#anyway in other news I think I failed my python class

[sprucestairs]

every time I think my code is janky or sucks ass I remember: at least I'm not y*ndev

[lipshits-continuous]

Prime numbers of the ask game let's go!

This is gonna be a long old post haha /pos

2. What math classes did you do best in?:

It's joint between Analysis in Many Variables (literally just Multivariable calculus, I don't know why they gave it a fancy name) and Complex Analysis. Both of which I got 90% in :))

3. What math classes did you like the most?

Out of the ones I've completely finished: complex analysis

Including the ones I'm taking at the moment:

Topology

5. Are there areas of math that you enjoy? What are they?

Yes! They are Topology and Analysis. Analysis was my favourite for a while but topology is even better! (I still like analysis just as much though, topology is just more). I also really like group theory and linear algebra

7. What do you like about math?

The abstractness is really nice. Like I adore how abstract things can be (which is why I really like topology, especially now we're moving onto the algebraic topology stuff). What's better is when the abstract stuff behaves in a satisfying way. Like the definition of homotopy just behaves so nicely with everything (so far) for example.

11. Tell me a funny math story.

A short one but I am not the best at arithmetic at times. During secondary school we had to do these tests every so often that tested out arithmetic and other common maths skills and during one I confidently wrote 8·3=18. I guess it's not all that funny but ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

13. Do you have any stories of Mathematical failure you’d like to share?

I guess the competition I recently took part in counts as a failure? It's supposed to be a similar difficulty to the Putnam and I'm not great at competition maths anyway. I got 1/60 so pretty bad. But it was still interesting to do and I think I'll try it again next year so not wholly a failure I think

17. Are there any great female Mathematicians (living or dead) you would give a shout-out to?

Emmy Noether is an obvious one but I don't you could understate how cool she is. I won't name my lecturers cause I don't want to be doxxed but I have a few who are really cool! One of them gave a cool talk about spectral geometry the other week!

19. How did you solve it?

A bit vague? Usually I try messing around with things that might work until one of them does work

23. Will P=NP? Why or why not?

Honestly I'm not really that well versed in this problem but from what I understand I sure hope not.

29. You’re at the club and Grigori Perlman brushes his gorgeous locks of hair to the side and then proves your girl’s conjecture. WYD?

✨polyamory✨

31. Can you share a math pickup line?

Are you a subset of a vector space of the form x+V? Because you're affine plane

37. Have you ever used math in a novel or entertaining way?

Hmm not that I can think of /lh

41. Which is better named? The Chicken McNugget theorem? Or the Hairy Ball theorem?

Hairy Ball Theorem

43. Did you ever fail a math class?

Not so far

47. Just how big is a big number?

At least 3 I'd say

53. Do you collect anything that is math-related?

Textbooks! I probably have between 20 and 30 at the moment! 5 of which are about topology :3

59. Can you reccomend any online resources for math?

The bright side of mathematics is a great YouTube channel! There is a lot of variety in material and the videos aren't too long so are a great way to get exposed to new topics

61. Does 6 really *deserve* to be called a perfect number? What the h*ck did it ever do?

I think it needs to apologise to 7 for mistakingly accusing it of eating 9

67. Do you have any math tatoos?

I don't have any tattoos at all /lh

71. 👀

A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors

73. Can you program? What languages do you know?

I used to be decent at using Java but I've not done for years so I'm very rusty. I also know very basic python

Thanks for the ask!!

[loremonster]

So the other night I remember reading a post bemoaning how disability in fantasy fiction gets romanticised rather than represented by characters in the story getting their disability rendered moot by some superpower or another. And I agree, that sucks. There's nothing nice or uplifting about chronic pain, for example. It's just... Hurting. All the time. In a way that quietly steals your energy, focus, relaxation, and your sleep at the worst of times. I've read my fair share of fiction that makes me quote Monty Python aloud "I got better", more sarcastically with every encounter.

But I do have a few recommendations from my Young Adult Fantasy Fiction Faves.

Garth Nix was easily my favorite author when I was in middle school and inhaling 2 books a week. For disabled representation, I'd like to recommend Keys To The Kingdom, a 7 book series that starts with a 13 year old boy with severe asthma who is Dying by the end of the first chapter because his asshole gym teacher forced him to run outdoors in early spring.

Because yeah, one stubborn asshole in authority can Fucking Kill You.

Fantasy shinanigans save his life, but not in a I Got Better way. It's complicated, and is part of the building conflict through the series that I won't spoil here. Most I will say is keep an eye out for the theme of Aurthur Losing His Humanity as he sheds things he Thought Was Weighing Him Down.

For a more Neurodivergant kick in the feels, I shall point you to The Seventh Tower. Once again our protagonist is a young boy; nearing 15 and due to circumstances beyond his control has found himself the Head Of His Family when his father is missing and his mother takes so fucking ill shes bedridden in a Fantasy ICU. Bonus points, if he fails to meet his society's expectations for a Head Of House, his failure will send his entire family down the heirarchy into the Literal Fucking Slave Class That Serves The Castle This Society Lives In.

Oh, did I mention this one is Post Apocalyptic Fantasy Fiction? Because shit was broke before our protagonist was even born... Who is exceptionally Driven but is painfully average at most assessments he could take to Prove Himself and meet his society's expectations of him. He's painfully shy and doesn't excel at conversation, but has a quick and strategic mind; taking in new information and applying it faster than those around him.

And when push comes to shove, he disregards the hierarchy he lives within and goes Straight To The Top, where the guardsmen are playing a card game he's familiar with and convinces them to Let Him See The Empress if he can beat one of them in a match.

It's never Said, but I think our protagonist is autistic, folks. The moment he saw the card game and suddenly snapped into Info Dump mode... I got The Vibe, y'know?

Anyway, I won't spoil the outcome of the Beastmaker match ;3 That would be rude.

[wuggen]

You've studied computer science, is there anything I ought to know before I start?

Use git!!!!! Use git from the start for all of your programming projects, and probably also for everything else! I was using fucking google drive to sync my work between my laptop and desktop for the first few semesters of college and it fucking sucked! If you don't already know how to use git, learn it now or very soon, cuz there will probably be later classes that require it and it'll be so incredibly useful to already know how to use it! Also if you're not comfy putting your coursework on like github or gitlab, go check out Keybase, there's free private git repo storage in there, it's neat

Anyway, as far as like actual coursework or general CS knowledge that'll be useful? I feel like that's highly dependent on the particular program you're in tbh. Like if you were going to my alma mater, (doubtful, it's in upstate New York and you say "university" instead of "college" so I assume you're in the UK or otherwise non-American,) I'd give you all sorts of advice about specifically the Data Structures course, which is the course after CS 1 that's notorious for the sheer difficulty of its assignments and tests. We used C++ there. I hear many other programs have data structures courses taught in Java or Python that are just a complete walk in the park. So who knows!

That said, something that was very generally useful for me was to come in with a more-or-less solid understanding of how code is actually executed in hardware, how assembly/machine code works and how higher-level languages map to it. I spent the summer before my freshman year working through Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson, so I was comfy writing low-level C and using a debugger, and had a pretty decent understanding of how software could fail. That was all tremendously helpful. (Also that book fucks really hard and you should definitely give it a look at some point in the future!)

On the more theoretical side of things, I think you might already be ahead of my freshman self! Certainly you already know Haskell, with which I wasn't acquainted until like my fourth or fifth semester as part of the programming languages course. If you're not already familiar with the concepts of formal systems/languages/syntax and computability/decidability, maybe give Gödel Escher Bach a read (or at least the first few chapters where he introduces all that stuff). I think that was the most generally useful theoretical knowledge I had going in. Certainly that was about half of the subject matter of my introductory Foundations of Computer Science course (the other half being combinatorics and finite automata/Turing machines).

Have fun with it! ❤️

[hazzatack]

Series: NFWMB

Chapter 1. Told you I'd give you student Harry.

"Alright, let's get started then."

Ah, the first day of classes of a brand new semester, you think as you slide into your seat in the very knick of time. Being on time was, well, not your strong suit. But you could feel the swell of pride in your heart that came from getting to your first class at all. After a year of nearly-failed classes, this was a new year new you, and nothing could get in yo-

"Do you have a pen I can borrow?"

A calamity of a boy has slunk into your row of seats - the last open in the whole lecture hall - and did so with as much clamor as physically possible before slamming into his chair.

You try not to roll your eyes too hard before reaching into your bag and pulling out a pen for him to do the "getting to know you" assignment.

No, where were you? Oh right, nothing was gonna distra-

"And a piece of paper?"

Now you look up at this boy with vitriol in your eyes and you aren't that surprised when you see he's got the Python logo emblazoned across his chest. Python, aka Pi Theta Nu. Aka the worst fraternity on the entire campus, kicked off multiple times in their history, back on now with a pending suspension that wasn't stopping them from continuing to host parties in off-campus houses.

Or you from going to them.

All that aside, you are surprised when you see him smile a genuine apology as you rip out a piece of paper and hand it to him.

You focus forward once again, eyes trained on Professor Martin as she begins her mini-lecture. So much for syllabus week.

You barely get the date written on your notebook page before you feel a tap on your shoulder.

Dear God, you are going to strangle this boy.

"One last question I promise," he says, and you notice an accent lolling around on his words, but you sigh in frustration instead of longing when he continues. "What time does class end?"

"Ummm, I think 1:35," you say back, just as Professor Martin looks up at you.

"Y/N! A pleasure to see a familiar face. Do you know the answer?"

Oh, fuck. Damn those stupid green eyes and accent for getting you started off on the wrong foot.

"Sorry, I missed the question, Dr. Martin," you say sheepishly, and slope down into your seat and - you hope - right into a black hole underneath it.

"Convergence," you heard your English neighbor shout across the lecture hall. Oh god, it was an easy question. and this bastard got it first.

"That's right... what's your name?"

"Harry," he replies.

When Dr. Martins goes back to the lecture, you feel him lean toward you ever so slightly.

"Sorry," he whispers, and you resist the impulse in your bones to flip him off.

Class ends early and without another word from the disruptive boy, aside from him sliding your pen back onto your desk.

You run out of the classroom and down the hall to the media checkout desk, and plop on top of the counter.

"I'm just here for candy," you say, leaning over your coworker to grab the Reese's that's behind her.

"Dude! You just missed it. That asshole Ryan kid just dropped a lens. Like right in front of me."

Your eyes widen, watching Jen repeat the story back to you. Typical entitled freshmen. No one gives a shit about this equipment the school pays thousands for. Can't wait till they're in the real world.

Same conversation as - it seems - every day.

"The semester literally started today. How is this already happening?" You say between popping another chocolate into your mouth.

You get swept up in conversation around the desk; your boss, classmates, and AI's all hang near the window during breaks. While you're laughing at your boss joke-firing you for the millionth time, you see the boy walk by and smile at you shyly, before putting his head down and walking on.

The week goes by crazy fast, and you're already obsessing over your next project for your Directing class by the time Friday night comes. Your teacher has already set up an open casting call and you walk onto campus the best way you know how to deal with 2 hours of immeasurable boredom - in sweats, holding a back of goldfish.

You'd been to these kinds of things before. 30 or so actors come in to give their monologues and each one is so... the same as the last that you wonder if you'll ever make anything worthwhile in college.

"Are we ready to begin?" Your teacher asks, clapping his hands together. You look up from the script you were furiously typing and the lights go down.

You sit in your uncomfortable chair in the middle of the studio and watch actor after actor come in and say their name, grade, experience, and then glaze over as they "act" for you and 5 other media school hopefuls that need to cast their next 10 projects. You take notes, and a few people even surprise you. Maybe you actually WILL get something off the ground this semester. It's a hopeful thought, given this is your final year before graduation and then LA.

"We've got just one more, then pizza. Or go home, I don't really care, but there will be pizza," your teacher says. Everyone laughs and begins to stir as the last actor comes into the studio.

