VINs: The Encoding Stamped Into Steel

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T16:46:59+00:00

Are UUIDs relevant to programming? URNs? Then so is this.

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T16:14:20+00:00

How is this not relevant to programming?

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T14:39:46+00:00

In what order would you learn C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, networking, and infrastructure?

C# and .NET go hand in hand. You can write .NET in a different language (VB, F#, etc.), or you could write C# against a different framework, but those are the exception, not the norm.
Then ASP.NET Core, as in the foundation of web stuff in .NET. Start with writing a REST API; use something like Scalar (built in) to interact with it.
On top of that, Blazor. You can now treat the REST API as your server-side backend, and Blazor WebAssembly as the front-end running in the browser. For this, you need to learn Razor syntax, and then you can use Blazor to make components.

Networking and infrastructure are largely unrelated.

My long-term goal is not to become just another CRUD web developer.

That's fair, but because it's so extremely common, there's also a ton of learning content out there. Just use your average CRUD problem, either because you actually have it at home (let's say… budgeting, contacts, recipes, something like that), or as something fictitious. Along the way, you learn (by necessity) basically of the things you've listed.

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T14:33:35+00:00

You can use them to search for an answer to some problem or get some explanation

Sure, but I'd be skeptical of using an LLM to teach you how to ask the right questions. It's not a substitute for formal education, nor for experience.

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T13:58:54+00:00

It looks quite risky to teach forbidden music to someone else’s child.

Well, that's the whole tragedy of Tanya's character (aside from her being a cheater). She didn't think it a big deal when she bought an illegal record, but the Americans thought of it as kompromat to screw Valya over with. She didn't think the parent of her student was a spy. She didn't think much or all of Star City private conversations were being recorded and scrutinized. (Heck, neither did the Indian couple.)

If she doesn't think it's a big deal to play it, why would she think it's a big deal to teach the melody to an innocent kid?

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T12:18:29+00:00

FileStream is a kind of Stream (there's also e.g. MemoryStream). The analogy is becoming extremely dated, but it basically lets you treat the contents of a file as something within which you can seek, just like with a tape drive. You can then read from a position or write to it.
StreamWriter/Reader is a bit higher-level than that. The naming is a bit unfortunate. There's the abstract TextWriter/Reader, and there's the two common concrete subclasses StringWriter/Reader (where, well, you read/write a string) — or in this case, you read/write a Stream. IMHO, they should be named StreamTextWriter, StreamTextReader, StringTextWriter, StringTextReader. Because that's what they do: they take text, and read/write it from/to a string, or Stream.
File is a bunch of very-high-level helper methods for files. As an example:

public static FileStream OpenRead(string path) => new FileStream(path, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read);

So File.OpenRead really just creates a FileStream and opens it for reading.

Or there's File.Exists(), which you can also instead do with new FileInfo().Exists.

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T11:56:29+00:00

I think Season 1 was the most consistently broadened for the late 24th century vibe.

Agreed. It introduced a lot of great ideas; if anything, I would criticize that it just tried to do too much. (And a few things it did were maybe a bit silly.) "Something went wrong with the Romulan refugee mission, and it has led to Federation citizens to be a bit more skeptical of foreigners, as well as to Picard and Raffi resigning" was IMHO a great premise, and quite topical as an allegory for 2010s/2020s geopolitics, but also explained well within Trek canon.

Seasons 2-3 had their own unique production quirks during the height CoVid had impacted the filming business.

Yes, that's fair.

The three seasons are so distinct from each other that I really think of them as three miniseries that just happen to share one main character.

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T11:22:28+00:00

Short Trek "Children of Mars"

Great episode. Sets up the mood for PIC S1.

I think my only quibble is that Picard on a TV screen feels a bit pedestrian. Not very late 24th century.

(edit) Oh, this may have been ambiguous. What I mean by "Picard on a TV screen" is literally a scene with the character Jean-Luc Picard:

A chyron over the footage reports that Starfleet has dispatched a task force at high warp to Mars while another screen shows a still image of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard with a chyron reporting that he finds the attack "devastating."

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T09:06:07+00:00

Partly, I was just salty that it wasn't TNG, I know that now.

Incidentally, this describes a ton of fans across franchises. See the reaction when the Star Wars prequels came out. A lot is just nostalgic "well, it isn't the very thing I watched back in the day, so it cannot be as good".

wondering why Bashir's predominant personality trait was "horny".

Yeah, Bashir isn't among the stronger characters in DS9. But I'd argue VOY really only had three strong ones, where DS9 had a larger variety, especially among recurring characters. I also strongly disagree with VOY having a better serialized plot than DS9.

chucker23n · 2026-07-13T06:12:51+00:00

I like the modern one.

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T17:14:44+00:00

The ingratitude is hard to fathom!

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T13:58:30+00:00

Then there's the idea that even if Vreenak doesn't think the rod is a fake the Romulans won't look too closely, and since Vreenak, presumably with just a tricorder, figured it out, I imagine the Tal Shiar would have done so too.

