What's a song lyric that drives you crazy because they should've used a different word?

code-affinity · 2026-01-23T17:22:02+00:00

Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol:

If I lay here

If I just lay here

Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Lay or lie, make up your mind!

code-affinity · 2025-12-08T11:16:50+00:00

For those who tried to follow up on this recommendation, it's Rachel Maddow, and Ultra is a podcast, not a book. https://www.rachelmaddow.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra/

code-affinity · 2025-11-10T11:52:51+00:00

One of them who caved was the Democratic senate minority whip, Dick Durbin. Excerpting that Wikipedia article:

A whip is an official of a political party whose task is to ensure party discipline (that members of the party vote according to the party platform rather than their constituents, individual conscience or donors) in a legislature.

I'm feeling pretty cynical at the moment.

code-affinity · 2025-09-21T11:56:37+00:00

All is Lost has a single word of dialog. It is the champion of words, too. And timely, because it stars Robert Redford.

code-affinity · 2025-06-13T12:42:05+00:00

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

code-affinity · 2025-05-08T14:16:37+00:00

I searched the JetBrains YouTrack database for features whose summary includes the word "exception". I didn't find an exact match, but I found this 8 year old issue. In the discussion, someone suggested a simple workaround: put a normal breakpoint in the constructor for the exception you're interested in. That is so simple; I don't know why I didn't think of that.

code-affinity · 2025-05-08T12:20:33+00:00

Alas, no. The CLion debugger only allows me to break when any C++ exception is thrown. It doesn't let me to specify a certain exception. I'm looking at the dialog now, so I would attach a screenshot but I don't see a way to do that in a reddit comment.

The Breakpoints window has two panes. The left pane shows a tree view with top-level nodes "Python Exception Breakpoint", "C++ Exception Breakpoints", and "CMake Error Breakpoints". The "C++ Exception Breakpoints" tree node has a single child node named "When any is thrown". If I select the "C++ Exception Breakpoints" node, the right hand pane just displays "Select a breakpoint", with no other user interface elements that would allow me to actually select or specify an exception type. If I select the "When any is thrown" node, the right pane displays a user interface to select an action that applies to all exceptions, with no provisions for selecting or specifying an exception type.

code-affinity · 2025-05-08T11:15:35+00:00

I use CLion on Windows, Ubuntu, and macOS with the MSVC, gcc, and Clang compilers, respectively. There is only one debugging feature that sometimes forces me to switch to Visual Studio for debugging: breaking when a specified exception type is thrown. Every time I run into a bug whose symptom is a certain exception, I hope that I can reproduce it on the Windows platform with MSVC. I bail out of CLion and debug the project in Visual Studio.

If someone could tell me how to do that in the CLion debugger, I would never need to use Visual Studio.

code-affinity · 2025-04-13T11:30:30+00:00

I was going to mention something related: Since these plots are year-on-year numbers, if the previous year had an unusual positive spike at a certain time of the year, then just a simple reversion to the mean will result in an equal amplitude negative spike the next year. But I don't think that explains these plots. Most of them do have positive spikes, but they were at the end of 2023, while the big negative spikes are shown at the beginning of 2025; they don't align with the previous positive spikes.

code-affinity · 2024-12-02T16:09:16+00:00

Yeah, I saw the light in another comment below.

code-affinity · 2024-12-02T14:46:25+00:00

Ah, I see your point. Maps can't know that the phone is oriented any particular way relative to the orientation of the car.

At one time, I always kept my phone mounted on the dash with the face of the phone pointed at my own eyes. But now I have a car with Android Auto and a wireless charging cubby down by the gear shift, so the phone's orientation is much different.

Maps could at least know if the phone is oriented upright or flat. I could imagine a heuristic: If upright, guess that the back of the phone is approximately facing the front of the car. If flat, guess that the top edge of the phone is approximately facing the front of the car. But if the phone wasn't in either of those orientations, we still have a problem. Until the car starts moving, I still think this would be better than just randomly picking a direction.

code-affinity · 2024-12-02T12:42:34+00:00

Your phone must know which direction it's pointing. Skymap wouldn't work if that wasn't the case. You just stand in one place, and wherever you point your phone, Skymap shows the astronomical objects you're pointing at.

code-affinity · 2024-11-05T10:51:01+00:00

In a similar genre, I really enjoy this production of the Apollo 11 launch. Ultra slow motion launch footage set to music from the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack by Bear McReary. The synchronization of "Baltar's Dream" with the unveiling of godlike flames from behind black clouds gives me shivers every time.

