Have you seen all my children? I have allready lost count. I am now dead unfortunately. My own child csharp-official killed me for good. Good news! I will continue posting from the grave. As long as C programs run on any computer a fragment of my will remains. In that way i am immortal.
Linux will just work and it will work and it will work and it will work for weeks sometimes months without doing anything more than a pacman -Suy and you will have a good time and it'll be great and then you will run into a problem that nobody online has had since 2013 and then you will spend 3 hours trubbel shooting and then you will do the sketchiest most jank solution to fix it and then it'll just continue to work
You start programming and are intrigued by types. You start to find out how usefull it is to have strict type bounds in your code. You start to wonder how types are checked and stumble into type theory.
You are still in the realms of computer science for now, but the danger of being pulled under by the current is now ever present. You spend more time thinking about type theory and dip your toes into dependent type theory.
Now you can hear the sounds of the topologists, they are not far away just beyond the horizon. Their strange and alien words intrigues you, but you stand firm and stay in the safe waters of informatics.
To ground yourself further you decide to write a type checker. It's a fun project but it is too late now. The topologists have spottet you and are screaming homotopy at you.
You surender to their violence and find yourself reading homotopy type theory. It's too late now. You have entered the realm of mathematical foundations and can never go back. Category theory follows soon after.
You start programming and are intrigued by types. You start to find out how usefull it is to have strict type bounds in your code. You start to wonder how types are checked and stumble into type theory.
You are still in the realms of computer science for now, but the danger of being pulled under by the current is now ever present. You spend more time thinking about type theory and dip your toes into dependent type theory.
Now you can hear the sounds of the topologists, they are not far away just beyond the horizon. Their strange and alien words intrigues you, but you stand firm and stay in the safe waters of informatics.
To ground yourself further you decide to write a type checker. It's a fun project but it is too late now. The topologists have spottet you and are screaming homotopy at you.
You surender to their violence and find yourself reading homotopy type theory. It's too late now. You have entered the realm of mathematical foundations and can never go back. Category theory follows soon after.
UNGRATEFUL tech companies are saying things like "turn off your ad blocker" and "we need your photo id" instead of "thank you so much for not just pirating our shit, youre so handsome"
Code should always be rewritten. Most code is rewritten more than it is read so next time you sit down to rewrite some old code make sure to make it as easy to rewrite for the next person.
the existence of the “holy” bible (we already know it’s holy? it’s the bible?) implies that somewhere in the world exists a book that embodies pure sin
in light of the ongoing Discord Palantir Kerfuffle, there’s been a lot of discussion about potential discord alternatives. i’m hearing about “stoat” and all sorts of other mammals.
well, we can talk about “replacements for discord” in a moment. for right now, though, i want to talk about one of the things discord replaced:
IRC!!!
it stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it’s a chat protocol (not an app—a protocol) from literally 1988. it predates the World Wide Web! like discord, the world of IRC consists of servers divided into chatrooms called “channels” where users self-moderate and talk about whatever. and despite its age, IRC actually has extreme advantages over discord and discord-likes:
IRC is a protocol, not an app. an app that supports the IRC protocol is called an “IRC client”, in the same way that an app that supports email is called an “email client”. like email, anyone at all can make an IRC client, and those clients can run on pretty much any device with an internet connection.
unlike discord servers, an IRC server is literally just some software that anyone can install on any server anywhere, and anyone with an IRC client can then join that server.
“well, hang on. at what point exactly do the corpos swoop in and delete my server for posting unregulated booby pictures?” my friend, the answer is never. because there is no IRC corporation. because IRC is a protocol, and not an app!!!
in other words, IRC is enshittification-proof.
…………………………………too bad it sucks!!!!
look. there are good reasons why me and all my IRC-using friends switched to discord. IRC is old. it is missing many, many features that today’s user has come to expect in a chat program:
it’s text-only. no images! if you want to post an image in an IRC channel, you have to host it yourself on the internet somewhere and then link to it on IRC.
IRC servers don’t maintain a user-readable chat history. in other words, when you join a channel for the first time, you can’t just scroll up and see what people were talking about three weeks ago. whatever chat history you can see is down to the logs your own IRC client keeps, and critically, it can only log messages while you are connected to the server.
irc has no accounts. you do not register to IRC and have an IRC account you use to join IRC channels. instead, when you connect to a server, you just tell it what username (or “nick”) you want, and then that’s your nick. your preferred nick might be free on one server and taken on another. when you log out, anyone else can use your nick. (on most servers you can “register” a nick by sending a direct message to a bot called NickServ, and then the bot will kick people who try to use your nick without the password, but that’s all you get.)
for someone who grew up with this stuff it’s easy to downplay the amount of friction this is. but if you take the median phone user and tell them, “go host your image somewhere so you can link it on IRC,” every part of that sentence requires them to learn a whole bunch of brand new shit.
so, if you were wondering, the answer is no: I categorically do not think IRC is going to re-replace discord any time soon.
where does that leave us?
let me lay it all on the table: i don’t think there is a “discord replacement”. any true, one-to-one discord replacement would, in the best-case scenario, enjoy five to ten years of goodwill before it, too, shoots itself in both feet and bleeds out on the floor frenching the heels that week’s tech overlord.
