lime!

the guy who got stuck in a block of ice during a ted talk, yes.

he’s my favourite quack because he claims that his training regimen is the reason he can handle the cold, even after participating in a twin study where his twin brother turned out to have exactly the same resistance despite never doing the training…

if a chicken could code, it would use CHICKEN.

i am currently working for a company that employs over 200 000 people. this is not a rare market.

if you’re looking at web stuff, sure. that market is saturated. i’ve worked in mining, manufacturing and vehicle industries and they’re always looking for people.

the market is screaming for talented developers. get in there!

you’re not going to get a position remote if your client is a bank or some other entity that does cobol. that shit is running on an airgapped machine running a vm of a machine from the 90s running a vm of a machine from the 70s. if you’re really unlucky the source will be on punch cards because they didn’t invest in a machine with storage and asked the VM developers for the same workflow as before

Why is verbosity such a bad thing?

oh the names aren’t long. cobol has keyword alternatives for all operators and all numbers up to 20. since the language was designed for non-programmers, code in the wild follows no paradigm and mixes these alternatives freely. names are usually kept as short as possible.

there’s also a lot of boilerplate required for each file wrt the actual structure of the sections, assembly style. sure most of this can be automated with tooling but there’s no tooling available. the cobol people have mainly worked in their own sphere and not been included in the tooling explosion of the last 15 years.

here’s an example of some well-written cobol. most of it is nowhere close to this consistent, or source-controlled for that matter.

keyword count is a quick but bad metric of language complexity. thanks to all the alternative syntaxes cobol allows, it has around 300 keywords.

good cobol programmers are probably the highest paid programmers there are. mostly because there are so few of them and the systems are so critical.

but like… it’s not going to be fun. cobol as a language is extremely verbose, and you’re not going to actually develop anything. it’s just fixing compatibility problems and y2k issues all day.

Fortran is everywhere. it got a new release less than ten years ago.

all of these are still used in modern applications. i suggest Forth.

you could just learn cobol. it’s not going anywhere, unfortunately

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well, ish. llms have a vector space of words, image generators of features. they use a second model to associate words with features. Steve’s explanation is a great intro but for a deep dive i recommend Self-Cannibalizing AI from 37C3.

i mean i don’t go

well, if we’re going by the original definition of meme as a concept or idea that spreads and mutates like a social version of a gene through a population (Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976), then unfortunately image macros are indeed a form of meme.

also, that’s not an image macro. a macro is shorthand; image macros are memetic images, e.g. they have a culturally understood meaning that requires no extra context after learning of it, optionally with attached text that plays off of that cultural understanding. examples of image macros are “foul bachelor frog”, “good guy joegreg”, “hide the pain harold”, “this is fine”, “all the things”, and so on. a comic that sets up a scenario is not shorthand, unless it’s “loss” or “sweet bro and hella jeff”.

Edit: yes, i’m fun at parties.

i have only ever made one meme. it was more than 15 years ago, in a specific thread on the facepunch studios forums. it broke containment and is now one of the featured examples for the thing it is about on knowyourmeme (i just checked this because i wanted to see if it was in the gallery). and of course, i have no way to prove this. it was a hastily made gif i lost like eight computers ago.

a beach, a plasma torch, and a very steady hand

man that’s way too few. the ones that are usually counted here are

• winter
• winter-spring
• april
• midsummer
• summer
• rainy season
• british summer
• april 2
• sleet
• night

i want seasons :(

we have +30C summers and -30C winters. perfectly balanced. i visited relatives in Vancouver last summer and the 36 degree heat was basically unbearable.