#programming industry

[k0libra]

RK800 #313 248 317 - 00

[alexo-lotl]

doing some research on parapsychology as a field. in short, it's the study of how the supernatural relates to psychology, and is largely regarded as pseudoscience with only a handful of people studying it, and very very few universities will even offer a parapsych program.

so… martin, buddy, did you just google 'what degrees do people get for paranormal research' and go with the first one that popped up? you did didn't you. idiot.

[shouyuus]

view, 7:17 on a thursday night

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

The Heritage Foundation — lead organizer of Project 2025, a sprawling effort to provide policy and staffing for a second Trump administration — recently promoted an apprenticeship program that opens up workers to increased exploitation. Heritage also criticized President Joe Biden for ensuring that most federal infrastructure contracting projects are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

In an article headlined, “Harris, Walz Policy Records Undermine Pro-Worker Rhetoric,” Heritage argues for a return to Trump-era apprenticeship policies that left new workers vulnerable by creating a two-tier workforce, and it disparages unions as detrimental to the working class. The result is standard-fare for the conservative think tank, which regularly attacks unions and promotes anti-worker policies like so-called right-to-work laws, which starve unions of funds by denying them the ability to collect fees from all the workers they represent.  As head of Project 2025, Heritage has waged an all-out campaign against unions and the entire working class. The effort’s policybook — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — calls for the dismantling of New Deal-era wins for organized labor by carving out state-level exceptions to the National Labor Relations Act. It would also eviscerate overtime regulations and open the door to increased child labor exploitation.

The new article furthers Heritage’s broadside against organized labor, even while masquerading as being pro-worker. Heritage criticizes what it characterizes as “the Biden-Harris Administration’s multi-front assault against apprenticeship programs,” specifically the administration’s cancellation of “new Industry Recognized Apprenticeship Programs,” or IRAPS, “that were training people in high-demand areas like nursing and technology, which now face significant workforce shortages.” In fact, IRAPs were a Trump-era policy that created a new class of apprenticeship programs that were controlled and overseen by employers — rather than the Department of Labor — and loosened standards meant to protect workers. As the progressive think tank The Roosevelt Institute wrote in response to the Trump-era rule, IRAPs are “likely to lead to a proliferation of programs that are lower-quality,” and could allow employers to exploit “loopholes in minimum wage laws.”

[...] This new salvo from Heritage is just the latest example of right-wing media pretending to endorse a pro-worker agenda, only to advance policies that benefit employers at the expense of labor.

The Heritage Foundation= enemies of workers’ rights.

[iluvgargoyles]

the general public cannot fathom what it's like to watch Yellowjackets having been in a wilderness program as a teenager lol every time they show the 90s timeline I'm levitating

[amalasdraws]

"My Prof told me I have to use adobe!"

Most of you don't even show up to 8 am class or do the mandatory reading, but this is where you decide to be obedient?

[apotelesmaa]

I like to imagine there’s at least one huge nerd at kamiyama in their third year and they’re always studying to get the best grades like really hitting the books & taking classes outside of school but they continually get the second highest scores and they’re seething with rage about it because the only person outdoing them academically is that purple fuck who never pays attention in class, is put in detention every week for blowing shit up and brings his whimsical ass gadgets to school. & he doesn’t even care about his status as the most academically talented kid in the grade. They’re planning on going into medical school or some other STEM field and he’s going into the arts.

[tetty-arts]

"Hey, aren't you glad that I'm here? Then act like it!"

Finally drew my favorite NIKKE ceo, hehe... she so silly i actually have every Missilis unit, fun fact

[rosestraumablog]

I know they will never see this but my heart goes out to every kid in juvie every kid in a program every kid in wilderness you are strong enough to survive I believe you and I believe in you. Be brave help others

[stealingyourspins]

(Click for better quality)

Ninjago Mermaid AU- Zane.

Species: Narwhal. Chosen because of their ability to withstand cold temperatures plus their color pallet.

Zane is a Marine “spy” Robot used by researchers to record and collect data of Merfolk in their natural environment. Made in a partnership with Borg Industries and Julien Laboratories, he is a revolutionary advancement in the robotics field, going past a simple language learning model level to becoming a true AI in the 25 years of development. Zane’s expedition is simple: to help marine biologists to study Merfolk and blend in the best he can.

(Alt version with no spots under the cut and non transparent versions)

[cerulity]

About Me

thought i would make this post because why not

My online pseudonym is Cerulity32K, casually Cerulity. Though, my preferred name is Kali, and my alternate username is Kali the Catgirl.

Though my mental conditions are mild, I do have ADHD (inattentive) and am seeking an autism evaluation. I am also trans (she/they).

But let's get to the good stuff. I excel in computing, especially low-level stuff and graphics (webdev scares me) and math, advanced functions, calculus and linear algebra being the most useful to me. I like to intersect math and computing, and it leads to some pretty fun results, especially when dealing with graphics. My main languages are Rust, C, C++, CUDA, C#, and Python, though I am trying to understand Assembly for a few systems (my laptop [x86_64], NES [6502], and the Atari 2600 [6507]). The main libraries I go to are Raylib and Macroquad for 2D games, and for 3D I go for wgpu, Vulkan, or OpenGL, though wgpu may be the main one I use from now on.

I also do music. My favourite types of music are either loud, distorted songs (FREE.99), literally noise (Portal 2 OST), or electronic-jazz fusion (Creo). I also sometimes make music. It's usually remixes or covers, as I suck at melody crafting, but I have made a couple original songs. I specialize in industrial chiptune and what I like to call "rustcore". My two music environments are LMMS and Furnace, though the latter is the main one I use nowadays.

