• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Hehe, good point.

    people need to read more code, play around with it, break it and fix it to become better programmers.

    I think AI bots can help with that. It’s easier now to play around with code which you could not write by yourself, and quickly explore different approaches. And while you might shy away from asking your colleagues a noob question, ChatGPT will happily elaborate.

    In the end, it’s just one more tool in the box. We need to learn when and how to use it wisely.




  • To optimize the intersection for car traffic. Or maybe rather to minimize signal wait times.

    If pedestrians could take the shortest path, it would roughly double the size of the intersection in both width and height. Which then requires clearing times on each signal pass to be longer. Which ultimately makes everybody wait longer at the intersection, including pedestrians.

    So, that is one possible explanation. I guess you didn’t really ask for one, and maybe I should also add that it’s just that; an explanation, not a justification.


  • This is like if Hezbollah bombed Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv. And then Hezbollah starts bombing israeli airports “pre-emptively” because “an israeli attack” (retaliation) is coming.

    Yes, exactly. They had good reasons to assume the other side is angry and might do something violent, because they themselves just did something very violent to them! So to protect themselves, they deprive their opponents of means of retaliation. Pre-empting the retaliation.

    Hitting someone and then hitting them again because you expect them to hit back does not seem very " self defensy" or “pre-emptive” te me.

    I get you. I would totally agree if this was about a school dispute. However in war, there are a number of things which can be done in self defense or to pre-empt an enemy attack which might seem counterintuitive at first, like for example destroying your own infrastructure, or investing in weapons with the intent to never use them.

    In war, an attacker can very well attack again to defend themselves and/or to pre-empt the enemy reaction.

    If you could hire one of two generals to protect your country; one which considers pre-emptive follow-up attacks and one who would rather let the other side strike back because it seems fair, who would you hire?


  • Spzi@lemm.eetoA Boring Dystopia@lemmy.worldMBFC Credibility - High
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    2 months ago

    You expect a military force to sit tight, not move, not shoot, while they know the enemy is about to attack?

    Because, the enemy “is defending itself”?

    I’d love to hear that rally speech with which you would motivate your soldiers to just eat incoming rockets without using the tools they have to prevent being attacked.


  • The strikes are only pre-emptive if we put on white-nationalism glasses and take away Lebanon’s right to defend itself. Israel attacked Beirut first.

    I guess as always with language, there are many possible interpretations. Yours is one, that’s right.

    To me, it came somewhat surprising to see you connected “pre-emptive” to moral judgements, or to the question who attacked “first” (which is a controversial and potentially infinite topic to track the actual honest true ‘first’ origin).

    Another interpretation is just military doctrine. The best defense is a good offense. Who cares who started the fight.

    In this interpretation, the IDF felt there might be an attack incoming, and prevented it’s adversary from doing so by striking first.

    Much like Hezbollah (or any other military force) would gladly pre-emptively strike their foe to protect their own troops. Doesn’t say anything about who started the overall conflict or even who’s right.

    You still have a point; by highlighting the reasons behind the strike, and painting it as a protective measure, it probably makes it easier for the reader to sympathize.





  • An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

    I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

    It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.


  • One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.

    Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …

    Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

    The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?

    I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.


  • You can use more debug outputs (log(…)) to narrow it down. Challenge your assumptions! If necessary, check line by line if all the variables still behave as expected. Or use a debugger if available/familiar.

    This takes a few minutes tops and guarantees you to find at which line the actual behaviour diverts from your expectations. Then, you can make a more precise search. But usually the solution is obvious once you have found the precise cause.






  • Exactly this. It’s often about finding the right balance between technically optimal, and socially feasible (lacking the right phrase here).

    The nerds brimming with technical expertise often neglect the second point.

    Oh - wow! I was about to complain about how https://join-lemmy.org/ is a shining bad example in this regard, talking about server stuff right away and hiding how Lemmy actually looks until page 3, but apparently they changed that and improved it drastically. Cool, good job!

    Anyways.

    For collaborative projects especially, it is important to strike a balance between tech and social aspects. Making poor tech choices will put people off. But making your project less accessible will also result in less people joining. It’s crucial to find a good balance here. For many coming from the tech side, this usually means making far more concessions to the social side than intuitively feels right.



  • I find the plateau quite puzzling (lemmy.world, but the total looks very similar):

    There was quite a steep increase, and then it suddenly stopped.

    I would rather expect it to slow down, than to stop that abruptly.

    We’re looking at a fairly large group of people making a decision to create an account on Lemmy. There are plenty of reasons to expect it to be fuzzy. Even if they all responded to one particular event in time, some would have done so immediately, others the next day, few more even later.