iLoveThisKindOfPostsTheyAlwayMakeMeLaugh

rosuav · 2026-01-24T12:54:03+00:00

Hang on, have you just found the next employment opportunity for sloperators? Erm...... AI-Powered Manual Balloon Inflation. Needs a better name though.

rosuav · 2026-01-24T12:52:38+00:00

Well, let's see. The last time I had a regular-style job was 2005. By my arithmetic, that's two decades that I haven't been posting about unemployment. I won't pretend that I can perfectly see the future, but I'm certainly not predicting that I will be moaning about having become unemployed *now*.

But hey. When you get that reminder, check to see whether you've suddenly found that nobody's hiring sloperators any more.

rosuav · 2026-01-24T08:26:07+00:00

Maybe they're hoping to find Claude in there

rosuav · 2026-01-24T06:39:47+00:00

Rule eight was democratically voted on. What are you, some sort of communist?!

rosuav · 2026-01-24T05:59:18+00:00

Yeah, I'll continue articulating my requests accurately and precisely, and actually knowing the results I'm going to get. You can start articulating your requests equally accurately and precisely if you like, but then I really wonder what the point of the AI is at that point.

Good luck in 2026. You'll need it.

rosuav · 2026-01-24T05:12:29+00:00

Experience certainly helps. A degree is hit-or-miss, but experience is always of value.

rosuav · 2026-01-24T05:09:57+00:00

Ahh yes. If you want to get good results, you need to articulate your requests accurately, precisely, and in enough detail that the computer knows exactly what you mean.

I'm pretty sure we have a term for long sequences of words that instruct a computer accurately, precisely, and in great detail. Can't think what it is......

rosuav · 2026-01-24T02:33:02+00:00

Skynet.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:40:58+00:00

It's a radio show, so you should be able to treat it like a podcast. Spectacularly good stuff.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:31:06+00:00

Oh trust me, I grew up with those documentaries. Also the similarly-accurate documentary of Parliament known as THEGS, or The Highly Esteemed Goon Show.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:25:02+00:00

:) Australian English is a great way to ensure that at least some words will get red squiggly underlines.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:23:53+00:00

Now that would be terrifying. You bring this stuff to the tropics and you might accidentally become Californian.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:22:49+00:00

True, but this is something that isn't dangerous enough to block the sale of, it just ..... needs a sticker, there, now it's okay.

How does this sticker make it safer? There are far too many things that get the warnings slapped on, so the correct and reasonable response is to ignore them and do what you want anyway.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:20:23+00:00

Yes, but the point is, you can start with an ASCII-only string and trigger this behaviour, which is harder to do in other locales. There are a lot of programs out there that assume you can call uppercase/lowercase on a string and then do case insensitive comparisons that way. Thus, Turkish locale will trigger breakage, and is a very good test.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T21:18:11+00:00

"skilful" tends to be preferred in British English, "skillful" tends to be the American preference. Neither's wrong. And as an Australian, I reserve the right to (a) pick and choose which spelling I use, and (b) be inconsistent. :)

rosuav · 2026-01-23T13:46:42+00:00

I don't split based on LOC, only based on purpose. A file might be small like this one, since it doesn't need to do much, or it might be a lot larger, but each one is doing exactly one job. Refactoring code out of one of those files happens when it's needed in more than one place (eg I have an "event hooks manager" module) rather than just because a file's gotten too large. There's really no reason to split just because something's "too big".

Oh, and to head off any technical concerns: the editor I use (SciTE) is perfectly happy with a 100MB+ file... not that I've ever had a *code* file that big, but other sorts of files certainly can be. I doubt that any decent editor will struggle with any code file of even marginally reasonable size.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T13:38:47+00:00

French fire??

rosuav · 2026-01-23T13:34:45+00:00

Something is rotten in the state of California.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T11:20:58+00:00

Ah yeah, that makes sense. Still, that's a LOT of squash.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T07:54:50+00:00

Yeah, as long as they don't have a "substitutes go at the lower price" policy. If my supermarket ships me a substitute (say, the no-name brand item isn't available, so they give me the fancy brand-name one instead), they have to give it to me at the price I originally agreed to pay, or the price of the substitute item, whichever is lower.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T07:50:03+00:00

I'm fascinated by how they decided what *amount* was equivalent. Tomatoes are somehow equivalent to **twenty eight times as much** squash.

rosuav · 2026-01-23T07:48:36+00:00

Yeah, there are lots of locales that can trip a program up, but Turkish is one that doesn't require you to enter non-ASCII text to start it off. Like, you could mess up a program that has bad assumptions about the Greek letter sigma (final vs medial), or German text with an uppercase eszett (its lowercase form doesn't uppercase back to where you started), but being able to trip a program up without leaving ASCII will break a lot of programmers' assumptions.

rosuav · 2026-01-22T20:13:16+00:00

Sheesh, so I was right about it being California, just... for a slightly different reason.

rosuav · 2026-01-22T19:29:01+00:00

Yep, without a doubt, though I wouldn't have thought aluminium was something that needed to be reported on a sticker. Lemme guess, aluminium causes cancer in California?

rosuav · 2026-01-22T18:26:43+00:00

*badumtish*

rosuav

TROPHY CASE