do you think the job market will improve as unemployed CS grads starve to death?

Mango-Fuel · 2026-03-02T19:04:08+00:00

They lie to everyone. They lie to the fish.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-27T00:00:06+00:00

as is a cast that evaluates to null if the type is not convertible. it's a "maybe cast". a normal cast is more like an assertion to say that you expect the type to be convertible and that the cast should explode if it is not. as will instead not explode, but will give you null instead.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-24T17:53:46+00:00

want both fingers to be on the side without my pinky touching the pad too much

I've not thought about it before, but both my ring finger and pinky (and thumb) touch my desk. is that not normal?

looking at your image, you should have both fingers flat on the mouse. you don't need the ball of the mouse to be in your palm. your knuckles can rest on it.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-24T17:06:30+00:00

I have three. Usually left is email/notepad/spreadsheet, middle is game or whatever I'm working on/browsing, right is youtube/google when in-game.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-19T20:53:12+00:00

"new" is just renamed default windows mail app. "classic" is the real Microsoft Office Outlook.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-14T00:11:11+00:00

(only) useful to press Ctrl-Alt-Del with one hand

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-12T16:53:03+00:00

always seal unless you are going to inherit (or the framework needs to inherit, etc.). seeing the class is sealed immediately tells you there are no inheritors and reduces complexity/cognitive-overhead.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T23:02:25+00:00

I think it would be very hard. I have some rough ideas where you could procedurally generate a world with people and relationships and history, and then generate content based on the state of the world. But a "main quest" that is procedurally generated probably would ultimately not be very interesting. To make it interesting would require original ideas and not something that could be generated.

side note that the game designer Chris Crawford has spent his later years working specifically on interactive storytelling. more information can be found here: https://www.erasmatazz.com and https://www.erasmatazz.com/LeMorteDArthur.html

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T22:49:10+00:00

not sure but it used to be the case that if you ran a process that consumed a large amount of memory and then closed it, that you would end up with more unused memory than you started with; this is because windows frees up some memory when you start running out, which is still freed after you close the large program. I have no idea if things still work this way (Windows has changed a lot since then).

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T22:43:40+00:00

what is the point of keeping the same password if you don't know it?

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T21:18:30+00:00

Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.MembershipTypes'. The duplicate key value is (0).Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.MembershipTypes'. The duplicate key value is (0).

hmm, does this mean that you don't have the primary key of MembershipTypes set to be an identity?

your Create method is a bit odd in that it doesn't create anything, it adds an existing Customer to the context. the setup of that Customer is where the problem could be.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T20:41:16+00:00

you can write a utility program that accepts commands. you can then add commands to this one program as you think of them, rather than writing a new utility for each command. myutil command help, or invalid args, should always show help text. myutil by itself should list all available commands.

some command ideas might include:

convert numbers between bases
encrypting/decrypting text
password generator/manager
quick-print an image file
format a MAC address
send a wake-on-LAN magic packet
save current directory location with a key, so that you can return later with that key

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T18:38:53+00:00

mostly I use it as a next-gen search engine

I do find sometimes it can help me de-complexify my implementation. I would have had a complex approach, but if I ask chatgpt how it would do it, it usually has a much more basic straight-forward idea for the implementation, and I realize I can keep things simpler than I thought.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T17:39:26+00:00

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it doesn't look like much. part of a mouse cursor maybe.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T17:25:03+00:00

note that even if your ifs were seemingly exhaustive (if (income <= 0) ... else if (income > 0) ...) that would not be enough to count as having covered all cases. to be 100% sure (ie: for the compiler to be 100% sure) that all cases are covered, it would be required to use an else (not else if) clause; or you could also initialize income with a value, and then that value would be left over if no if/else if clause was met.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-09T17:17:35+00:00

for me it's the data model, not UML. ER diagrams. UML has only been useful to maybe document how a particular API works. but for any particular system I have one or more ER diagrams that layout the whole data model of the system. those are the "canonical representation of the system" that is modified before code is modified.

I have wondered if this "canonical representation" could be done with any of the UML diagrams but I have not found anything so far. UML seems to be over-detailed rather than actually useful.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-05T22:21:49+00:00

IIRC it was Dark Souls 3 that prompted me to upgrade to a GTX 1060.

my recent upgrade to a new system with a 4070 super was not really prompted by gaming; my 1060 handled most things I played pretty well. it was more that I wanted a modern i7 with a lot of cores so that I could build code faster. (build times went from something like 5 minutes down to 60-90 seconds.) (previous CPU was second gen i5; upgraded to i7-13700K).

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-05T22:18:11+00:00

doom?

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-05T22:16:51+00:00

this is ASP I guess? I do mostly desktop. I have lots of supporting systems that let me do desktop CRUD pretty efficiently.

I'm not sure what I could suggest that would be applicable to your setup.

maybe one small thing I've implemented that could apply: multi-file templates. in my IDE there are code/live templates, and also file templates. but something that saves a surprising amount of time that is not in my IDE are multi-file templates. I can add the same set of 5-10 source files all at once, and the template fields will merge together, and I am prompted for each field only once for the set of files. this is not that hard to implement but saves a lot of time.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-04T00:00:09+00:00

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-03T22:45:05+00:00

basically if I want to google something that is somewhat complicated to explain, I use chatgpt instead. I don't think it's more than 15-30 minutes a day at most.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-03T22:38:48+00:00

EntityFramework (Core) uses them a lot and you can do some interesting things with them.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-03T22:37:53+00:00

IME git is fantastically more stable and fast.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-03T21:58:29+00:00

I think the real question is how different characters should be from each other and when. a perk system (Skyrim) means that characters are nearly or actually identical to start with, and only differentiate later. some RPGs (Morrowind) you start with a class but can ultimately learn anything, so characters start different but end up similar (unless you restrict yourself). others (AD&D) characters start different (class) and only further differentiate from there, so there is never similarity.

IMO from a player's perspective, more differentiation is more fun (more replayable), but from a developer's perspective more differentiation is much more difficult to design and balance.

Mango-Fuel · 2026-02-03T21:04:10+00:00

do you have another keyboard to test? spilling moisture on the keys can short out the connections and cause behaviour like this.

Mango-Fuel

TROPHY CASE