I write bugs and sometimes features! I'm also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

  • 2 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • Jeez, where do you live?

    I'm in Canada and have never had to wait even remotely that long in any city I've been a pedestrian in. It's certainly a poorly followed law in that I'll regularly see people not stop even if they had tons of time, but the majority of drivers do stop. I don't think I've ever waited more than maybe a minute. I'd usually have to wait longer at a light than I would at an uncontrolled intersection or no-intersection crosswalk.

    That said, the most annoying was in Saskatoon, where I went to university. There's a road going up to the university where there's a very long stretch with no controlled crosswalks until you get to the very end. I learned to just cross at the end (even if it meant needing to loop back) because crossing at an uncontrolled crosswalk in the middle was annoying. I would have often been on the top part of a T intersection and there were always parked cars, so being seen as trying to cross the road was the challenge there. But even then it usually wasn't more than a minute and crossing from the other side was a lot easier because it was so much more obvious that you were waiting to cross. It was also a 2 lane road, but usually when one direction stops, drivers in the other lane figure it out.


  • At the very least, it should be illegal to use the misleading tactics they use for things like seats. Not sure if airlines in the EU differ (I'm Canadian), but seemingly every airline here tries to make the seat selection seem like it's mandatory. While I've never fallen for that, I wonder how many people pay for their seats simply because they didn't realize it's possible not to?

    And Flair here in Canada is the budget airline whose whole thing is that they advertise prices that don't include a carry-on (which is standard with every other airline in Canada). But if you want a carry-on, they'll charge so much that their flights are often roughly the same price as the competition (and they push bundling carry-on + checked bag so that people will pay more than they need). Flair is great if you know what you're doing, since a backpack fits the "personal item" size limit and is all I need for short trips, but many people don't realize how it works and think they have to pay for the carry-on, plus Flair gets their listings to show up higher in search results because they will list the base price. Google Flights makes it clear that there's no carry-on, but it still shows those flights first and someone without familiarity with Flair won't expect carry-ons to cost as much as they do.



  • I have a MacBook for work and I'm not sure it has ever updated overnight like it said it was gonna. It's quite annoying because OS X updates (or my work's custom stuff? Idk) are so, so bad. Big, focus grabbing prompts popping up to say I need to update, when I agree to do it, it has to download too (every other system I use just downloads automatically and only prompts about the restart), and it is the slowest OS update to boot!


  • I don't understand why that one has gone away. Like, the 3mm audio jack made waterproofing difficult and was big. But that doesn't apply to the notification LED, does it?

    I really miss that feature because now I have no indicator of a notification, short of the major battery drain of setting the screen to always be on. I remember even customizing the colour so that I could tell when I had important notifications. Now I often have to double tap my phone just to check if I have any notifications. So dumb.



  • The idea of an "inquiry" for this is so utterly hilarious. What is he expecting it to find? That leaving the EU was a disastrously unpopular decision and that anyone can wave a flag?

    Also, they view Rule, Britannia as a modern, relevant, unironic thing? I see that as the British equivalent to when Americans are like "MURICA, fuck yeah, guns and lifted trucks and bald eagles and worshipping the founding fathers!" Which is to say, incredibly cringy.


  • I'm just finishing act 1 (no spoilers please) and my rampant stealing of everything remotely valuable seems to be paying off in my ability to buy literally anything that catches my eye. I kinda wonder if I'm overdoing it with how much gold I have vs the price of things so far, but I don't want to risk encountering a trader with amazing stuff that I can't afford.

    I still have lots of room for even modest gear improvements. eg, not all of my party members even have 2 rings yet, let alone gear that is genuinely useful to their play style. And some of my characters have some gear that are very niche usage that I'm keeping an eye out for something that will give them an edge in combat.


  • CoderKat@lemm.eetoAnimemes@lemmy.mlIsekai
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think this is often what amnesia is so common in fiction, too, despite being extremely rare in the real world. It provides a convenient plot device, both to perform exposition and for some inevitable gotcha behind either their identity, how they lost their memory, or some other major revelation from their past (seriously, has there ever been a case of amnesia in fiction where they didn't conveniently forget some big, plot relevant thing?).


  • CoderKat@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlAnd thanks to our sponsor
    ·
    1 year ago

    Lol, same. I think I've always made the decision to like and/or subscribe in the middle of videos, usually when I've seen enough to conclude I want to see more.