My favourite game genres are automation, puzzle, and platformer. Factorio, Exapunks, and Celeste are my favourites in those genres respectively.

Other than that, I like to do procedural or subdiv modelling in Blender.

All in all, I'm just a software catgirl :3

[layover-linux-official]

Write One to Throw Away?

If you're in the software industry for long enough, you'll hear this advice eventually. There's an infamous Catch-22 to writing code:

You don't deeply understand the problem (or its solution space) until you've written a solution.

The first solution you write will have none of that hindsight to help you.

So it naturally shakes out that you have to write it at least one time before you can write it well, unless you're stricken with exceptional luck. And the minimum number of attempts you will need is two: one to throw away, and a second attempt to keep.

It's just math. It's just logic. Write one to throw away. It's got the world's easiest proof. You'd have to be some kind of idiot to argue with it!

Okay, hear me out...

As you work on bigger and older projects, you will continuously be confronted with a real-world reality: that requirements are an input that never stops changing. You can make the right tool for the job today, but the job will change tomorrow. Is your pride and joy still the right tool?

If you're like most developers, your first stage of grief will be denial. Surely, if we just anticipate all the futures that could possibly happen, we can write code that's ready to be extended in any possible direction later! We're basically wizards, after all - this feels like it should work.

So you try it. You briefly feel safe in the corrosive sandstorm of time. Your code feels future proof, right up until the future arrives with a demand you didn't anticipate, which is actually so much harder to write thanks to your premature abstractions. Welcome to the anger stage. The YAGNI acronym (you ain't gonna need it) finally registers in your brain for what it is - a bitter pill, hard-won but true.

But we're wizards! We bargain with our interpreters and parsers and borrow checkers. Surely we can make our software immortal with the right burnt offerings. We can use TDD! Oops, now our tests are their own giant maintenance burden locking us into inflexible implementation decisions. Static analysis and refactoring tooling! Huh, well that made life support easier, but couldn't fix fundamental problems of approach, architecture and design (many of which only came into existence when the requirements changed).

As the sun rises and sets on entire ISAs, the cold gloom eventually sets in. There is no such thing as immortal software. Even the software that appears immortal is usually a vortex of continuous human labor and editing. The Linux kernel is constantly dying by pieces and being reborn in equal or greater measure - it feels great to get a patch merged, but your name might not be in the git blame at all in 2 years time.

I want to talk about what happens when your head suddenly jumps up in astonished clarity and you finally accept and embrace that fact: holy shit, there is no immortal software!

Silicon is sand

... and we're in the mandala business, baby.

I advocate that you write every copy to be thrown away. Every single one. I'm not kidding.

Maybe it'll be good enough (read adequacy, not perfection) that you never end up needing to replace your code in practice. Maybe you'll replace it every couple years as your traffic scales. But the only sure thing in life is that your code will have an expiration date, and every choice you make in acknowledgement of that mortality will make your life better.

People are often hesitant to throw out working code because it represents years of accumulated knowledge in real-world use. You'd have to be a fool to waste that knowledge, right? Okay. Do your comments actually instruct the reader about these lessons? Does secondary documentation explain why decisions were made, not just what those decisions were? Are you linking to an issue tracker (that's still accessible to your team)? If you're not answering yes to these type of questions, you have no knowledge in your code. It is a black hole that consumed and irreparably transformed knowledge for ten years. It is one of the worst liabilities you could possibly have. Don't be proud of that ship! You'll have nowhere to go when it sinks, and you'll go down with it.

When you write code with the future rewriter - not merely maintainer - in mind, you'll find it doesn't need to be replaced as often. That sounds ironic, and it is, but it's also true. Your code will be educational enough for onboarding new people (who would rewrite what they don't understand anyways). It will document its own assumptions (so you can tell when you need a full rewrite, or just something partial that feels more like a modification). It will provide a more useful guiding light for component size than any "do one thing well" handwave. And when the day finally comes, when a rewrite is truly necessary, you'll have all the knowledge you need to do it. In the meantime, you've given yourself permission to shit out something sloppy that might never need replacing, but will teach you a lot about the problem domain.

This is independent of things like test suite methodology, but it does provide a useful seive for thinking about which tests you do and don't want. The right tests will improve your mobility! The wrong tests will set your feet in cement. "Does this make a rewrite easier?" is a very good, very concrete heuristic for telling the two apart.

Sorry for long-posting, btw. I used this space to work through some hazy ideas and sharpen them for myself, particularly because I'm looking at getting into language design and implementation in the near future. Maybe at some future date, I'll rewrite it shorter and clearer.

TL,DR:

Every LOC you write will probably eventually be disposed or replaced. Optimize for that, and achieve Zen.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

I'm just saying maybe you shouldn't talk about the Luddites if you actually refuse to engage with their historical struggle and the reasons for it and instead just perpetuate the bourgeois propaganda about them and somehow act that's the materialist take. get fucking serious please.

[starflungwaddledee]

i am probably going to regret going down this rabbit hole but.... what programs are the go-to for playing around with animation these days? just for fun.

[ebonytails]

sorry my post is just to complain but guys i literally hate adobe after effects. i can not explain to you the mental torture and how LOW it has brought my mental health because I *need* to use it for my post production class because it's "industry standard". ADOBE After Effects has made me write off the entire film and video production industry as a turn off and I never want to do it ever again.

The amount of times this has crashed on me where I lost everything? 5+ hours of work? 8+ hours of work? It's my fault for not saving sometimes but I also have auto-save on. it didn't save anything so im just left with nothing.

You want a trip to burn out town really quick? Use adobe after effects in an academic setting where you have no choice but to use this program.

I have never in my life TOUCHED a program SO TERRIBLE that it made me never want to do anything about that form of art/media EVER AGAIN