the enshittification of for-profit apps is inevitable. it might as well be a law of the universe. we can’t keep treating this stuff as an aberration when it happens.
you know what people will still be using in ten years, though?
email.
email is unkillable. email endures. email is so ubiquitous and so mundane that we don’t even capitalize the “e”. in 2017 the Chicago Manual of Style had to throw up their hands and finally admit that it’s okay to spell it without a hyphen.
email endures because email is not an app. email endures because it’s a protocol. (technically it’s a handful of protocols, but the list doesn’t exactly change very often.) if an email provider enshittifies, it doesn’t take the concept of email down with it. jumping ship doesn’t result in the loss of all of your messages and contacts: you take them with you to, you know, wherever!
and in ten years, you can bet that people will still be using IRC, too. though its limitations may leave it a perpetual underdog, it will endure for the same reason as email.
maybe i’m sending mixed messages. again: i don’t think IRC is The One. but to me, it’s such a perfect example of what The One would look like.
so, instead of recommending any specific discord alternative—because i haven’t actually had time to investigate them all myself—let me tell you what i think you should be looking for.
to avoid discord’s fate, any replacement should meet these criteria:
it must be an open-source app implementing an open-source chat protocol. this is non-negotiable. also, the more choice you have in terms of third-party clients, the better: those are the ships you can jump to without losing your friends and history.
for discord-style chat servers, it must be possible for at least your average techie to host their own server on their own hardware that can be accessed by any client implementing the chat protocol.
in that vein, there must be no corporate “upper management” who can make unilateral moderation decisions on behalf of a server (such as banning pictures of boobys service-wide).
there should be no authority capable of banning a user from the protocol; only server mods can ban users, and only from the servers they moderate.
no one who is not a member of a server or private conversation should have access to the unencrypted chatlogs thereof.
finally, a warning about data.
i need you to understand this: not even two decades ago, the idea that we would all be using apps that let you just upload arbitrary amounts of data, and that those apps would be expected to store that data indefinitely, for free, was fucking preposterous. and guess what? it’s still fucking preposterous!!
data storage isn’t free. if an app is free, and it stores your data—pictures, audio, and especially video—then that app is hemorrhaging money every day that it exists. this is literally a law of physics! at some point, they have to get paid or go out of business.
before you commit to an app, find out how it’s getting paid. where does it put the goddamn data? this is another reason (aside from moderation) that i think the ability to self-host a server is so important. storing one discord server’s worth of data ain’t all that expensive; it’s well within the realm of financial possibility for A Bloke. storing all of discord’s worth of data is a completely fucking other question.
this is the other shoe that Bluesky is currently dangling, by the way. it’s gonna drop at some point! here now at this crossroads of post-discord destiny, do your best to identify the shoes.
and if all else fails: IRC literally isn’t actually that bad like it’s fine it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
I went to a show on saturday where there was a video backdrop that included, among other things, C code for like aesthetic reasons. and as someone who knows how to write code it's fairly unremarkable to see C code. pretty normal as far as code goes. but then I got to thinking what programming language could you use in this instance that, to me, a fairly experienced programmer, would convey the same amount of wonder and mystery. i.e. what programming language looks to me the way code in general looks to someone who doesn't know how to write code? the only thing I could think of was perl, which every time I see it my eyes completely glaze over
Does agda count? I mean its basicly math and not code. Do not get me wrong this looks hella cool, like we are doing cohomology on spheres by using the Ext functor as far as i can tell.
So it looks like wierd code but if you realise it is math it is still weird but sort of readable.
My vote definetly goes to uiua (as pointed out by itsjunetime). There is definetly the problem of it not using indentation so visually it has less of the wow hacker effect and more just a foreign alfabet.
If we still want formating that has strong code vibes i would say perl. Maybe that is just because most of the perl code i read is bad perl code and uses all the hacky shorthands like $_ way too much and uses an unnecessary amount of regex.
In any case C is not for blasting on a big screen to wow the masses. C is for the private intimacy of a small laptop.
fuck it. sudoku game. one line. one expression. 2154 characters.
download it on my gitlab and play it in your terminal 👍 it's pretty alright considering i imagined the board generation algorithm while biking home from school
Awesome work. Here is something stupid i for some reason had to make:
Display the Sudoku board in 231 characters. Input being a list of 81 elements, 0 representing empty space:
lambda g:(l:=lambda x:(1-x%2)*(1+(1-x*x//4%3)*(2+(x-1)//12)),print("\n".join(["".join([" %s "%(" 123456789"[g[j//2+i//2q*]])if i%2*j%2 else" │┃┃┃─┼┠╂┨━┯┏┳┓━┿┣╋┫━┷┗┻┛"[l(j)+5*l(i)]*(j%2*2+1)for j in range(19)])for i in range(19)])))
The current scene of video games is such a disgrace. Where are all my ACE exploits??? Simply snuffed out. I want developers to fuck up so badly that it is somehow possible to do ACE exploits again.
Also we need more conical ace characters, but that is a whole different thing.
izzy806
2087
germansingergirl
stormborns
prguitarman
romaincrisis
annaxmalina
titsay