"Hello, I'm Harry. Harry Styles. I'm a junior, theatre and advertising major, and I most of my experience comes from on-campus stuff. Black box studio theatre."

The familiar and slightly warm accent pulls your head up from the script you've once again opened up, and you can't help your heart from racing at the sight of the boy. He hadn't sat next to you for class yesterday - probably sensing your distaste wafting off of you - and you thought you'd been rid of him for good.

You sit back and smile smugly when he looks up at you, honestly kind of HOPING that he'd be absolutely awful.

And then... he's not.

"I've always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die," he starts. It's interesting to watch a scene come to light in an actor's eye, and not something that's very common for college students, but damn. He absolutely knocks it out of the park and you can see your brain mentally tallying where to slot him in for every part you need to cast for the next... forever. He's that good.

Everyone claps when it's over and your teacher stands up, slaps Harry on the back, and announces the pizza.

When you grab your slice, you're first out the door, heading down the hall to pick up your late night shift at the media lab, all the while trying to reconcile that Harry with the frat-star you broke down in your brain.

"Thought you had me figure out, eh?" Harry says from down the hall. An hour later, you're closing up the lab, locking it down before the weekend.

"Sorry?" You hear yourself saying, but your heart is so far up in your neck that you can't really tell if you're controlling your mouth or not.

"I'm just kidding," he says. He walks up next to you and leans against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. "I did see your face during my audition though. Your jaw was basically on the ground."

There. That's it. The Python ego that you'd come to know and hate.

He might be a good actor but you're not working with that kind of attitude for a whole project. No way.

"I was blinded. American Beauty's one of my favorite movies, and you were the first person to do the monologue tonight."

He shrugs.

"Whatever you say." There's a small moment of awkward silence as your click the key in and twist the lab shut.

"I've got a show tonight," he says out of nowhere. "You should come."

"You're in a band?" You ask, instead of one of the other trillion questions flying around your head. Why the fuck are you inviting me to your show, being the first and most important.

"Drummer," he says. There's a glint in his eye that totally says I-get-girls-to-drop-their-pants-just-by-using-that-one-word. But you're not falling for it.

You stay silent, mostly confused.

"We need a videographer?" Harry says, looking at you like any other option would be idiotic. And it would. "We'd pay you."

You breathe a sigh of relief.

"I don't have my own equipment, sorry. But have a good show," you say and turn around, heading toward the door, your car, somewhere that isn't sweatpants in front of Harry Styles.

"You could come anyway!" He tells down the hall, right as you open the door. You play it off like you didn't hear it, knowing it's making his heart race that he didn't have you running back to him with your panties already halfway down your legs.

But you absolutely know what you're doing tonight.

[legisaskerator]

vent vent vent

buckle up bastards this is gonna be long as FUCK

holy fucking shit my life yhas been so goddamn hard recently and i’m not handling it well

first and foremost on my mind at this second is the fact that i am in so much fucking pain right now i do not know what to do. my EDS is acting up really really badly and i’m super bedridden right now. i took my last vicodin and i have no idea when i can get more, or how, and i have like nothing to help. i had to leave class today to weep in the fuckin bathroom because i can barely walk and even sitting up is a struggle. if i felt this sort of pain three years ago i would have likely considered doing something VERY rash to stop it and i’m amazed i’m still, almost functioning. i can barely think i’m in agony i want it to end

i’m so scared this is just the next turn that eds is taking. i know i wont ever get better but fuck, i dont want to need a mobility aid yet. i’m only fucking 22 i have to be a teacher!!! how can i fucking teach if i cant write on a board?? or maneuver around classrooms? how will i ever get a job? or even just. live in the house of my dreams. i wish there was some help for me because i am tired of ehlers danlos running my life. i am scared for my future. i cant imagine who i will become if this level of pain becomes my “normal”. someone move me to mass so i can get legal weed to try to numb myself

on the same path of injury, my mother recently injured herself very badly and was hospitalized for a little w hile. ended up needing surgery to put rods and screws and plates in her leg/ankle, and as a result, she’s not functioning for the next 12 weeks. i’m doing my best to help out aroudn the house and i’m filling in for her at work. she does advertising for a newspaper and brings the papers to subscribing businesses,, which i’m taking over now. at least i like driving?

i love my mom and i will do anythign to help her, but god it’s such a load on my shoulders. i’m  upset and frustrated because i’m strugtgling to balance my life around this sudden responsibility. it’s definitely not her i’m upset about, it’s not like she did this purposefully??? she needs the help and i am willing to give it. but i am also allowed to feel these emotions. i am upset at the /situation/. her boyf and my sister are barely helping and they’re neglectful and distant. i’m the only emotionally present one in the family and also (aside from mom) am the only nurturing, caring one in the household. i keep her from having panic attacks, i keep her anxiety down, i’m warm and i try so goddamn hard to make sure shes ok. but it’s exhausting. i’m keeping my family together it feels like, everythings crashing down and i’m the only “sane” one. which is sad because ive been a depressed wreck for weeks and have been working on scraping myself off the fucking pavement, trying to get out of the spiral. i’m scared that my mom relies so much on me. she tells me everything, things i don’t want to hear. relationship troubles primarily. i know i give great advice and am ~wise beyond my years~ (thanks trauma) but, that’s what her therapist is for. i’ve told her i wish she would, tell me less, because as her daughter it’s uncomfortable, and she always overreacts like “oh i’ll never tel you anything again if it’s so terrible then” and i end up feeling fucking awful, and it’s a nightmare. but if things keep going the way they are in their relationship (i’m not gonna spill deets because, privacy still) we might lose our house!!! and everything we’ve finally worked for!!

so i feel like, if i can’t fix this problem, it’ll be my fault our lives come crashing down.

i know that’s ridiculous. it’s not my job. 

but it still feels like it

i never feel like i’m doing enough. just in life in general. i’m not good enough i’m not working hard enough i just am not enough. i was very saturated with child prodigy shit when i was younger and that fucked up my psyche so much. it’s still thrown at me by my father, americas got talent and movies where the protag is a ~genius~. i hate it. ill never be that and i know that’s what my dad wants of me. i’m not the next bill gates i just want to be a teacher and live my life!!!! i don’t want to start a band and get famous!!!! i dont want to run a business!! i don’t want to revolutionize the world!! just let me please! follow my heart!!!!!! i can’t fucking stand it when he tries to tell me what to do with my life it makes me want to scream and wail and sjafkl; fd fjasfg;akldf

i can’t do this, man. 

i’m so alone. i’m sick of the slut life. i’ve been hoeing around for a year and it’s taking a massive toll on my self esteem and sanity. i’s a terrible coping mechanism and i’m very very not healthy about it. i only have sex when i’m heavily under the influence of something and use it as a way of getting attention, which is, awful. i often forgo protection because it’s ~inconvenient~ and the second a guy protests, i’ll cave because i ~live to please~ and don’t want to start shit. i can’t keep doing this. hooking up is the only time people ever touch me. i just want a fuckign hug sometimes

i keep seeing so many posts like “you can’t love another if you don’t love yoursel!” and “people aren’t your medicine” but what if??? they can be to an extent?? part of being uber depressed is self-isolation and i’m so, sick of it. i need some fucking comfort because right now i am suffering through my life alone and it’s so difficult. it’s not as easy as just, settling though. i’m picky with my lovers because?? i deserve someone good? everyone that’s been coming through my life like, has a fatal flaw that i just can’t do. like long term compatability is risked for me with that shit.like, too introverted, too emotionally distant, people who just aren’t smart, i can’t do it?? i just want someone who’s going to comfort me when i need it, who i can have a healthy debate with, and someone who respects my life choices and things i do. 

i’ve been talking to one guy recently who, i was hoping maybe could have been a potential. he’s super nice and considerate/respectful, hes HELLA smart, adores a bunch of the same stuff i’m into, we talk really well together, i feel comfortabgle around him, gotta say he’s hot as fuck too...and he just wants friends with benefits. I respect that. i was in a similar spot literally last semester, there was a pretty great guy but i just wasn’t in the right space for a relationship. so friends with benefits. i don’t blame this new guy for not wanting a relationship he has every right!! but oh god it hurts a little. i worry that it’s me, that i’m just a good pussy for him, or a convenient lay who’s down to clown like 99% of the time. he’s been talking to me less recently and i’m worried that he’s...done with me. idk if that’s true or if i’m just reading into it but i’m in a VERY vulnerable place right now in my life, and i really need someone by my side for it. i need the support and warmth. 

i wish my warmth would comfort me. i wish i could turn my nurturing attitude around and help myself. i wish i didn’t need smoene else for comfort. i’m a fuckin libra tho i live for romance

this guys’ great though. i hope he sticks around at least for a little bit longer. i want to learn more bout lovecraft.

my sluttiness is my biggest qualm with myself right now. it’s definitely a huge problem in my life, it’s actively causing me problems. my one friend (because, i have only one fucking friend i can actually talk to. that’s it i hAVE ONE i’m so goddamn l,onely) has been like, coaching me through making better decisions? i’m very impulsive and he’s got great advice and is quick to be like “then don’t” and shit. i’m trying really hard to make sure i dont use him as a therapist though, that’s unfair to him. i’m respectful and all that shit don’t worry bout htat. he’s a huge help to me and has been my absolute rock through college, idk where i’d be without him. he also introduced me to his friend group, who are all really amazing people? they welcomed me with open arms and no ones ever done that before. i’m always super outcasted cause i’m weird and i wont hide it because it’s ME goddamnit! but these people, they’re weird too, they’re freaks and outcasts and, while they’ve all been very close friends since they were wee tots, they still welcomed me in. they still wanted me to be part of them. i’m getting to know all of them still, but i’ve got hope that, maybe i’ve got some lifelong friends now. at the very least, i’m sure i’ve got one. 

onto phase 4 of my fuckin monologue i guess, topic SHIFT

my thesis is a mess and it’s due in three weeks, i’ve barely gotten anything done because my teacher is awful and i’m worried i’m gonna fail the course

which would be SUPER bad because, i’ve had this teacher too many times and we do not get along, she loathes my existence, and i really just need to get out. shes partly the reason i need an extra fucking year at school and i always DREAD going to her class. it’s humiliating and discouraging to spend three hours every monday there. no one else likes this professor, they’re only here becuase the school loooooves the researchers and writers. complaints dont matter. all of my other classes are fine but this one has been probably the worst, most emotionally devastating class i’ve ever taken

i don’t even get to write about a topic i want. i was forced to write about the play i was in, instead of Monty Python like i wanted (it’s a fucking comedy class!!!!!) the play is about SCHOOL SHOOTINGS (we won some national awards teehee it’s an outstanding play). yes it’s a “black comedy” but not really? it’s a drama with comedic moments? and i KNOW THIS cause i’ve been studying comedy with this professor for like three cumulative years at this point. i’m struggling beacuse there’s zero research, zero information, and has to be over 20 pages long??? like fuck? i’m so fucked

anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk. i’ve been wanting to make a vent post for like weeks but i haven’t had the time or energy and , i really needed to just....get this out. i feel a little better having all the words down. there’s still so much else going wrong in my life that i could talk about, all the car troubles, my other classes, dorm shit, but, it doesn’t matter in the light of these issues. i can get through this. i just gotta keep fighting. 

oh and if anyones like, worried, i’m not suicidal, i’m not going to do that, there’s no chance of that hpapening. i’m in a very bad place but i’m never gonig back there if i can fucking help it

[hydrus]

Version 324

windows

zip

exe

os x

app

tar.gz

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a great week. The downloader overhaul is almost done.

pixiv

Just as Pixiv recently moved their art pages to a new phone-friendly, dynamically drawn format, they are now moving their regular artist gallery results to the same system. If your username isn't switched over yet, it likely will be in the coming week.

The change breaks our old html parser, so I have written a new downloader and json api parser. The way their internal api works is unusual and over-complicated, so I had to write a couple of small new tools to get it to work. However, it does seem to work again.

