Notices by Geoff Wozniak (geoffwozniak@mastodon.club)

You can find me at my brand new, shiny hackers.town account too, if you want. I'll still be posting here, but will likely stick to Canadian stuff.

https://hackers.town/@GeoffWozniak

@TheGibson It'd be appreciated. I wouldn't mind another account.

@TheGibson Are registrations still closed?

@ink_slinger For me, the tree is not allowed until Dec. 1. I made an exception this year because of the new cats. We put it up (without decorations) to see if they would wreck it. They did not. It gets decorated on the weekend.

I posted this elsewhere, but they're so adorable it's hard not to.

They wanted to hang out with me all day. They ended up sleeping on my desk in a little bed. https://mastodon.club/media/xMxe3pjtLt10QlmEDPk

@calvin Can you point me to that? I'm now curious.

@calvin Uhhh...

One example uses a floating point number X.Y to represent two ASCII characters (!). This is "patched" to deal with two special cases by just hard coding a string in the code. But then it's revealed there are only 15 cases in total. You might as well hard code the strings anyway since the data set is so small, thus avoiding the bizarre numerical representation of characters.

There is a whole chapter on patching. This is trivial in BASIC, but the examples are so contrived it's ridiculous. The argument is that you may not be able to rewrite or reload the program. But the scenarios presented are, laughably, less than 50 lines long.

If you don't want to read it (and I don't blame you), the examples are mostly badly designed programs -- even for BASIC -- with a stream of consciousness describing how to fix them. As you read it, you think, "Uh, maybe the design is no good?" This is never brought up.

As much as you may want it to be, this book is not very good.

https://archive.org/details/howtodebugyourpe00jimh

@JordiGH When I taught in grad school, the Faculty of Engineering had the CS department teach C++ to the first year engineering students. Just explaining cout was a pain.

@FssOfDeath Yup. This quote:

"...the desire to infer someone’s moral character or hidden thoughts from physical features and behaviors has persisted."

The author forgot to add "by racists".

@FssOfDeath "...Martin has claimed that the company’s proprietary analytical processes can determine someone’s risk level with greater than 97 percent accuracy."

Seriously, how do you even prove this at all. They're just making shit up at this point.

Future motto for smug Lisp weenies? https://mastodon.club/media/q3pZsrNFcJrSt9_mGds

Wow, this is terrible. Please don't work for or support these companies.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/25/voice-risk-analysis-ac-global/

@thomasfuchs Choose wisely, Haskell!

Gin and tonic. And BASIC.

#SaturdayNightFever

Still hating the spay shirt, but loving the attention.

#Caturday

https://mastodon.club/media/nnLYFbPh4zUQf5lbPOM

1000 PRINT CHR$(4);"OPEN";F$