Explore local activities

Just had one of those epiphany moments in #zig as I looked at a problem and realised 'hang on a minute - that thing I read in the docs and didn't fully understand about arena allocators was talking about this, wasn't it?'

The ability to swap out which allocators I'm using is giving me a level of both confidence and practicality I wasn't really expecting in my first venture into manual memory management. I know I'm not always being as efficient as I could theoretically be, but I'm pretty sure there aren't leaks and I'm still using around 40 times less memory than the previous #fsharp version (although that's a little unfair - short run time console app is about the least favourable comparison space for runtime versus fully compiled native code)

A lot of my posts are getting rejected (while federating) by tags.pub - I get a 403 principle not authorised error when posting to the _followback inbox. Before I report it as a bug, is anyone else seeing the same? I'm well aware the issue might be on my end, but if it is I'm not seeing it.

Me, teaching coding via project based game dev: Hmm. Not sure if this student is fully grokking why we're using a message bus rather than inversion of control here. I'll just check what the expectations are from the exam board at this level.

Exam board: "Has added a feature to the game using at least four variables and an if statement."

Me: Ah.

As an aside, loving Godot (godotengine.org/) as a teaching environment. #gamedev #godot #homeed

@[email protected] "... they never stopped to ask if they should!"

It's a very impressive piece of work though! I love it.

Quick test post after a #bonfire update.

Sub posting myself after having to delete a post which was too mangled to try and edit into submission: is anyone else finding using SwiftKey and seeing it getting massively less accurate in the last few weeks? Half of me is thinking it must just be my perception and I'm blaming the tool, the other half is looking at Microsoft's current release standards and wondering if they've changed how they're doing the recognition... (it happens on device, so I doubt it is actually llm related)

Decided for the first time ever that it was worth breaking out some manual memory management for some code I want to run on (relatively) low resource systems. Weirdly, it's never something I've had reason to do before in these last ~20 years writing software.

So I get to take ziglang.org/ out for a trial run and try out all the funky design features I've been admiring from afar. I'm really enjoying it - trial run was streaming from RSS xml to activitypub Article json, and it has basically all just worked. Admittedly I'm rewriting a work flow I've already written in another language I know much better, but I'm pleasantly surprised with progress and how fast the resulting executable starts doing stuff (my biggest gripe with the languages I normally use). #ZigLang #zig #activitypub

Random question for techy profession people; I was one of two software engineers brought on during the founding of a start up and wrote the initial implementation of the serverside infrastructure for the product (the other engineer was writing client code). I was not "a founder" - I had no involvement with investment, financing, etc.

Obviously, with two engineers I didn't have a fancy job title, but the work I was doing required at least the level of technical skill as my preceeding "staff engineer" post. Would it be accurate to use "founding engineer" to describe the post, or would you associate that with an engineer who is an actual "founder"?

I've worked remotely for US firms for years, but I must admit I'm still frequently confused by what different job titles mean to different people.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Oh, I like your idea too. Looking at my own education in the UK and seeing how much about British colonial history I would have missed without first hand commentary from family members because school just happened not to mention those parts, I can't help feeling that human governments would really not like elves in a politically realistic setting...

@[email protected] Sort of adjacent to what you're asking, but I've been very pleased with my Boox e-ink tablet. BUT it isn't an ereader, it is an actual android device with a good stylus. Pros: good built in ebook reader for drm free docs, runs the Kindle android app, good for note taking and even art (mine runs Krita fine, although judging colour saturation on eink is still hit and miss). Cons: enormously overkill in both price and performance if you're only going to use it as an ereader.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Conversely, played straight this one of the only ways I've seen the 'fantasy world in eternal tech stasis' trope work; if you assume scientific progress is hard for some reason (maybe physics/chemistry work just slightly differently) then it begins to make sense that religions, nations, and schools of magic can persist for enormous spans of time when you have people living for hundreds or thousands of years holding it together by just remembering stuff. Of course, if you then try and add 'hasn't been seen for centuries' at the same time the whole thing falls flat on its face.

@[email protected] @[email protected] raises eyebrow inscrutably giving the impression of vast knowledge and encouraging continued investigation; a technique that fortunately works for the teacher regardless of any actual knowledge on their part

@[email protected] @[email protected] Within you are two wolves, a chicken, a head of grain, and a pauldron...

@[email protected] @[email protected] ah, no you hadn't. That clarifies everything - I had been assuming the traditional four faces which rotated as their split personalities transitioned.

@[email protected] @[email protected] To be fair, if your cauldron has a pauldron has something very wrong with it. Or it is a curséd knight who needs kissing.

(final option only available to heirs to the throne with correct sexual orientation unless local equality laws apply)

@[email protected] Oops. Still, mild embarrassment aside - using the correct title gets the same issue.

Searching for "glyph Futzing fraction" gets me an AI summary and a bunch of commentary links, but no link to the post. Searching for "glyph blog" brings up a link to the blog index page.

@[email protected] @[email protected] My grandmother used to train great danes, an other type of large dog with a generally good temperament. Nearly all small little dogs (puppies or just smaller breeds) seemed entirely happy to play with, try to threaten and/or, for the adult dogs, romantically engage with the danes despite it being obviously physically impossible for them to impact the danes at all (many of the smaller dogs were shorter than the danes' knees). That did rather immediately change on the one occasion I saw a dane get actually angry with a smaller dog, but even then the caution only lasted as long as the growling did.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...

We have some bite sized introduction to #ink posts for writing #interactivefiction / #visualnovels up on YouTube and I’m hoping to do a few more next week. I’ll definitely be doing a follow on about conditions (the different comparison operators and “switch” statements) and I’ll probably also do a video version of this blog post.

If you’ve got requests or ideas for other focused mini-videos let me know commenting here or over at the IntFiction forums (intfiction.org/t/ink-introdu...)

@[email protected] Thanks. One of the things I hate about the combination of #chronicfatigue brain fog and #adhd impulsivity is that I know there's a huge danger of my brain just randomly starting sealioning and mansplaining across the people I follow as my brain just starts spewing random responses to stimuli. At least on this occasion I noticed...

@[email protected] Also, I just read your post and that wasn't what you were asking at all. Sorry, replying to posts with a sleep dep headache is never a wise move.