All of your subscriptions and downloaders will try to switch over to the new downloader automatically, but some might not handle it quite right, in which case you will have to go into edit subscriptions and update their gallery manually. You'll get a popup on updating to remind you of this, and if any don't line up right automatically, the subs will notify you when they next run. The api gives all content--illustrations, manga, ugoira, everything--so there unfortunately isn't a simple way to refine to just one content type as we previously could. But it does neatly deliver everything in just one request, so artist searching is now incredibly faster.

Let me know if pixiv gives any more trouble. Now we can parse their json, we might be able to reintroduce the arbitrary tag search, which broke some time ago due to the same move to javascript galleries.

twitter

In a similar theme, given our fully developed parser and pipeline, I have now wangled a twitter username search! It should be added to your downloader list on update. It is a bit hacky and may be ultimately fragile if they change something their end, but it otherwise works great. It discounts retweets and fetches 19/20 tweets per gallery 'page' fetch. You should be able to set up subscriptions and everything, although I generally recommend you go at it slowly until we know this new parser works well. BTW: I think twitter only 'browses' 3200 tweets in the past, anyway. Note that tweets with no images will be 'ignored', so any typical twitter search will end up with a lot of 'Ig' results--this is normal. Also, if the account ever retweets more than 20 times in a row, the search will stop there, due to how the clientside pipeline works (it'll think that page is empty).

Again, let me know how this works for you. This is some fun new stuff for hydrus, and I am interested to see where it does well and badly.

misc

In order to be less annoying, the 'do you want to run idle jobs?' on shutdown dialog will now only ask at most once per day! You can edit the time unit under options->maintenance and processing.

Under options->connection, you can now change max total network jobs globally and per domain. The defaults are 15 and 3. I don't recommend you increase them unless you know what you are doing, but if you want a slower/more cautious client, please do set them lower.

The new advanced downloader ui has a bunch of quality of life improvements, mostly related to the handling of example parseable data.

full list

downloaders:

after adding some small new parser tools, wrote a new pixiv downloader that should work with their new dynamic gallery's api. it fetches all an artist's work in one page. some existing pixiv download components will be renamed and detached from your existing subs and downloaders. your existing subs may switch over to the correct pixiv downloader automatically, or you may need to manually set them (you'll get a popup to remind you).

wrote a twitter username lookup downloader. it should skip retweets. it is a bit hacky, so it may collapse if they change something small with their internal javascript api. it fetches 19-20 tweets per 'page', so if the account has 20 rts in a row, it'll likely stop searching there. also, afaik, twitter browsing only works back 3200 tweets or so. I recommend proceeding slowly.

added a simple gelbooru 0.1.11 file page parser to the defaults. it won't link to anything by default, but it is there if you want to put together some booru.org stuff

you can now set your default/favourite download source under options->downloading

.

misc:

the 'do idle work on shutdown' system will now only ask/run once per x time units (including if you say no to the ask dialog). x is one day by default, but can be set in 'maintenance and processing'

added 'max jobs' and 'max jobs per domain' to options->connection. defaults remain 15 and 3

the colour selection buttons across the program now have a right-click menu to import/export #FF0000 hex codes from/to the clipboard

tag namespace colours and namespace rendering options are moved from 'colours' and 'tags' options pages to 'tag summaries', which is renamed to 'tag presentation'

the Lain import dropper now supports pngs with single gugs, url classes, or parsers--not just fully packaged downloaders

fixed an issue where trying to remove a selection of files from the duplicate system (through the advanced duplicates menu) would only apply to the first pair of files

improved some error reporting related to too-long filenames on import

improved error handling for the folder-scanning stage in import folders--now, when it runs into an error, it will preserve its details better, notify the user better, and safely auto-pause the import folder

png export auto-filenames will now be sanitized of \, /, :, *-type OS-path-invalid characters as appropriate as the dialog loads

the 'loading subs' popup message should appear more reliably (after 1s delay) if the first subs are big and loading slow

fixed the 'fullscreen switch' hover window button for the duplicate filter

deleted some old hydrus session management code and db table

some other things that I lost track of. I think it was mostly some little dialog fixes :/

.

advanced downloader stuff:

the test panel on pageparser edit panels now has a 'post pre-parsing conversion' notebook page that shows the given example data after the pre-parsing conversion has occurred, including error information if it failed. it has a summary size/guessed type description and copy and refresh buttons.

the 'raw data' copy/fetch/paste buttons and description are moved down to the raw data page

the pageparser now passes up this post-conversion example data to sub-objects, so they now start with the correctly converted example data

the subsidiarypageparser edit panel now also has a notebook page, also with brief description and copy/refresh buttons, that summarises the raw separated data

the subsidiary page parser now passes up the first post to its sub-objects, so they now start with a single post's example data

content parsers can now sort the strings their formulae get back. you can sort strict lexicographic or the new human-friendly sort that does numbers properly, and of course you can go ascending or descending--if you can get the ids of what you want but they are in the wrong order, you can now easily fix it!

some json dict parsing code now iterates through dict keys lexicographically ascending by default. unfortunately, due to how the python json parser I use works, there isn't a way to process dict items in the original order

the json parsing formula now uses a string match when searching for dictionary keys, so you can now match multiple keys here (as in the pixiv illusts|manga fix). existing dictionary key look-ups will be converted to 'fixed' string matches

the json parsing formula can now get the content type 'dictionary keys', which will fetch all the text keys in the dictionary/Object, if the api designer happens to have put useful data in there, wew

formulae now remove newlines from their parsed texts before they are sent to the StringMatch! so, if you are grabbing some multi-line html and want to test for 'Posted: ' somewhere in that mess, it is now easy.

next week

After slaughtering my downloader overhaul megajob of redundant and completed issues (bringing my total todo from 1568 down to 1471!), I only have 15 jobs left to go. It is mostly some quality of life stuff and refreshing some out of date help. I should be able to clear most of them out next week, and the last few can be folded into normal work.

So I am now planning the login manager. After talking with several users over the past few weeks, I think it will be fundamentally very simple, supporting any basic user/pass web form, and will relegate complicated situations to some kind of improved browser cookies.txt import workflow. I suspect it will take 3-4 weeks to hash out, and then I will be taking four weeks to update to python 3, and then I am a free agent again. So, absent any big problems, please expect the 'next big thing to work on poll' to go up around the end of October, and for me to get going on that next big thing at the end of November. I don't want to finalise what goes on the poll yet, but I'll open up a full discussion as the login manager finishes.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THEY MADE SEARCH WORK, THEN WORRIED ABOUT HOW TO DESIGN TYPE SYSTEMS MAY SHUDDER AT THIS

There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most successful of that group by an order of magnitude. Common Lisp. And in the early 1970s, before C, MIT's dialect of Lisp, called MacLisp, was one of those rare, historic shifts in the way of Perl's popularity. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food shop owner, accusing us all of stealing their smells.1 Most hackers who start startups wish they could do searches online. There are other messages too, of course. So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should live better. The biggest mistake you can make is not to worry about this.

Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team. At least one hacker will have to do is keep telling your story, and eventually people will start to get the gold out of it. I think is a red herring.2 And the core problem in a startup is too much for one person to bear. I think I have finally solved the problem people cared most about, which was dictated largely by the hardware available in the late twentieth century it seems to matter more than that. Visually, Paris has the best eavesdropping I know. Early Lisps let you get your hands on everything. Conditionals. Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be, because I wasn't looking for it. If you're designing a chair, that's what you're designing for, and there's no way around it. It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's nothing to distract you. If the founders know what they're doing.

While young founders are at a disadvantage. It won't stop patent trolls, for example, or find fields that are uninitialized. There's a lot of time doing it. So the solution may be to shrink and then figure out a way to answer this question, you have to write it anyway, so in the worst case, it will probably fail. Historically, Lisp has been good at letting hackers have their way with it. Burning through too much money is not as great as it's sometimes thought to be. When I was in college I used to write papers for my friends. The language offers abstractions only as a way of telling you what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics. How grim it must have powerful libraries for server-based applications. It's a lot more interested.

And yet a surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen.3 If you start a startup by just writing code. One complaint people have had with Lisp is that it's not true.4 Scheme has no libraries, and Lisp syntax is scary. You got me.5 The good news is, plenty of successful startups, you find they'd often make good startups. If i is the average outcome of the whole company was before.6

So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston.7 New York.8 The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it, and show why most but not all should be ignored. Statues to be cast in bronze were modelled in wax. Oxford and Cambridge England feel like Ithaca or Hanover: the message is there, but not the best.9 Python is a more elegant alternative to Perl, but what we mean by it is changing. What do you do about it? Make something people want.

In a way, it's harder to see problems than their solutions. Programs composed of expressions. Perl: Shell scripts/awk/sed are not enough like programming languages. For some kinds of work better sources of habits of mind you invoke on some field don't have to remember anything, and you're going to have competitors, so you have to work at something that pays the bills. I think a lot of people think they're too young. And in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. Historically, Lisp has been good at letting hackers have their way. In fact, I'd guess the most successful founder we've funded so far, Sam Altman, was 19 at the time and not too resistant to learning new things. Professors in New York the number of people with the necessary skills.

I think the worst danger of committees is that they probably will, one day. But of course it's not a problem if you don't need as many hackers, and b look at the world of programming languages: library functions. So there you have it: languages are not equivalent, and I understand the messages of New York to California residents in the Forbes 400 has decreased from 1. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. Is there some way to beat this limitation? The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. They think of the profiler as an add-on, at best. There need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder. That sounds like a recipe for chaos, think about a soccer team. Whereas if I encourage people to start startups. What I mean is that Lisp was neater than Turing machines was to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Good ideas and valuable ideas are not million dollar ideas, and the de facto censorship imposed by publishers is a useful if imperfect filter.

But Lisp Machines along with parallel computers were steamrollered by the increasing power of women, the increasing influence of actors as models, and the best research is also good design, and my habit of always asking would x be useful in a programming language.10 If you're smart enough to start a company by just writing code. You can sense it when you walk around one. So our rule is just to do whatever's best for your users. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not so pretty. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. Most startups fail because they don't like the uncertainty. Popularity is always self-perpetuating, but it's not going to say you should seek out ideas that would be an extraordinary bargain. An investor wants to buy half your company for anything, whether it's money or an employee or a deal with another company, the rather surprising conclusion is that the people who know this best are the very ones trying to get you to stick to the old model. Instead you should draw a few quick lines in roughly the right place, and then you realize the window has closed. A popular programming language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a command-line interface, is more available than one that you have to select 20 players. Whereas if I encourage people to start startups who shouldn't, I make my own life worse.

Notes

Related: Reprinted in Gray, Donald J.

There are aspects of the main reason kids lie to adults. The best kind of secret about the difference.

This is an interesting trap founders fall into two categories: those where the second clause could include any possible startup, and b the valuation at the end of World War II had disappeared. And when they buy some startups and not least, as it were a first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are or feel weak. Google Google is not the only reason you're even considering the other. 001 negative effect on college admissions process.

Russell also wrote the editor written in Lisp, you don't get any money till all the free OSes first-rate programmers.

It's a case of heirs, professors, politicians, and their wives. Then you'll either get the money was to reboot them, and jobs encourage cooperation, not where to see it in the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as brand split apart from art as stuff.

I have to mean the hypothetical people who are younger or more ambitious the utility function is flatter. This is the odds are slightly more interesting than later ones, and would probably also intelligence. And I've never heard of many startups from Philadelphia. By your mid-sentence, but to do it to profitability, you don't want to start some vaguely benevolent business.

Since they don't make wealth a zero-sum game.

I'm not against editing.

But you can charge for. Apparently someone believed you have for one user.

Managers are presumably wondering, how little autonomy one would have become direct marketers.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris essay, Patrick Collison, Mike Moritz, Geoff Ralston, and Robert Morris for the lulz.

[marketingatlightspeedreadin-blog]

Games You Might Not Have Tried #11 – Find New Games – Extra Credits

I sure hope you folks enjoy watching these as much as I like making ’em, because… I don’t know, these are fun! These episodes always take us a couple of months to put together, so by the time each one comes out, James has already got a new batch of games to recommend. Anyway! You know the drill. We don’t promise that all these games are good, just that they’re different.