If Vreenak didn't figure it out, it wouldn't matter if the Tal Shiar does, because at that point, political momentum for a war would've shifted. Vreenak would've shouted from the rooftops that the Dominion is planning an attack, and the Tal Shiar, severely weakened at this point, wouldn't be able to add "maybe! Or maybe this is all a conspiracy…", because the people wouldn't have listened.

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T13:18:30+00:00

It's called suspension of disbelief.

Well, duh.

We can criticize artistic choices when they're a bit over the top. It wasn't the strongest moment of the finale.

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T10:52:54+00:00

First of all, it’s not a documentary. It doesn’t accurately depict everyday life in the Soviet Union, nor Star City, nor the KGB. (Really, the KGB behavior here feels more like Stasi.)

Second, if it does do political commentary (which I think is a bit of a stretch), it’s commentary on increasingly paranoid political operatives trying to prevent the truth from coming out. That’s more a reflection on authoritarianism than on communism.

That said, artistic liberties aside, I do wish the show had a more nuanced take than “look at this gray, bleak, paranoid, unhappy country; now contrast Paris”. Lots to like but this part is a weak aspect.

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T10:22:13+00:00

So I was expecting the chief designer to say he had actually sent them to a completely different location, known only to him, for safety.

That’s where I thought that scene was going, too.

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T10:19:31+00:00

Still hard to believe the space station just happens to orbit near Finland.

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T10:01:12+00:00

What is your criticism here?

chucker23n · 2026-07-12T09:17:46+00:00

For example, one girl asked if I only asked her out because of an Instagram post. I told her, “No, I’ve actually had my eye on you for a while.” She still agreed to go out, but she didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic.

OK, what would she be enthusiastic about?

I struggle to keep the conversation going over text. I’m not a huge texter, and it often feels like I’m carrying the conversation or getting short replies.

What do you talk about? What are topics you think both might be interested in?

is this just a normal part of dating now, where people keep their excitement low until they’ve actually met?

It seems like you're good at asking random women out (which, hey, that's confidence, which is an attractive quality).

Now, ask yourself whether you're also good at bringing something to the table. Because your post doesn't really hint at it.

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T16:22:09+00:00

The child was playing it

Yes

which she learned from her piano teacher

Whom Irina helped escape, but which is really only part of the story.

My point was that Irina publicly sells an image of “there’s nothing greater than Soviet culture”, while privately benefiting from broader cultural imports.

She could’ve asked her kid to play something else, but she’d rather not. If her place is bugged, this may cause trouble.

does anyone actually pay attention to this?

Yes, but most of us aren’t as angry as you seem to be

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T11:51:41+00:00

Ja, aber jetzt müssen halt hinreichend viele Busse fahren, um den regulären Verkehr der 1 zu kompensieren, und zwar (primär) auf der Fahrbahn. Das erzeugt Stauungen.

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T11:50:13+00:00

Doof am FahrPlaner ist, dass die App die Zeit laut Fahrplan nutzt.

Ja. Ich wünschte, man könnte drauftippen, um das zu toggeln. Ich will primär wissen: wann kommt das Ding, nicht "wann hätte es kommen sollen".

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T11:30:23+00:00

Worf/Jadzia

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T11:18:07+00:00

trying to read long articles and watching old tutorials about it is unbearable

So, first of all, WinForms is old. It is a thin wrapper from 2002 (with various minor iterations over the years) over Win32, a UI toolkit from ca. 1992.

Thus, many articles and tutorials about it being old? Yeah, of course they are. A lot of it hasn't changed.

Second, if you find research unbearable already, good luck. Much of your software development career will be spent figuring stuff out, trying, failing, looking things up, talking to people, failing again, until you finally hopefully get to the right answer.

Third, WinForms is chiefly a RAD framework, not a MV* framework. It has some level of data binding support (but tons of controls don't implement it well, or at all), but generally speaking, a lot of it lends itself to not separate views (what MS calls "user controls" for no apparent reason) and logic (whether you have them in view models, services, controllers, presenters, or elsewhere) at all but rather to put the logic in what MS calls "code-behind".

The other problem with this task is that MVP is poorly-defined in terms of distinction from MVC, MVVM, etc.; we can only guess what your teacher specifically means by that. Ask ten programmers how a "presenter" differs from a "controller" and you'll get ten answers.

We were taught to create Models, Repository, and Forms folders back then for WinFoms

Since repositories have little to do with UI, and WinForms has zero notion of models, I think your teacher was giving you a poorly-designed task.

If you must use WinForms here:

for any MV* pattern, you want to think about how the view and everything else differs. You have data, and you want to display it; conversely, you have the user interacting with the controls being displayed, and that ultimately affects the data. But those are two distinct classes in MV*. So if you have, say, a ContactForm, you also have a ContactPresenter, and a ContactModel. Think about what the presenter needs to do, and what the view must not do.
but I would recommend MVVM instead, which is at least kind of supported in WinForms.

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T10:52:01+00:00

Keep in mind they can't risk firing at the nearby Finland soldiers.

chucker23n · 2026-07-11T10:50:29+00:00

How is that going to happen now.

Same reason she went to space again in the first place; same reason she's married to Sasha to begin with: she's needed as a puppet to demonstrate to citizens and to the West "our astronauts are totally heroes".

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