    I wonder, does YouTube have any stats they expose for what timestamp people like at? I'd actually be really curious to see a graph of that for some videos. It'd obviously be biased towards earliest good points, but it'd probably identify the best sections.


  • CoderKat@lemm.eetoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comtitle 1
    ·
    1 year ago

    TLDR: want to program? Take an intro and an algorithms class first. I suggest you avoid video games or AI. Web or mobile apps are much more beginner/solo friendly.

    As a professional software dev, I see this a lot in my field. Software is very approachable and frankly there is a lot you can just learn as you go along. But usually you still need a decent amount of fundamentals as well as domain knowledge to do that, especially if you want the code to be at all maintainable.

    My biggest suggestion to anyone with programming aspirations is to take a step back and start with a basic course on the fundamentals (there's multiple MOOCs for this that are a good way to get that). Ideally then find a similar class or resource on algorithms and data structures, because those are just crucial for many projects, but more importantly they get you "thinking like a programmer". Having that analytical mindset is probably the best thing you can do to make winging it actually possible.

    But even then, expectations need to be grounded. Eg, video games are by far the most common thing people want to create. But video games require a lot more math, can be performance critical, and perhaps most critically require you to have many other skills, too. It's one thing to be a good enough programmer, but you also need to make a lot of art.

    Another is AI. You can totally learn to make AI stuff. There's so many frameworks, pre trained models, and easy to use cloud offerings for making custom models. The bigger concern with AI isn't simply writing code for it, but that modern AI is simply limited. The type of AI most people talk about is basically just prediction and categorization. It's only as good as the training data. Finding and cleaning data is very time consuming and often very boring. Some parts of this aren't very automatable and thus aren't truly programming tasks. So it's easy for an AI project to fail not because of any programming skills, but because of the limitations of modern AI.

    My advice? Self contained web or mobile apps. Those are usually the most feasible for a single person and the most practical. Look at the various apps on your phone or that you see recommended online and consider if there's things you could do better or if you see niches that aren't covered. Or even just reinvent an app that already exists for fun. Not all projects have to actually be practical!

    There's also technically the option of contributing to open source, but I think beginners will find that too difficult. A project you create yourself lets you know every line of code and keeps the project easy to understand. Big open source projects can be thousands of millions of lines of code where nobody understands it all and learning to read code is a skill that takes practice and experience.


  • IMO it's not a good solution to just say "just block the bigots". The problem is that for new users, they are going to see those bigoted posts. They're going to either think that's what kind of site Lemmy is and potentially leave, or they'll potentially get pulled in by the bigots. Both are bad situations.

    Especially for blatant bigotry, it makes perfect sense to take measures to ensure that the site is safe for everyone by default, without every individual person having to take action (especially those without accounts or not signed in).


  • I thought that was odd, too. I've driven in both countries and they're very similar. Public transit is poor or unavailable for many outside of city cores and there's mad suburban sprawl. And the most aggressive drivers I've seen would actually be in Montreal.

    I wonder if it could be cultural differences overall? Or maybe how much of Canada's population is so concentrated in just a couple of cities? Apart from the 401, most Canadian highways didn't feel nearly as backed as American ones, too. I've driven around San Francisco and Atlanta and they were both super packed highways with exit ramps constantly backed up for hundreds of meters. In Canada, the 401 is really the only highway I see that. As bad as inner city traffic can get, that's much lower speed.

    But yeah, it's really hard to think of actual differences between the two. While the two countries do have overall cultural differences, I did not perceive a huge difference in driver selfishness or speeding. Contrary to internet memes, Canadians are usually very selfish drivers, too. Canada also is obsessed with oversized trucks. Ontario is the epitome of "just one more lane will fix all our problems" and train service is constantly underfunded (though I guess at least we do have the Go trains and buses, which seems to be more than can be said about many US metro areas).






  • Also, if OP is new, they may not yet be aware of aliases and functions. Generally you'd out those in a ~/.bashrc file that gets automatically executed when a terminal starts. They'll allow you to save a more complex command as a really simple one. And particularly can be useful when things you want to run are in unusual directories. Eg, maybe you have a git repo somewhere that contains some project you spend most of your time on, so you could have an alias that just cd's you to it's directory. Git also has its own way of doing aliases and that's really nifty for the more complicated git commands (or the more commonly used, like st for status).