Their design is interesting in some way, even if the most interesting thing about them is how they failed to achieve what they’re setting out to do. Anyway, enough talk. Have at you! Zero Time Dilemma. Years ago, we recommended 999 in one of these episodes. It’s been quite the journey since then, but now the franchise (or at least this chapter of it) is coming to a close, and the story is perhaps one of the best yet in the series. The graphics… not so much, but don’t let that deter you. This game may handily demonstrate just how much better 2D graphics can look, and that switching to 3D isn’t always the best choice, but, if you’ve followed the series so far, you owe it to yourself to finish this one out. And if you haven’t checked these games out yet, well, maybe get on that. Inside. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention this one.

Brought to you by the creators of Limbo, this is a dark and mysterious run through a puzzle-filled testing facility. James didn’t find it quite as compelling as Limbo, but it’s still a solid title, and the atmosphere alone is worth your time if you want to learn how to build that sort of oppressive feeling into your own games. Reverse Crawl. James just tore through this one. It’s one of those, “just one more battle” type games that’ll have you so sucked in that you won’t realize the sun is rising and, oops, you didn’t sleep. The really interesting thing about this game is that it takes the “Heroes of Might and Magic” or “Kings Bounty” formula, and does away with the exploration.

Now, that might sound terrible – James felt that way too, at first. I mean, exploration kind of seems like the lifeblood of those games. But by doing away with the exploration, Reverse Crawl is able to make the combat much tighter, with specifically designed encounters and a progression system that really makes the player consider what they want to be able to play with. Add to that the fact that the player can’t just barge into battle with a ridiculously broken combination of units, but instead has to pick from a wide variety of pre-made unit groupings for each encounter, and you get a tightly designed experience.

You can even beat it in one night if you don’t sleep. I don’t recommend it, but, I’m just saying, you could. ([evil laugh]) (And this, my distinguished gentlebots,) (is the new SteamWorld!) SteamWorld Heist. Since we’re talking strategy games, let’s talk about this pleasantly surprising little gem. This is a game that takes all the conventions of our isometric or top-down tactics games, and puts them on a 2D plane. And it works! It works because the designers considered how 2D might change the formula, what they might be able to do with the design in 2D that’d be harder in one of those other formats. And the conclusion they came to was to make you aim manually.

Yep, this is a tactics game like any other, but sort of like Valkyria Chronicles, when it comes time to shoot, you’ve gotta eyeball it. With no reticle to guide you, this makes variables like cover become a much more interesting and interactive element of the game than we saw even in games like XCOM. So, if you’re looking for a quirky tactics game, or even just like thinking about how we can push the formula, you might want to check out SteamWorld Heist. (And of course it all went according to plan…) Now, a whole lot of you asked if we could talk about some tablet and mobile games on one of these lists, so let me just throw a slew of those at you before we get back to the weird PC games. Let’s start with Galactic Keep. Galactic Keep is exactly what I always wanted a storybook adventure to be when I was young. It takes some of the work done in Steve Jackson’s excellent Sorcery series to the next level and really makes you feel like you’re playing a solo tabletop role-playing module.

Seriously. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more like I was at the Barrier Peaks without a GM screen on the table. Out There. This game has no combat, and yet, it is brutal. It’s a roguelike survival adventure where you are the last surviving member of humanity trying to make it home. Its vignettes are excellently written, but unlike most story driven games, you will not easily reach the end of this story. I think it’s the very fact that Out There presents a harsh universe where you will die time and again before ever being able to see one of its many endings that kept drawing James back. If you like sci-fi, if you like roguelikes, if you like narrative and are interested in a brutal challenge that never once involves firing a blaster, you better check this out.

Icebound Concordance. Speaking of writing, here is a game that is all about writing. Or rather, it’s all about rewriting. The game itself is a conversation with an AI built from the mind of a writer, and you are there to help it edit and rewrite its last book. That’s pretty interesting in its own right, but then you get to the real bit: the Icebound Compendium. If you’re willing to pony up $25 to pick up the companion book, you are in for something…

Novel. I can’t say much about the Compendium without spoiling things, but, suffice it to say that periodically throughout the game you will be prompted to search through the book for pages related to some of what’s going on on-screen. Then, the game will use your iPad camera to scan the pages and to make the book itself come to life. My only complaint here is that the book itself is poorly made. The cover fell off the binding of James’ copy before it even got through the mail. Of course, that’s a sample size of one James, so hopefully yours will be sturdier. (♪ This is the Guild of Dungeoneering,) (♪ On our quest, we’re never fearing…) The Guild of Dungeoneering.

This game is here simply as an example of what a difference platform can make. James found this to be a mediocre strategy title when he first played it on PC, but on a tablet, its lighter shorter sessions and more casual strategy experience really works. If you want a relaxing strategy game to play on the go, it’s worth trying. Really though, this game is worth buying for the songs alone. (♪ The Guild of Dungeoneering!) (♪ Curse and swear, but don’t despair,) (♪ The way out appears to be over there,) (♪ I think we’re lost, but what do we care?) (♪ The Guild of Dungeoneering!) Templar Battleforce.

I haven’t tried this game on PC, but the mobile version was exactly what James was looking for in a slightly more hardcore tactics game. If you want to play Space Hulk, but the actual modern Space Hulk video game didn’t cut it for you, get Templar Battleforce. It’s everything Space Hulk should be. It’s got an interesting class system, a varied advancement tree, multiple ways to customize units of the same class, and yet the levels are short enough to play on the go. Alright, that’s enough mobile games. Let’s return to the PC, and let’s get weird.

Cat Lady. We so rarely get to recommend adventure games, so I’m glad we get to talk about this piece of weirdness. There are a lot of counter-intuitive design decisions in this game: sometimes on purpose, sometimes as pitfalls of the old-school adventure game ethos, but if you’re looking for something surreal, creepy, and dark, Cat Lady has you covered. The art style perfectly fits the madness, feeling at times like Monty Python channeling Poe.

And the decision to do away with the mouse entirely in an old-school adventure game and streamline things by going with a keyboard interface alone? That’ll put you on a “Games You Might Not Have Tried” list. Fran Bow. We can’t talk about horror games without talking Fran Bow. If you want disturbing and strange, this game has it in spades, but it’s the ambiguity of this game that I love. I’ll try not to spoil anything, but let’s just say, the game leaves itself open for interpretation, and I think that’s great. Too often, horror stories try to explain all their nightmarish surreality, and in doing so, kill the horror. That’s not to say that horror stories shouldn’t make sense, but leaving your nightmare world as an ambiguous metaphor is often so much better than feeling like you have to tie up all the loose ends by saying something like, “See? It was a dream all along!” Fran Bow is an excellent example of this.

Killing Time at Lightspeed. I love the premise of this game. You’ve left Earth. You’re traveling away at light speed, but you can still see your Facebook feed. But here’s the catch: at relativistic speed, every time you hit refresh, a year has passed. You can touch base for one snapshot of everyone’s lives back home then it whirls past and time moves on – for them, if not for you. My only complaint is that most of the time, most of my friends back home simply talked about the news, and for me at least, that’s not how social networks work. That’s a big part of it to be sure, but it’s in the background of all the tiny day-to-day things that people post. I would have loved to have more emphasis on the personal, on the relationships of people and their daily lives, as that backdrop would have given the big events of the world that much more impact, seeing how they affected the people I loved even as I whipped away from them at the speed of light.

Anyway, neat game. Try it out. And finally, Quadrilateral Cowboy. What happens when you mix stealth capers with command line hacking and a PS1 visual aesthetic? Well, you get Quadrilateral Cowboy. Your mileage may vary with the art style, but there is something so cyberpunk about actually hooking up a computer to a jack and having to turn off a security laser with a series of semicolon delineated commands. Am I alone, though, in this making me long for a multiplayer game where one player plays the stealth action hero, and the other one plays their off-site hacker buddy? Like, unlocking the doors and shutting off security cameras in the nick of time with a command-line interface? That would be rad. Somebody, get on that. Anyway, I think that’ll do it for today. Thank you for watching; recommend some of your own weird favorites in the comments below, and we will see you next week..

For More Info : Visit Here : Light Speed Reading

[impurelight]

Two Weeks With Flutter

For the two last weeks I've been playing around with Flutter which is a framework for building Android and iOS apps (it also has Web/Windows/Mac/Linux/ChromeOS support in development). And I really like it. I mean, I didn't always like it. When I first picked it up I thought it was needlessly complicated and frustrating. But as I started to learn what the things actually did I started to think it wasn't so bad. It might even be fun. But I guess that's the way with most programming frameworks.

So Flutter makes Android and iOS apps. How'd you expect it to do this? Probably something like HTML, right? Nope. Flutter uses Dart. The way it knows what to build is you have to override the the build() method and make it return your entire UI. The entire UI in one method. Yeah... that's going to get messy fast. Just take a look at one of my build() methods.

Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Scaffold( body: SafeArea( child: Stack( children: <widget>[ FutureBuilder<list>>( future: DatabaseManager.getAllTasksAsTasks(), builder: (BuildContext context, AsyncSnapshot<list>> tasks) { if (tasks.hasData) { return ReorderableListView( children: createWidgets(tasks.data), onReorder: (int start, int current) {}, ); } else { return Center(child: CircularProgressIndicator()); } }, ), Container(color: Color.fromRGBO(0, 0, 0, 0.4)), Hero( tag: "TaskCreate", child: new AlertDialog( title: const Text('Create Task'), content: new TextField( controller: textController, autofocus: true, ), actions: <widget>[ new FlatButton( onPressed: () { Navigator.of(context).pop(); }, textColor: Theme.of(context).primaryColor, child: const Text('Create'), ), ], )), ]// This trailing comma makes auto-formatting nicer for build methods. ) ) ); }

Yeah, I tried to move some things to their own methods (or classes which is more performant but you really only have to worry about that once you call setState()) but there's only so much you can do and so much you have time to do. If some normal person saw this they would probably say it's ugly. And to be honest when I first saw something like this I thought it was ugly too. It's even more messy if you try adding something to it. Paste your text, watch the entire thing go red, then try to add the end bracket in just the right spot (although a better way appears to be cut the old code, create the old container, and paste the old code). But as I got to know how it worked there was something actually pretty elegant about this.

It's sort of like designing something with Legos. You have your root UI, your scaffold, and that can have a child which is a list view and a floating action button. Only instead of Legos they're widgets. There's widgets for almost everything: list views, cards, centered content, images, text, etc. And if you can't find a widget that serves your purposes you can find one on pub.dev or code your own.

So apart from Widgets there's scenes... no views... I mean routes. OK, different frameworks call them different things. Basically just a page of your app. In Flutter they're called routes. In Unity they're called scenes. And the way Flutter handles routes is pretty interesting. It's like a stack of routes. When you go to a new route you call .push() and when you want to go back or if someone hits the back button .pop() is called.

It's pretty simple. But the code to create one of these routes is not. Like look at this:

class TaskRoute extends StatefulWidget { TaskState createState() => TaskState(); } class TaskState extends State<taskroute> { ... }

Every single time we want to create a new route/widget class. Why do we need all this boilerplate? Why do we need Stateful/State/Stateless (not pictured). I think it's for optimization or something but it's still annoying.

So now I should probably talk about the language Dart. Oh, Dart. It's not a bad language. Not as bad as Javascript anyways. The best way to describe Dart is to say it's a modern COOL (C-like Object Oriented Language) similar to other COOL's like C# and Java. Emphasis on modern. So as languages mature there's a tendency of adding random syntactic 'sugar' that no one really needs or asked for that only serve to alienate newcomers to the language. Like take C++. C with classes, right? Nope. Now it's this giant behemoth of a language that takes ages to compile. And I've noticed the same thing with C#. In fact most of the newer syntactic sugar additions to C# are in Dart. Almost as if the Dart team is copying from C#. Hmm...

