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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • pixelscript@lemm.eetomemes@lemmy.worldThere's a hierarchy
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    9 days ago

    They are public drinking fountains. These aren’t meant to be put in homes or private spaces.

    America is absolutely filled with these things. They are everywhere. Public drinking access, no cups required, at an overwhelming number of public institutions. One of the extremely rare W’s of American public use infrastructure.

    On the few occasions I’ve been to Europe, I’ve honestly been quite frustrated at the lack of them. I can’t just roll up to a place and have a quick drink, I’m apparently just expected to carry it with me on my person when I leave my place of stay, or buy a disposable bottle of something from a shop. Even if there are public faucet taps available, I guess I’m expected to be carrying a drinking vessel already, or stick my face under the faucet and slurp awkwardly from the falling stream?

    I’m just baffled public drinking fountains don’t seem to be common elsewhere, to the point that there are several people in this thread questioning what they even are. I would consider them basic infrastructure for any civilized society.





  • Patrick Warburton is the only one on that list who was actually on board with the film in its small budget phase. The rest came aboard after the Weinstein Company stepped in to be the distributor.

    Picking up movies that were already finished for cheap and then using industry connections and capital to forcefully inject more star power into the voice cast is apparently something the Weinsteins did several times. They did the same thing to The Magic Roundabout (marketed in America as Doogal).

    Funnily enough, getting the Weinsteins involved with Hoodwinked! in the first place was a chance encounter made possible by Robert Rodriguez’s wife.



  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlSwitch for Christmas
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    1 month ago

    It’s basically a power strip:

    but specifically for cables that carry Internet traffic instead of electrical power.

    A more direct analogy would be a telephone switchboard (which is why it is called a “switch”), basically a computerized version of those old-timey operator ladies who used to sit in a room waiting for you to make a phone call, and they’d physically move a plug connected to your phone and plug it directly into the phone line of whoever you were trying to call. That, but for computers trying to talk to one another over network cables instead of making telephone calls.


  • No homework in detention sounds absolutely fucked.

    There were a couple times in high school I actually asked to go to detention after class, just to do homework. Because I knew it was a quiet, distraction-free space where I could concentrate on a time-sensitive task. Baffled the detention supervisor, she probably wondered if I was having a bad situation at home I was trying to avoid, but no, just wanted to protect myself from myself. And it was very effective every time.



  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlComenting code
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    3 months ago

    I recognize three kinds of comments that have different purposes.

    The first kind are doc block comments. These are the ones that appear above functions, classes, class properties, methods. They usually have a distinct syntax with tags, like:

    /*
     * A one-line description of this function's job.
     *
     * Extra details that get more specific about how to use this function correctly, if needed.
     *
     * @param {Type} param1
     * @param {Type} param2
     * returns {Type}
     */
    function aFunctionThatDoesAThing(param1, param2) {
        // ...
    }
    

    The primary thing this is used for is automatic documentation generators. You run a program that scans your codebase, looks for these special comments, and automatically builds a set of documentation that you could, say, publish directly to a website. IDEs can also use them for tooltip popups. Generally, you want to write these like the reader won’t have the actual code to read. Because they might not!

    The second kind is standalone comments. They take up one or more lines all to themselves. I look at these like warning signs. When there’s something about the upcoming chunk of code that doesn’t tell the whole story obviously by itself. Perhaps something like:

    /* The following code is written in a weird way on purpose.
    I tried doing <obvious way>, but it causes a weird bug.
    Please do not refactor it, it will break. */
    

    Sometimes it’s tempting to use a standalone comment to explain what dense, hard-to-read code is doing. But ideally, you’d want to shunt it off to a function named what it does instead, with a descriptive doc comment if you can’t cram it all into a short name. Alternatively, rewrite the code to be less confusing. If you literally need the chunk of code to be in its confusing form, because a less confusing way doesn’t exist or doesn’t work, then this kind of comment explaining why is warranted.

    The last kind are inline comments. More or less the same use case as above, the only difference being they appear on the same line as code, usually at the very end of the line:

    dozen = 12 + 1; // one extra for the baker!
    

    In my opinion, these comments have the least reason to exist. Needing one tends to be a signal of a code smell, where the real answer is just rewriting the code to be clearer. They’re also a bit harder to spot, being shoved at the ends of lines. Especially true if you don’t enforce maximum line length rules in your codebase. But that’s mostly personal preference.

    There’s technically a fourth kind of comment: commented-out code. Where you select a chunk of code and convert it to a comment to “soft-delete” it, just in case you may want it later. I highly recommend against this. This is what version control software like Git is for. If you need it again, just roll back to it. Don’t leave it to rot in your codebase taking up space in your editor and being an eyesore.



  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlZen Z
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    4 months ago

    An analog clock is just three sets of loading bars with their ends glued together. You can tell geometrically what proportion of each division of time (day, hour, and minute) are spent and what proportion remains. You don’t even need the numbers.

    If you need stopwatch-level precision, sure, a digital display is superior. But how often do you need that? Most of what I need clocks for is, “Oh, it’s about a quarter to noon, I have a lunch appointment to get to”.

    It is my personal preference to visually intuit that the clock hands are roughly separating the hour into 3/4 spent and 1/4 remaining and use that to know how much time I have left to the hour, rather than read the symbols “42” on the display and manually do the mental gymnastics of “well that’s basically 45, which is three quarters of the way to 60 minutes”.

    I’ll admit this benefit is marginal.