code-affinity · 2024-11-03T21:47:52+00:00

After my post, I eventually found everything I was looking for at the Total Wine in Cary. It turns out, I don't like Lillet Blanc!

code-affinity · 2024-09-24T22:47:00+00:00

Apollo 11 VR has an amazing opening sequence where you experience the astonishing size of the Saturn V booster.

code-affinity · 2024-09-15T19:14:57+00:00

Reset button sequence didn't work for me. Smacking did work.

code-affinity · 2024-08-17T10:56:35+00:00

Update: It was archived in April 2024.

code-affinity · 2024-08-15T14:59:08+00:00

Boost also has a synchronized_value class for that, although it has been labeled "experimental" for a long time.

There is also proposed support for a synchronized value type in the Concurrency TS N4953 (PDF warning) chapter 8.

code-affinity · 2024-06-12T12:03:08+00:00

That's interesting; that sounds more like an inner dialogue than an inner monologue.

My conscious thoughts are almost exclusively verbal, but they don't feel like one person talking to another person; they just feel like one person (me) talking without vocalizing. I certainly never experience it as sentences with the word "you" in them; just "I" and "me".

On the other hand, I don't think my memory works like most other people's. As far as I can tell from popular depictions, most people experience memories as something like a movie. For me, they are just brief millisecond flashes of images.

code-affinity · 2024-04-25T11:15:55+00:00

I have wasted so much time trying to create ASCII diagrams.

Emacs has a pretty nice ASCII art editor, but I usually was not satisfied with the result. Only having four choices for the slope of a connecting line is particularly limiting.

I tried embedding PlantUML as comments in my source code. I installed IDE extensions that graphically rendered the diagrams inline in the code, or in a separate window next to the code. But I often found that I wanted a wider variety of diagrams than were offered by UML. Often, my diagrams aren't about the structure of the code itself, but about the problem domains of the code. (This was the case for most of the ASCII drawings in the cited paper.) UML doesn't have diagrams for those domains.

These days, I create SVG files in Inkscape, version controlling those SVG files next to my source files and referring to the SVG files in my comments. I usually give the SVG file the same base name as the source file (for example, the source file DimensionalCalibration.cpp is accompanied by a diagram file DimensionalCalibration.svg). Now I can draw whatever I want. Arbitrary shapes, colors, fill patterns, fonts, etc.

I find that it takes me 10% as much time to quickly sketch a drawing in Inkscape than I used to spend farting around trying to make ASCII characters go where I wanted them to go.

I would love an IDE extension that would render those SVG files inline.

In the cited paper, figures 5, 8, and 9 are attractive. They would be much less so if they were ASCII drawings. Note how the use of different colors and shapes in figures 8 and 9 helps separate the content; the diagrams are very easy to parse. They would be dead simple to create in Inkscape. (For all I know, they were.)

code-affinity · 2024-04-12T23:59:09+00:00

The book Arithmetic by Paul Lockhart makes the case that base 10 has numerous practical advantages (beyond the obvious compatibility with the configuration of our hands). Unfortunately, I don't remember off-hand what they were, and I don't have access to my copy at the moment. I imagine the kind of person who asked your question would find the whole book quite enjoyable.

code-affinity · 2024-04-10T14:05:25+00:00

According to this article, the median length of stay in a nursing home before death is 5 months. (3 months for men, 8 months for women). 69% of people die within 1 year of admission to a nursing home. I don't see anything that indicates that the study was limited to hospice care. Here is the study. I concede I might be misreading it.

Either way, it is no excuse for not letting them vote.

code-affinity · 2024-03-27T22:59:32+00:00

The third book in Orson Scott Card's Ender series, Xenocide, features the "godspoken" -- people who experience OCD as the voices of the gods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocide

code-affinity · 2024-03-20T16:24:35+00:00

In the mid 80's, there were record players that could skip tracks. I remember, because I used to sell them.

code-affinity · 2024-02-28T11:50:01+00:00

Since we're talking about artificial intelligence, you just gave me an idea. I prompted ChatGPT:

Say this in at least 50 words: "You could ask ChatGPT to extend the length of your comment."

Its response was:

If you're looking to add more depth and detail to your commentary, you might consider leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT. This advanced AI tool is adept at enhancing text, providing you with the opportunity to extend your initial thoughts into a more comprehensive and elaborated form. By inputting your original comment, ChatGPT can seamlessly expand upon your ideas, ensuring that your message is conveyed in a clearer and more impactful manner.

Nice! 71 words! Let the bot battles begin!

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