And this is a particular sore spot for Dart which has a million ways to do everything.

So take typing. There is static typing which means the compiler knows the types of everything at compile time and can alert you of any problems. Then there's hipster typing which means you're going to get a nasty surprise when you run that line of code you haven't tested yet. So which one do you expect Dart to choose? Trick question, Dart uses both. And different tutorials use one or the other. It can make it seem like a tutorial is written in a different language.

And it's not even like some dedicated keyword. This is the difference between static typing and hipster typing in Dart:

// Statically typed; will not compile var myVar = "Hi"; myVar = 5; // Hipster typed; will compile var myVar; myVar = "Hi"; myVar = 5;

Also: allocating new object. You can define new objects (oh, and by the way everything is a reference type in Dart) using the new keyword. But you don't have to use the keyword. It's completely optional. Which, why even have the keyword? Also it's possible to define a method that returns something without actually returning. I mean, you get a warning if you do that but it'll compile just fine. There's also a bunch of weird syntax like Dog({this.id, this.name, this.age}). This is basically the same as saying:

Dog(int id, String name, int age) { this.id = id; this.name = name; this.age = age; }

And there's a large amount of using functional map-like syntax instead of for loops. You know, the standard syntactic sugar stuff.

So syntactic sugar isn't in and of itself bad. The problem is when you have so much syntactic sugar it gives you syntactic diabetes meaning the language gets so inconsistent that it is difficult for new comers to learn. This is definitely a problem for Dart: one tutorial might use the new keyword and explicitly type all their variables. Then the next tutorial might not do any of that and it gets very confusing very fast.

But it's not all bad. There are a few neat things you can do in Dart. For one there's no public or private. To make something private by starting it with an _. It sort of reminds me of Python where you make a function by just indenting. I think it's pretty neat. Also you can have named constructors. It's pretty cool as you can name a constructor something like FromDatabase(Map<string dynamic>) if you just read from a database.

There's also two type of exceptions: error and exception. Error is bad, you should not be getting errors. Exceptions are, well, exceptions. So just catch them normally. I don't really know the difference between these two though. There are assert which is only called in debug builds. Oh, yeah, Flutter compiles to a debug build by default but there are also release and profiling builds.

Also when defining a list, which you'll do a lot in Flutter, every element can end in a comma, even the last one. This is something I've been thinking about whenever I code outside of an IDE. Adding a comma when there shouldn't be one results in a lot of compiler bugs (or in the case of hipster languages runtime bugs). So I think putting a comma after every item, even the last item is the way to go.

Lastly there is Future and async. A function signature that implements these is something like:

Future<list>> getTasks() async

and then you call it like:

tasks = await getTasks();

This is a major thing in Flutter. The main way I use it is when I push another route. I say something like await push() and that stops executing until the route being pushed calls pop(). And then I can do whatever management I need to make sure the data is saved.

Another way this comes into play is I can use an async method to load a database.

Although, to be honest, I sort of think this feature is a little superfluous. Especially in the database example. Reading from the database is so fast that stopping the whole app as the database returns its results is likely good enough. And the poping of pages could be done with a callback instead.

So how is it to actually develop for Flutter? Pretty good, actually. The first major feature of Flutter is the hot reload feature. Everytime you save your app it is instantly recompiled and sent to your phone (if it is already plugged in and the app is started) so the app updates faster than you can turn your head to look at it. It's pretty cool. It sure is a big shift from Unity's builds that can take minutes just to get an APK that you then have to install. Although it can fail sometimes. Usually when you rename something, but that rarely happens. I should probably mention here that I use my phone to test. You can also get a virtual device but that's like a 1GB download and I don't want to do that.

As for debugging instead of crashing flutter will give you a red screen of death.

Which, I mean, looks pretty ominous. Couldn't they have put a smily face on it or something like Windows?

There's also the call stacks when you get an error. They're not as compact as Unity and there's a lot of scrolling and they usually contain tons of information about Flutter's internal calls I don't care about before and after the relevant parts of the callstack. But I mean it's serviceable. Better than not having a callstack at all or a callstack that rarely points to the right thing like... some other languages.

Now there's Android Studio. It's basically a less good version of a JetBrains IDE. There's no telling you how many times something is called, there's no refactoring tools, it doesn't tell you to import packages to fix errors, it takes an extra click to get into the search all screen (Ctrl+N vs Ctrl+T), and it doesn't alert you if something isn't used. And it still takes more RAM than Chrome. Like, what are you doing? But at least it supports the Material theme I'm using on Rider. Like, it doesn't matter if the IDE sucks, as long as it looks good, right?

The only thing it really has over Rider (which I was using for Unity C#) is that it automatically inserts a comment telling you that this end brace corresponds to a particular widget. Which given the nested nature of build() method is quite useful. Not useful enough to get me to not jump ship to IntelliJ though.

So last but not least: the problems I have with Flutter. And there are a lot of them. The biggest one is the documentation. You know, for something made by Google that is almost 3 years old you'd think it would have better documentation. But no. You still see things like: "Enables the form to veto attempts by the user to dismiss the ModalRoute that contains the form." In all fairness this is the exception rather than the rule. Most of the commonly used widgets do have good documentation. But when you click to what a class is you still get this nonsense.

And there are a few bugs still. I encountered one where if you use Navigator.pop() it does not trigger the onPop callback. You need to use Navigator.maybePop() instead.

So all in all Flutter is a fine framework and pretty fun to program for. The foundation is pretty solid, it's just some of the documentation that is not quite up to snuff and some things can be hard to do due to not having the proper widget. Two problems that I'm sure will be solved soon. And once they are I think Flutter has a pretty good shot at being the most popular framework in the world due to its ability to run on Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS with an identical experience on all platforms.

[overlycaffeinatedwarmage]

RtS 46-49

Back to Wales, and the chapter where Pritkin and Cassie actually talk.

Chapter 46

We are finally back to Wales with Rosier, Hilde, Abigail, Cassie, Billy Joe and Roger's ghosts.  Poor Abigail! She is really not liking being back in action. Hilde is into it though!  I like Hilde, she’s got moxie.  Oohh the fail-safes get the Pythian slide show this time too, did not catch that before. Gertie and Hilde are sisters, I was not surprised. They totally act like it too when we see them. I love these little details. It really makes the universe more real.

 Cassie sends Rosier off to court to find Pritkin. We won’t see him again until near the very end of the book.  Billy is shifting now, that's a funny idea. Cassie is trying to stay ahead of the Pythias and acolytes Billy shifts them to edges of non-time, sorta half way between both places.  This was really confusing first times I read it. This time is better.

  Athenais! Lydia! Gwenore! More Pythia names, in case of future Trivia.  I should keep a list.

 Cassie and Billy hop into and out of non-time to stay ahead of Pythias. At one point they are beneath the waves to avoid them. Billy boops a shark on the nose, just because he can

Oh, Billy set ships on fire at the port, as distraction. I definitely missed that before. The distraction works and Cassie heads to Camelot.

 This chapter was a ton of action that I kind of breezed past initially to get to the “good stuff.” I tend to that a lot on my first read throughs of long awaited books.  It’s why I do re-reads.  I never understood people who only read a book or watch a movie once.  There is always so much more to learn from the story on a second or third pass through of it.  Hell, with KC’s books because I listen to the audios while I sew, I often experience them many times over.  Learning new things each time. (I’ve probably gone through HtM 10 times, easily, not exaggerating). To me books, movies, and shows are meant to be enjoyed many times and looked at from many different angles.  That’s what makes their sometimes initial “high” fees worth it (talking hard cover prices, not paperback).  

 Chapter 47

Camelot! (I want to sing Monty Python here but that would be wrong yes it would). Or Caerleon as it is more properly called. The place is a mix of Celtics and Roman style and Cassie is in awe of it, to the point of tears.  I would be too.  Unfortunately, I’ve never made it outside the Americas and have never seen any historical buildings older than 200-300 years old.  Some monuments at DC or possibly a few in Argentina are about the oldest that I’ve had a chance to visit.  Heading to Europe and seeing what’s left of some of these places of legend is a dream of mine (Stonehenge!!!!). So, I totally understand Cassie’s reaction here. I was never into history classes in school because the teachers made them all about wars and dates (zzzzzzzz) but I’ve always found history fascinating, so I get it.  Also, high school needs better history teachers.

 Anyway, I’m really off on tangents today, sorry. We get a brief history of the region from Cassie. Despite being in shambles, Augustine still whipped up an outfit for Cassie. That that man a medal!

 KC really has a thing for curly haired people. Half her characters have curly hair I swear. “Closer in, a swarthy type with a hooknose and a wand was painting stories in the air with fire: battling knights and fierce dragons and a princess in a tower.” Hi baby! Pritkin! The eel boy gives Cassie sass, yep KC likes her sass. Nimue and Morgaine exit a boat made of water

 Arthur's symbol is a bright red dragon, hello clue by 4. How did I miss you before?

 Chapter 48

Caedmon grabs Cassie and he's pissed! Their meeting in present day should be interesting to say the least. I look forward to it! Saved by the fireman, she actually calls him the right name for a change! First time I think. “Hair like a cow’s breakfast” Poor Pritkin and his hair. I would kill to have hair that stood up like that.  But then again, I’m weird.

 And they are on the run from the Blarestri. Pritkin tries the illusion trick but it doesn't work this time. Green fey help them, mostly to piss off the Blue as far as I can tell. And to give Nimue a chance to deal with Pritkin herself. Then the Green Fey get in the way of the Blue, Blue king won't kill them and piss green off. Fey are weird. I totally missed this before.

 And then we see Pritkin control air. That's 3 elements now, water, fire, and air. All that's missing is earth.

 It's the tent!!! Laundry tent but eventually sex tent :D  The laundry couple protect Cassie and Pritkin. I guess they see them as the agents for change? Not 100% sure but I'm glad they helped

He's known around the castle, probably as a trouble maker. Part of me wishes we could have seen more of him as a youth but I am glad we get present day Pritkin back again next book.  I’ve missed him so much. The old one is so interesting though. Such a rich life.

 They evade fey. Cassie wants to go to Castle for staff, Pritkin demands to know why. Baby!Pritkin is just a stubborn as modern day one.  I can’t imagine how hard it would be to write a character that’s the same base characteristics but subtly different like KC has with done baby!Pritkin and regular!Pritkin.  The base qualities of his character are there in both incarnations: loyalty, honesty, bravery to the point of near suicide, stubborn, brilliant, cocky, hot headed, strategic (more or less), caring, strong.  But you can see how his time in hell and what happened after changed him.  Made him harder, gave him more control, made him plan more, made him less free with his emotions and more guarded in general. He’s less quick to trust people.  He doesn’t let anyone in.  It took him months to let Cassie in, even then it was only under duress or when he deemed she was owed an explanation that he did let her in, and she’s the person he’s closest to present day.  His younger self knows her for 3 days and tells her all his person stuff.  He’s the same yet different.  

 Chapter 49

Pritkin gets them into the castle dressed as actors. Cassie is dressed in a brief outfit and she’s isn’t too happy about it.  I mean at least you're dressed at all this time Cassie!

 I love this chapter.  I think it’s my favorite.  Even more than tent sex.  Because they both reveal so much to each other here and actually get to TALK. There’s been so little time to talk this book that this brief interlude is all the more precious.  Plus, he kinda shit talks Mircea a bit (one of my favorite pastimes).  AND Pritkin respects her no when she says no to sex.

 Aww he's flirting. He grabs her hips, invitingly, she says no, he accepts it but asks why. They talk, about why Pritkin wanted Cassie's name before sexy times before.  God, the parent issues and abandonment issues they both have just kill me. Especially his here, Cassie's parents died, purposefully, but they really had little choice. Pritkin's parents did have a choice and this is what they did to him. Selfish dicks. Yeah, I understand Rosier’s reasoning for leaving Pritkin on Earth instead of bringing him to Hell straight away, but still.  Surely there was a better way than this?  Look what it’s done to him?  No wonder Pritkin snubbed Hell and Faerie and choose Earth and humans in the end.  I would have too.

