drastically different way.

In the base game, you can play around with ratios and targeted throughput, but you almost always will have the same machines crafting the same recipes, in the same order. The most significant decision when designing a production line is often whether to bring an item in by belt or instead bring its components and craft it adjacently.

Space Age shakes that up by introducing several new choices/decisions to make. There are alternate recipes to be unlocked (similar in function to Satisfactory, without needing to hunt for hard drives on a map). There are now multiple “looping” recipes (the input items can be part of the output). Most notably, which recipes are available to you depends on where you are building - not only planetside vs in-orbit, but planetside vs in-orbit across all planets. The planets have different resources on them, and their orbits contain different ratios of resource-laden asteroids. Same goes for the routes between planets!

I was very afraid that the extension would feel like “more of the same, just longer and more tedious”. That’s the experience I’ve had with most overhaul mods I’ve tried, and notably why I never bothered paying Space Exploration (whose author ended up working with Wube on the Space Age extension). So far my experience has been the exact opposite. It really feels like every single new “thing” feeds back into the core gameplay by “rejuvenating” it in new ways.

I wonder what other applications this might have outside of machine learning. I don’t know if, for example, intensive 3d games absolutely need 16bit floats (or larger), or if it would make sense to try using this “additive implementation” for their floating point multiplicative as well. Modern desktop gaming PCs can easily slurp up to 800W.

There’s a scene in the game where the character is taking a shower. The shower stall is glass, and the glass is frosted from around ankle height to neck height.

I haven’t played the game myself, just came across the scene on YouTube several years ago, so I don’t know how justifiable the choice of the scene is in the first place. At least, from a technical point of view, it makes sense to me that they modeled the full nude body so that the frosted glass would blur what we “see” in a realistic way. It’s a lot easier to model something and then have the glass blur it, instead of directly modelling the blurred version for example.

Personally I think most of the creep factor comes from the fact that this character is explicitly modeled after a live human being who presumably didn’t sign up for that.

I think I would have more sympathy with those focusing on the “not all men but always a man” sign if this weren’t in the context of a woman being drugged by her husband and then said husband inviting about 50 random men to rape her, over 10 years.

One of the worst times to advocate for men’s rights/issues is when everyone is talking about the heinous crimes a bunch of men have done. Especially if the comments you’re leaving are focusing on how women rape just as much as men do, etc.

To be fair, weren’t Valve the first company to do that? People were really annoyed at having to install steam just to play some Half-Life.

Of course, that was only 1 launcher, no launcher-in-launcher shenanigans back then.

Aside from echoing @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone and Doctorow’s statements about unionizing, I am aware of a few others who are trying things that I’d describe as complimentary to unions.

This is a panel titled “Why hasn’t Open Source Won?” where several of the speakers attempt to sketch out a framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used: https://youtu.be/k3eycjekIAk . I’ll admit, I’m not the most impressed with where they get to in the limited time they have. Nevertheless, I think it’s a useful angle of consideration to have in the tool belt.

This is an org/foundation that is trying to walk the walk with regards to governing tech democratically: https://nivenly.org/ I haven’t kept up with any recent developments of theirs.

First there was no difference between gaza/the Palestinians and Hamas, now there’s no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon…

“I need some more [input] sanitizer for my eczema script, the console is red and inflamed whenever I check it.”

the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.

As we have seen in months past when Linux takes a sizable dip, it’s correlated to a rise in the Simplified Chinese use. In August the Simplified Chinese use further grew and helping out Windows at the cost to the Linux percentage.

So, the solution is clear: get all Simplified Chinese users to switch from Windows to Linux :D

We also added the ability to pin the resource patch, and the count of remaining ore will update as the patch is mined. You can use this to keep an eye on how things are going, and be aware when a patch is running dry.

Yet another great mod transcending its mod status to be assimilated into the base game!

Having just watched the lecture, the only classified info I can recognize is the capabilities of 80s era satellites.

Given that, I think it’s quite a shame that the whole thing is only now available. Rear Admiral Hopper seems to have been someone who deeply understood both computers and people. The prescriptions she gives regarding “systems of computers” and “management” vs “leadership”, to name just two, are spot-on. Her lecture is quite grounded in what I’d call “military thinking”, but that’s just because she’s in a room filled with people who are of that life. In my opinion, everything she talks about is applicable to communities and businesses.

The general gist of the entire ~90mins reminds me of Project Cybersyn in its perspective on how computers could serve society.

The idea is neat, and there is a certain precedent for the approach in .htaccess files and webserver path permissions.

Still, I worry about the added burden to keeping track of filenames when they get used as stringed keys in such a manner. More plainly: if I rename a file, I now have to go change every access declaration that mentions it. Sure, a quick grep will probably do the trick. But I don’t see a way to have tooling automate any part of it, either.

making sure everyone is okay.

Given the current state of the world, that would be progress.

An oldie but a goodie : https://csszengarden.com/

This is why I’m very pleased by how small in scope the upcoming Factorio expansion is compared to some of the mods that inspired/preceded it (notably Space Exploration).

Part real Greens, part Greenpeace, part Green-washing.