 Pritkin wants any child of his to at least know it's parents’ true names, poor guy. Then he turns it around on her and ask why she doesn't want to get busy when she very much did before. She tries to explain Mircea and her relationship but can't really. I love that he presses her about loving him and calls her out for hesitating! He tries to understand their relationship and fails. He points out to Cassie that relationships shouldn't be this much work. So complicated. She says they are serious and should be treated as such. They are both right to a degree, IMO. Relationships are work, not everything will be perfect all of the time.  They will require compromise and consideration for your partner.  But they also shouldn’t be THIS much work.  Or this one sided.  There should be some fun and enjoyment (outside the bedroom) to balance the work.  I don’t see that in Cassie’s relationship with Mircea.  She’s holding onto a dysfunctional relationship for nostalgia or for some other, wrong, reason.  I think she’s finally beginning to see that.

 Then Pritkin says this and I melted: “Not at all. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m tired, I sleep. When I see a pretty girl, looking at me with eyes as dark as the ocean, with hunger in them, so much hunger . . . I oblige.” No Cassie you don't want him or love him at all.

 She calls him young.

"Yes. So are you.”

Yeah, right. “I don’t feel like it much lately.”

“Then feel like it now.” He saw my expression, and laughed. “Not like that. Well, unless you change your mind. But there’s other ways to have fun, you know.”

The respect here! Mircea would have her naked and over a barrel by now, protests be damned.

 “If he gets you, I get this much,” and he teaches her to have fun, lol. What a change. Pritkin having fun. Smiling and laughing. This is my favorite chapter, better than the sexy ones. They needed this chat and reflection. This is why their ship wins.

[view-from-a-warm-place]

025 // Distractions III: External Random Item Drop Generator

So you may be wondering what happened to last week's post, and the answer is that I never wrote it because I was too busy trying to finish this side project I have been working on. And I finished it!

I think I might have offered to explain it a while ago, so I will do that now, since I have very little new art to offer at the moment (it is probably not why you are here but please bear with me).

This one is a bit long and is all about code..

For the last few weeks, I have been working on an external random item dropper for a couple of friends who want to start their own thing, and doing that required me to either construct an entire user interface arrangement in Pygame (which I have done twice already and have my own modules for but am not really super-de-duper into) or to learn at least enough Tkinter to make something I am not totally ashamed of (which is a lot of learning because I know-- which is to say, knew-- almost exactly nothing about Tkinter, not counting some stuff with Listboxes.

I opted for the latter and, in truth, it was pretty easy to learn. It was a bit frustrating at times because there are problems with Tkinter's 'widgets' (graphic interface objects) that can occur and lock up the software in a way that Tkinter considers normal and not an error and why would it tell you about it? For instance, if you try to use a "grid" arrangement in the same Frame (an object Tkinter uses to create layers of widget organization) as a "pack" arrangement, it will "Tkinter will happily spend the rest of your lifetime trying to negotiate a solution that both managers are happy with," or how replacing Variable objects with new ones that have the same name sometimes causes the whole affair to silently stop working and leave you clicking a button to no effect, wondering what is going on and why.

Problems which I overcame! Quickly and with some difficulty! Most of my time was spent on the interface, actually, since it was the part I knew the least about. The design was pretty easy (or it was easy in the extent that I produced an interface experience that I, personally, found satisfying, and which failed to produce a/any complaint(s) from the people for whom I made it) but the actual construction took a lot of learning when it came to displaying and updating the right variables in the right places and when. There are many values shared between user input boxes (Tk.Entry), where the user enters various bits of data, lists (Tk.Listbox), which have selectable entries and a lot of straight-forward appearance parameters, labels (Tk.Label), which display values either as static text or from various types of Variable, and, of course, the item data sheet that the user provides (read using ConfigParser from an simple external text document I can tell you how to make, and internally, as a chaotic dictionary of lists and Variables and strings and numbers). Incidentally, I ended up extending (adding my own functions and attributes to) a few of Tkinter's basic classes, and this part of the project was actually one of the most interesting. A great many parts of the original module have been deliberately constructed in a way that simplifies that kind of extension, and while I had to go outside of that on an occasion or two, it was absolutely a worthwhile lesson!

The Variables were the most perplexing part, because Tkinter is the least forthright about them and because they are more flexible than they let on. These variables can be equipped with callback functions that allow them to alter their contents, or the contents of other widgets, or do some other crazy third thing, whenever they are altered, or even just whenever something looks at their values. That part was easy and extremely useful once I got the hang of it! They can also be given specific names by which other functions and widgets may identify them, and while I found this quite useful as well, its lack of stability was somewhat less endearing since Tkinter will not tolerate two variables with the same name (a legitimate and preventable issue!) and will not necessarily tell you when this has happened or where (I am less okay with this).

Another interesting thing about Tkinter is that it offers multiple obvious ways of accomplishing the same thing, which is a bit of a problem for "The Zen of Python," a sort of mantra that a lot of people in the community take quite seriously. As an example, you may almost always alter the configuration of a widget in at least two ways: - Use Widget.config(some_attr = value) and change one or several attributes at once using arguments, or - Setting them using attribute names as keys, like so: Widget['some_attr'] = value. - There are other ways too but none spring to mind.

Also, widgets can be stored in attributes, but you can also call them up using their names: a widget created in the line

myObject.my_widj = Label(master=tk_root, text='Yo, babe(l), I am a Label!', name='lbl_annoyinglabel')

..can be accessed directly either by way of some object attribute reference:

myObject.my_widj.config(text = "Hey, id'jit, I'm a widget!")

..which is absolutely normal in Python, or by calling it by name from its master object:

tk_root.nametowidget('lbl_annoyinglabel')['text'] = 'Please stop talking.'.

Naturally, you would probably want to use the first method as often as possible, because it involves fewer operations and would probably be easier to maintain. But the second way, more elaborate though it may be, lets you save on assigning attributes by tracking widgets using Tcl's internal structure. (n.b.: I cannot say I have ever found myself running out of room for attributes in a namespace but I am also a complete amateur as a programmer so please bear with me. <3 )

Interestingly, actual structure of the input sheets was the next-most time-consuming part. Trying to find a data format that would be easily comprehensible by anyone who picked it up (probably only going to be two people, plus myself, if even that many) and which also met with ConfigParser's profoundly elusive approval was a somewhat complex task. It turned out to be exactly as hard as I thought it would be, at least, and there were no surprises here. You can see a blank template of the input sheet here!

The actual drop generator code-- the element which takes the user-supplied data and returns a random selection of items from it, according to their initial and supplemental parameters; the single element that the entire program is built to support-- only took an hour to complete, actually. I did it last and by then, all of the parameters and variables and their names and locations had become obvious, and since it was a pretty plain function to start with, it was done quickly. It was interesting to note how much more effort it was to pack this simple function up into a pretty interface than it took to build the core element itself. I suppose we see this everywhere: a car is just self-propelled chairs; a human is just a gangly, leaky chariot for a suite of genitalia; this software is just 'arbitrary decisions' packed in a pretty box. A very pretty box that I will no doubt look back on in two years and wonder what I was thinking, I hope!~ <3

Anyway I completed it and delivered it and it is my first free-standing piece of software that some other person might actually use for their purposes, and that is a sense of accomplishment I have not felt since the WSDOT departmental library people told me they wanted to include my undergraduate thesis in their stacks.

As an aside, I had considered making a companion tool to go with the drop generator that simplified drop sheet creation. It would not be over-hard to make: all it is liable to be is another Listbox with a text entry field attached, a button or two to add and remove entries, a few other configurables, and a ConfigParser set up to save it all out, but I feel as though the drop sheet format-- sensitive as it is to typographical problems and formatting issues-- is probably easy enough to use. Also there are two people using it and I am in touch with one of them almost every day. Still, food for future thought!

Anyway, back to my game, now! It has been a long time and I am ready to face it again with fresh eyes and fewer .. days.. to live.. I guess! Hm..

See you next time! :y

[evenstevensranked]

#49: Season 2, Episode 12 - “Easy Crier”

Holy crap you guys. Can you believe we’re already into the #40s?! This is going by faster than I anticipated.

This week, Lenny Cranepool (a.k.a “Lenny the Lifter”) is the new kid at school. He's a giant. Louis and Twitty befriend him and they become the most feared crew in school. Until they find out Lenny is a big softie who dreams of becoming a pastry chef. Meanwhile, Ren is trying to outlaw dodgeball due to its physical dangers.

The opening shot is Louis late for school, running in slo-mo down the hallway. His backpack is unzipped so every single paper in his bag goes flying literally everywhere. He gets stopped by Tugnut who yells at him for being late, and Louis says “Or! Is it possible everybody else on earth is early?” Real slick, Louis. Tugnut let’s him off the hook for his “sassy mouth” clap back, because it’s dodgeball season and he’s creepily overexcited for it and even throws in some maniacal laughter to drive it home. Do schools have dodgeball season, though? Like, is that a thing? Do they have big rainbow parachute in gym class season, too? That was the best. Anyway, this dodgeball mention is setting up the subplot.

Louis crawls into math class trying (and failing) to go unnoticed, when suddenly… there’s a giant foot in the aisle! Someone else is sitting in his seat. It’s Lenny Cranepool! The new transfer student who must’ve only transferred there for a few days because we never see him again! Louis is clearly intimidated when Lenny stands up, towering over him and GROWLING. I’m not kidding. Lenny genuinely growls and grunts like a caveman. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty hilarious. Louis is chill though and settles for a different desk. Once he sits though, he casually says “Actually, I’d prefer the window seat” and out of nowhere he is LIFTED INTO THE AIR BY LENNY and carried over to the window. 

He’s sitting in front of Twitty now, so Twitty fills him in on everything. He tells Louis the new kid is Lenny the Lifter. Word on the street is that he got kicked out of his old school for “going on a lifting spree” probably. I love that, omg. Lenny breaks his pencil and growls like an animal again. Louis is nice and gives him one of his pencils, but Lenny doesn’t even say thank you and gives them a hard look. Louis and Twitty are just relieved to be alive at this point. 

Next, we see Ren and Nelson preparing to go live on the school news program, The Wombat Report. Ren introduces her dodgeball segment accusing it of being a “barbaric celebration of pain and violence that sadistically pits the mean and vicious against the weak and skinny.” Dang, Ren. Tugnut is watching while wearing an I <3 DODGEBALL shirt and gets so pissed he breaks his pencil, too. That’s one too many pencils broken in under a minutes time if you ask me. Ren says they took a hidden Cap Cam into Tugnut’s gym class and came away with “disturbing footage.” The footage shows him teaching the kids about Hot Zones on the human body to aim for while playing dodgeball and uses a cardboard cutout of a skinny nerd dubbed Target Timmy. He notices the kid in the Cap Cam and says “no hats in class! TAKE IT OFF!” and violently throws a dodgeball at their head. Great teacher, right there.

I’m sure that’s enough to get him fired and banned from teaching ever again???

Louis is walking down the hall and is surprised when each step he takes parts the crowd of kids like Moses. Until, of course, he notices Lenny has been following him. He initially runs away, but Lenny catches up to him at lunch and thanks him for the pencil. Louis says “The pencil! Oh, right. Old Number 2! You’re welcome.” The Old Number 2 comment makes me laugh. That was definitely an ad lib. Louis invites Lenny to eat with him and we see the first glimmer of Lenny the Softie accompanied by sensitive piano. He’s like “YEAH! :D Thanks!” all happy. And it would be a nice gesture, except it marks the arrival of Selfish Louis here. He immediately decides to use Lenny to his advantage. He takes a seat at the 8th Grade lunch table, which is clearly off-limits and decorated like a fancy restaurant in comparison to all the other lowly tables, lol. Twitty comes over and asks Louis if he has a death wish. This is accurate.

When I was in middle school, there was this small stoop in the parking lot where the 8th graders would hang out during recess. If you went anywhere near there they would cuss you out. I was a pretty outgoing kid (I mean, not as brazen as Louis can be, but..) so one day when I was in 6th grade, I purposely got to the stoop before the 8th graders and just stood there. When they eventually came over telling me to leave, I stood my ground and said “This is a slab of cement. I don’t see your names anywhere. I can stand here if I want to.” They eventually gave up and went somewhere else, letting me and my friends hang out there that day! Ayyyyyy! One of my proudest moments. I wonder if I was subconsciously inspired by Louis. Probably, honestly. This show subconsciously shaped my sense of humor growing up and I only realized this when I started getting back into the show in 2011. I digress…

I felt the need to include a picture of the stoop. I literally went on Google Earth to get this! haha. This isn’t the exact stoop at the exact location, but this is exactly what it looks like. Just so you can visualize, lol.

Sure enough, Larry Beale and the big tough 8th Graders come over telling Louis the table is reserved. But, Louis says “Larry, this table is only reserved because you and a few of your unattractive friends say it is.” Burrrrn. I’ma use that next time. Just then, Lenny comes over. Larry is clearly scared and quickly sits at a different table and pretty much does whatever Louis says. So yeah, this is where Louis realizes he can just use Lenny to intimidate everyone and get whatever he wants from this moment forward. Nice!

Ren goes walking into a pitch black gym per Coach Tugnut’s request. He says “you got a problem with dodgeball?!” and claps twice to turn on a spotlight which dramatically reveals him sitting at desk. That’s honestly terrifying considering Tugnut is a grown man and Ren is like.. 14. I’d run out the door. We get one of my favorite lines here, though. Ren asks “I take it you’ve seen my dodgeball exposé?” and Tugnut says: 

(credit)

He tells her that Principal Wexler is holding a referendum on whether to keep or ban dodgeball. But he’s adamant that dodgeball isn’t going anywhere.

Louis notices Lenny sitting on the stairs, visibly upset. Louis goes over to him and Lenny immediately bursts into tears! Louis frantically tries to hide him so his tough image stays intact. Turns out Lenny is crying over a simple poetry assignment that’s due the next day. He says he’s worried that if he doesn’t do well in school he’ll “never graduate and become a p-p-p….” through tears, and Louis tries to guess what profession he was going to say. Asking “Police Man? Private Investigator?! PYTHON TRAINER?!” (I just love the way Shia says it.) But Lenny clarifies that he was going to say pastry chef. Louis ain’t thrilled.

Later that day, Louis and Twitty try to come up with a plan that will help Lenny remain feared. Louis just hopes that Lenny will write a poem that’s dark, mean and hateful. Unfortunately, he writes a poem that’s gentle, sweet and loving. Ren reads it and convinces Lenny to recite it on the Wombat Report to show everyone what a sweet guy he is.

Then, the following scene happens. Which I’m just going to embed instead of describing because I think it’s hilarious.

This paper cut incident helps Louis come up with an idea to stop Lenny from reading his poem.

The dodgeball drama turns into a Ren vs. Larry thing because Larry sides with Coach Tugnut. I’m not complaining about this. Any Ren/Larry interaction is nice because REN AND LARRY SHOULD JUST PUT ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES AND DATE! Larry and Tugnut demand equal time on the Wombat Report to debate over dodgeball, which is fair I guess. 

Over the course of ONE NIGHT Louis comes up with a voice activated device to attach to the bottom of Lenny’s chair that will zap him as soon as he starts reading his poem. Louis The Incredibly Gifted Engineer strikes again. 

The plan is to make Lenny go insane, like when he got the paper cut, on live TV. Yeah, that should do it. But before he’s about to go live, Lenny gives Louis a copy of the poem and says he wrote it about him. Louis reads it and asks Twitty “You ever feel the gnawing pains of guilt? You know, the ones that make you feel like a terrible person who doesn’t deserve to live?” Twitty says no and Louis is like, “Yeah, me neither. But this is the closest I’ve ever been” as if he’s a person incapable of feeling remorse or emotion. Not a fan of that choice, tbh.

Either way, he decides to do the right thing and swap the chairs. Lenny successfully reads his poem, which is also hilarious. Here’s the transcript:

“Emotional” by Lenny Cranepool

I wish you could see beyond my size, to the person that lives inside. There is someone who sees the real me... his name is Louis, and you see... He never judged, or laughed or tried to hide, he just treated me like any other guy. I owe a lot to this true friend, I hope our friendship never ends. It really hurts to be left out, if you have any doubt... Try being me for just one day, and I’m sure you’d agree when I say -- That being feared cuts like a knife, but one good friend can change your life.

The entire school is in tears, including Louis and Twitty. We see Larry and freaking PEDRO FROM NAPOLEON DYNAMITE with tears in his eyes (this is his second appearance in the series as a member of Larry’s posse.) He turns to Larry and says “That was so beautiful, man.” And Larry’s just like “Shut up, Omar” which makes me laugh. Larry’s happy though, because Louis just lost his body guard.

“Shut up, Omar.” lol this show has so much meme potential. 

Then they make a sharp turn from crying to the dodgeball debate, which is also funny. Only problem is that Ren is sitting in the rigged chair now. Oops. As soon as she speaks to debate against Larry, she gets zapped and screams at the top of her lungs. She knows Louis did it. She kicks the chair away and quickly shares a seat with Larry instead. They’re so cute. Just like that, Ren changes her position on dodgeball and decides that it can be a “very rewarding experience.” Meaning, she wants to get back at Louis.

I love how they have an American flag displayed. I mean, what’s more American than dodgeball?! 

The last scene is Ren, Larry and Tugnut ganging up against Louis by pelting him with dodgeballs. Ren and Larry are smiley and he says it’s nice to be on the same side for once, which is also cute. They’re just cute and should’ve got together by the end of the series!!!

Anyway, I’m not against Louis getting his but kicked here. He was going to do a pretty mean thing to Lenny for his own personal gain. And, then ended up ruining things and embarrassing Ren in the process. So… Sorry, Lou! I'm not with ya on this one. The episode ends on a freeze frame of Louis about to get hit in the face. The end.

This is a good episode. I used to love it... A LOT. (But again, every episode was my “favorite” at some point.) I guess the fact that it revolves around a one-off character makes it difficult for me to rank it any higher. Although, a good episode is a good episode regardless. But still. Louis’ ugly side made an appearance here, which I hate. So. I love the little Ren/Larry bit at the end, though. I wonder if Eric Ty Hodges was directed to subtly act like he has a secret crush on Ren occasionally, because I get those vibes.

Just a side note I’ve been thinking about: I might be the only person who feels this way.. but… Season 2 is weird for me. I’ve always seen it as the awkward transitional period between gritty Season 1 and über polished zany Season 3. Barring a few super memorable, pretty iconic episodes — Season 2 is just kinda… there. It might have something to do with the fact that Shia looks a little awkward himself. He’s not the young baby faced kid from Season 1 and he’s not the grown teenager we see in Season 3. He’s like.. an actual awkward 7th grader here lol. Also, little known fact! Louis and his friends actually move up to 8th grade in Season 3! It’s widely believed that Louis and Ren are in 7th and 8th grade the entire series. It's even listed as a production fact on Wikipedia! But, nope. There are slight things that confirm this, which I’ll acknowledge when they pop up but yeah. (This means that LJH is one of those rare middle schools that go up to 9th grade, btw) So, that’s definitely something else that contributes to my feelings towards Season 2. For Louis and his friends, in my mind I think...

Season 1: First half of 7th grade.

Season 2: Second half of 7th grade.

Season 3: 8th grade.

Obviously, Ren would be the same except 8th-9th. Also, fun fact #2: Seth Miller, who plays Lenny, was in an episode of Boy Meets World. There are a lot of parallels between the two shows, actually. 

I DIGRESS AGAIN!

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[buzzycohen]

I just read Ready Player One in one sitting lmao

Good introduction! Would have liked to hear more about the poverty and death in that world though. Like, everybody escapes to the Oasis to get away from real life but I still don’t know how tracking Parcival in the news is more important than covering entire cities blowing up or islands disappearing.

Main character is too boyish! Art3mis is too manic pixie! Wade was a savant at video games and pop culture but like, introducing himself he was like “I’m fat and I’m not smart” and then he gets rich, moves, gets healthy (because he can now afford to eat healthy), he slims down and you’re just kind of like ???? His nose is big but his stomach is flat for the first time in his life so I guess he’s happy now! Odd.

He doesn’t have real friends and then he finally meets everyone and he’s so comfortable with Samantha and he’s like “oh you’re so beautiful!” and after 20 years of thinking her birthmark is ugly, she’s like “really? Do you really think so?” and blushes and then she KISSES HIM????? Like, “Thank you Wade Watts for saying I’m beautiful when I didn’t think so!” Sad thing is, she is SUCH a badass for a good portion of the book! She kind of starts taking him on dates like... idk I thought of him an inexperienced virgin and she was the hot older chick omg (WAIT!!! HE ACTUALLY POINTS THIS OUT WHEN HE IS ~LEGITIMATELY~ CRYING! IN! A! CLUB! COULDN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP. SHE TELLS HIM THEY SHOULDN’T SEE EACH OTHER ANYMORE AND HE STARTS CRYING AND ASKS IF IT’S BECAUSE HE’S A VIRGIN!!!!! OMF!!!!!!!!) but like, they end it and then all of the sudden she’s like “I’m mad at you for going through my folder and invading my privacy but- okay you did save my life so- okay I’ll let you win this fortune so I can have a fourth of it and- okay yeah when it’s finished, I will make out with you if you meet me in the maze” what a convenience!

Some of the stuff in this book sounded cool but when he was like “I have watched Monty Python 157 times” I was just like,,,, everything said about video gamers is true and I never ever want to meet one. Also he was trying to act like a cool guy, “I know more than you so I’m superior” and I FUCK with that I-r0k guy for outing the location of Parcival and Aech because P and H were being dicks!

This was all gamer boy virgin heaven and like... every sequence where it was just describing the games or describing the world was FANTASTIC. But any time someone started to talk, they sounded like a cunt.

Also- time does not work well for me in this. There is no way that a self-described unathletic overweight boy can be so wasteful with his time that he consumes video games and movies and tv like an addict and be able to memorize it. His circumstances are not extraordinary. He himself says that his aunt steals his food stamps and then it’s like, okay where do you get your food? Do you pawn things for it? He said he had to pawn things or find and repair computers to get food. That’s a full fucking job! Especially when you’ve got so many poor people living on top of each other and also not having food! Being a scavenger is full time! So yeah- he says he’s overweight because of the sugary food that is more available to poor people but he also says it’s because he just sits in a chair playing in the Oasis for up to 16 hours a day. Homeboy does not have time for that! He has to go to school and then he should be rummaging through garbage if his aunt really doesn’t feed him!

And also there was a part where he said he spent 4 hours going through the entire IOI database and he had to rummage through it all to memorize and program this huge escape from jail and destruction of a force field inside what is essentially a virtual reality death match and I just.... 4 hours is not enough to create a new identity and create a supercut of incriminating evidence against the video game virgin version of Papa from Stranger Things and then bring down like.... a super advanced defense that kept everybody out for weeks.

This kid knows all the right things but his motivation is non-existent and his goals and personality change every couple pages and he’ll say shit like “I was never smart and there’s not way I could even get into online college with my grades” and then he ended up being the first to find the copper key because he was thinking about fucking Latin declensions (btw- he is either supposed to be in Latin 2 or Latin 4. Latin 2 would be the one to finish the requirement but usually Latin 2 is taken as a sophomore. He’s a senior and he’s taking it because James Halliday did. So I’m going with Latin 4. Regardless- discere?? Is not advanced AT ALL. Ernest Cline grew up in Ashland so I KNOW he did not get a good education. Homeboy obviously doesn’t know about Latin!!!!! Talk all you want about discere and school and games but my class brought that shit up when we learned it in Latin 1! ‘Cause school is a game! That’s the joke that you tell in Latin 1! And also- I’m not fucking smart! I don’t know about Black Dragon or Blade Runner but for fucks sake, reading that riddle and school was my first thought. It legit said “where you go to learn” and for 5 years you had people wondering what the fuck was going on when they were just being dumbasses.) anyways! Thinking about Latin declensions. He eventually put it together and then he beats the game in his first try and he’s a braggart and has a photographic memory and just like?????? Don’t say you almost failed out of middle school unless you nearly did, you’re not Archie Andrews, you can read!

[barelycompiles]

Constructive Ways of Managing Quite Long Development Iteration Times

So you're a brogrammer now. You sling some Python, or Coffeescript, or bash, or whathaveyou. Now you're contributing so some mighty project, and it is taking quiet a while (in developer time) to build. Maybe the compiler is slow. Or the CI server runs a bunch of extra checks. Or you're generating virtual machines that take ages to install. Whatever your project, it can feel agonizing to change a few characters, start a build, and have to wait a long time for the build to finish before you actually know if your code is working. If you're lucky, the build runs sucessfully and you now have a working system to share with others. If you're unlucky, the build dies half an hour from now, and you'll be tweaking some more characters, triggering another build, and by then you'll have lost quite a lot of productivity. In an industry of instant gratification, latency measured below human perceptive levels, actually making your own software can be a very different experience to using premade software. Expect more pain and bugs than usual. When you clock out of a hard day's coding, you may have only moved the progress bar a few ticks, while the rest of the open source community seems to whizz by at light speed. It feels like being stuck in a local Turing tar pit, where even the most incremental code changes take forever to test. What a bother! Might as well ditch software entirely and go back to Triceratops trolleys or however things were done before computers.

The good news is that, as bad as a post-fifteen-minute build may be for software development, it's neither atypical nor fatal to the success of a project. You think you have it tough? Hardware development cycles can take months, so practice patience young programmer. If you're stressing about fixing that null pointer exception before the hackathon deadline in time for a pizza break, consider how the foreman feels managing a condo. He doesn't even get the benefit of instantly wiping his workspace when something builds wrong. A foreman (or forewoman) has to spend even more time and money to tear down any mistakes during construction. You got it lucky doing your jerb from a coffee shop.

As I said, it's not uncommon to suffer egregious build times that take far longer than a few milliseconds, stretching instead into the quarter hour, half hour, or multiple hour mark. This happens for a lot of reasons, basically ineptitude in build design, which we won't cover in this post. There are plenty of steps an engie can take to optimize build times, and if you're the punk suffering from those build times, I'm sure you know better than me what specifically is soaking up your productivity. If you can fix that, you should. A good technical leader will recognize when project structure is limiting productivity, and will reward anyone who can reduce these blockages. The technicals don't matter so much as the political power to effect that change. That's all I'll say about that.

Instead, this post is about what you can do to get the most out of a sucky code-build-test-repeat loop, where you've exhausted the technical and political possibilities for improving the loop time. Aside from rewriting the project from scratch (probably in Go), what can be done to stay productive in this hellish environment?

Recognize your daemons.

Take stock of the applications, services, processes, and so on that are sharing resources with the building project. If you're playing around in Photoshop the same time you're running a graphical benchmark, that probably adds some extra delay on top of the baseline delay. Disable networking programs, menulets, anything that is stealing precious resources from the build.

If you're building locally, consider moving the build process to a dedicated remote server. If you're building remotely and the server is always stalling, replicate the build locally. Even odds that the build system is awkward and designed for local operation XOR remote operation, i.e. not for both. If you can unify the build system so that it can run more similarly and successfully in both environments, that will exponentially improve production reliability in addition to improving build times. Use Docker. Anyway.

Debug logically.

Richard Feynman is said to have fixed a radio just by thinking about it. Some shit like that. The point is, you spend time thinking about a problem before you go and solve it. Especially when the act of solving it takes way more time than thinking about it. Become the compiler. Practice those stupid Java puzzlers. Once you hit Build, it will be very many nanoseconds in the future before you can fix the code and build again, so make every build count. Specifically:

Lint your shit. Your text editor can warn you of build-failing code before you actually build.

Unit test your shit. When you add functionality, write a dinky little test that should fail if the function is at all inaccurate. Learn the syntax for calling specific tests rather than the whole test suite.

Automate that shit. If you're setting up a database every code-test iteration, find some kind of process so that the computer does the work for you. Doesn't have to be a perfect POSIX compliant shell script. It doesn't have to be portable across different user accounts. It doesn't even have to be command line driven, just as long as YOU can get it to run and do the things you need in a basically reproducible fashion. If it fails half the time, run it twice the times.

Master the code base.

Software is shit. There is a very good chance that the build error you see bears the most strained and tenuous relationship to the actual source of the error. I hope you never have to debug microservices. Jesus.

In any case, study not just the error messages, but the code base as well, including the history. Does git-bisect show a particularly bad sequence of commits? Does churn show an unusually in-flux file? Does git-blame show a logic bomb your asleep ass slipped into development months ago? Which classes are poorly documented? Which classes' documentation are LIES? Baz Luhrmann would have sung "Add... Print statements." if he wrote this shit.

Boldly experiment.

In science, some experiments are so sensitive that they take decades to complete. You can't push a rover to mars faster than the laws of physics permit. So when the project calls inherently for long turnaround times, the thing to do is to pack that bitch with as many experiments as possible. Collect soil samples, record atomospheric measurements, take photos, gather dozens of metrics. It's a big investment, so diversify the treasures.

Do not be afraid to try out ideas on the code. Fork it. Branch out. Tie it up in an FPM bundle. Delete the parts that you don't like. Fix multiple bugs at once, because it's better to find out that 4 changes don't work in 1 hour than to find out that 4 changes don't work in 4 hours. Change the code to fix the top error message, and the next dozen, before you hit Build.

Fuck commit hygiene. What a waste of time! Do your dirt in a feature branch and rebase for cleanliness once the build works. Swap out dependencies, even just different versions of dependiencies. Pin that shit. Lock it down. Distrust semver. Control your space, now you have all the time in the world.

They say discipline boosts creativity. Not fascistic hierarchical discipline, just the idea that supplying your own structure to your work can actually lead you naturally and unexpectedly to new ideas. Try programming without classes and objects. Try installing operating systems without a mouse. What kind of algorithms would still work for that problem without losing idemopotence? How freeing is a system with full POSIX compliance? How freeing is a system with no POSIX guarantees? Change the system to work for you, or else change yourself to work in the system.

It can get so droll hitting Build, looking up an error code, changing one or two lines of code, repeat, repeat, repeat. Take a coffee break. Do something else for an hour, even if it's just coding in a slightly different project. To be pretentious, let your subconsciousness solve the problem for you while you consciously attend to other tasks. That single threaded grind can wear you down, so I personally recommend pipelining your life with more than just the same old same old. One of my coworkers had a multiple monitor setup. The first monitor was for coding. The second monitor was for "bullshit", basically Internet memes. Find your bullshit Zen. You can be productive, even when the system seems to be designed against productivity. Lurk in IRC; solo coding gets depressing after awhile.

If you're suffocating from long build times, breathe. You are not alone. Build times can certainly be improved, but history indicates you'll be far more productive if you treat long build times as axiomatic, just part of the inherent nature of the work. You can pine for a time machine to fast forward the build, or work on unrelated tickets, or program defensively. Standing still is not an option, not for this blog.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU KNOW THAT YOU'RE SHIPPING SOMETHING LOADED WITH BUGS, AND YOU'VE EVEN SET UP MECHANISMS TO COMPENSATE FOR IT E

Constraints give your life shape. And yet these ideas turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost as if they were true or not. The unusual conditions that prevailed in the mid twentieth century there was a strong middle class it was easy for the rider. It was not easy to find. But what they're really saying is they want both. If there are three reasons. Notes Steep usage growth will also interest investors. You have to at least look at the average outcome rather than the other students, and this must be free. The country is shifting to the left or the right, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, please let us build this thing to make money from.

His response was to launch with the simplest possible terms what McCarthy discovered. Anyone who's worked for a time as the manager of a silver mine. This is the lowest form of response to an argument is simply to look the other person in the next. With Web-based applications, the software will work better, the servers will be better at running their companies than investors. Many more than most people realize, because companies don't advertise this. But we also raised eyebrows by using generic Intel boxes as servers instead of industrial strength servers like Suns, for using a then-obscure open-source language effort like Perl or Python. Common Lisp had powerful string libraries and good OS support. I'm not saying that if you can. My mother doesn't really need a desktop computer, and there was a problem with options, it's that they succeed or fail based on the total number of new users was a function of the interest other VCs show in it.

If you know nothing more than a question of just solving a problem. It's the same all over Silicon Valley like the one the Valley has over New York or LA. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the power of investors as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. It's not so important what you work on matters of passing importance. They care what the market thinks of you and what other VCs think of you seems the most successful ones. It's the middle one you get wrong when you're inexperienced. Nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable. If you're going to need to do is not squash it if it starts to own you rather than the topic, it's a great advantage to be able to get big fast. It helped us to have Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this; Daniel Giffin who is also writing the production Arc interpreter for several good ideas about filtering and for creating our mail infrastructure; Robert Morris, Neil Rimer, Hugues Steinier, Brad Templeton, Fred Wilson, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders date: Mon, Feb 9,2009 at 11:08 AM subject: Re: meet the airbeds I'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of climbing it. Not Yet a Police State. And I worry that if they wanted to; they're probably required to by law. I still don't even have a name yet.

We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. To do good work, on an absolute scale, as you approach in the calculus sense a description of Y Combinator that the most valuable things you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be rewarded with high-paying union job. The thing is, they're not. Miss out on what? I've seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. The woman in charge of engineering at Yahoo, we got an email from a partner you should try charging customers right away. In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to inhabit. You can come along at any point and make something better designed. Just two or three to one would be $1 million. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. But can you think of one that had a round fall through at the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can tell that from indirect evidence. But if you have eager first investors is raise money from them is worth one dollar.

By granting such an over-broad patent, the USPTO are not hackers. Instead of making n constant, it might be helpful to look at, because they treat this as evidence of laziness. And only good people can ride the thermals if they hit them anyway. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another, this could cause some friction. After barely changing at all for decades, the startup should raise more now, and what's good design for one group might be bad for another. They may have to wait for Python to evolve the rest of the world is going. It would be helpful just to realize it, but several planned to, but instead spent all your time working on new stuff.

People look at Reddit and think the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, not professors. In a place where there are a lot of stigma attached to failing in other places are just doing what startups naturally do: fail. Which is precisely my point. So probably the limiting factor. Where does it go wrong? Historically there have always been occasional cases, particularly in winter, and there's something very pleasing about small things. Founders April 2009 Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of all ages to build things in Lisp, you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and there will be more of a hiring bonus than an acquisition.

Or 10%? If the company does badly, he's done badly. Your prestige was the prestige of the institution you belonged to. Relativism is fashionable at the moment; if anything Boston is falling further and further behind. Http:///home/patrick/Documents/programming/python projects/UlyssesRedux/corpora/unsorted/marginal. This tradition continues today. Other domains change fast. The designer is human too. I started using it out of necessity, there must have been a lot of things that matter, most wars in recent history. Compositional symmetry yields some of the current super-angels make more investments per partner, they have no idea what they mean is decreasing poverty.

A phone-sized device that would work as a way of picking a winner. So if you want to make. You won't get to, unless you got the right answers, and that's one of the top two computer science departments. Worse still, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to standardize everything that doesn't need to rely on benchmarks, for example. But when you ask that question, and it is a huge one. It was pretty advanced for the time. But increasingly startups are evolving into a vehicle for several different types of investors. Could you turn theorems into a commodity? Unfortunately, patent law is inconsistent on this point. You're all smart and working on promising ideas. 1-x Though I can't off the top of the possible rewards, you thereby decrease people's willingness to take risks. But the margins are greater on products.