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.

Much like that comment. Can you give a better example, or express why it’s a bad example? That would bring some quality in.

FYI you can self-host GitLab, for example in a Docker container.

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

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.

I think that’s one of the best use cases for AI in programming; exploring other approaches.

It’s very time-consuming to play out how your codebase would look like if you had decided differently at the beginning of the project. So actually comparing different implementations is very expensive. This incentivizes people to stick to what they know works well. Maybe even more so when they have more experience, which means they really know this works very well, and they know what can go wrong otherwise.

Being able to generate code instantly helps a lot in this regard, although it still has to be checked for errors.

There’s a very naive, but working approach: Ask it how :D

Or pretend it’s a colleague, and discuss the next steps with it.

You can go further and ask it to write a specific snippet for a defined context. But as others already said, the results aren’t always satisfactory. Having a conversation about the topic, on the other hand, is pretty harmless.

Those LLMs are great fools, but I am just paranoid to use it in that manner.

Exquisite typo. I also agree to everything else you said.

You can do that when you control the frontend UI. Then, you can set up the input field for their name, applying input validation.

But I would rather not rely on telling the user, in hopes they understand and comply. If they have ways to do it wrong, they will.

Then null will be returned, as the value of b.

For those who don’t know what Firefish is: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Firefish%3F

A design professor actually proposed this idea to us. Make the user feel how the computer is working, so they can appreciate the result more.

“Monad” is a shorter term though. “Structured data type” reads almost as bulky as “Curve of constant normal intersection points”.

“For agencies like the FTC to seriously consider action, there has to be harm to customers. But the sneaky formula that mobile developers have pioneered is one where the app itself is free, and the gameplay technically does exist in the application, so where’s the harm? Any rEaSoNaBlE viewer won’t be harmed. They will see and uninstall, and there’s disclosures, so who cares? But these companies aren’t targeting ‘the reasonable customers’, they are targeting the people with addictive personalities who get easily sucked in from a deceptive ad to a predatory product.”

Damn, that’s insane and evil. Like a drug cartel distributing free candies after school, with crystal meth inside. They just weather the storm, well knowing a few “customers” will stick.

I still don’t understand how this can work so well, which apparently it does given the numbers and scale. I have questions:

• Why bother making a “main product” at all, if people come for the mini game? Why not make the mini game addictive and predatory, save even more development costs and get less negative reviews as a bonus? Like, why bother with the candy when you can legally sell meth?
• Why is this exclusive to the mobile market? The same games, ads and arguments could be made for any other platform with “free”, downloadable content like PC. Why don’t they share their crack candies at college?

I think that’s a helpful analogy and comment. Please remember this while I go on to nitpick. I’m aiming at in both fields, there may be more math-leaning scientists and concrete-leaning workers, with the engineer being somewhat in the middle.

Declaring bridges safe probably involves a lot of math and tables in the background. I guess we don’t actually run a million trucks but estimate the safety theoretically, with a few experimental tests. Likewise, a security specialist can define the edge cases against which the tests should be run. That may be the same person who also implements the test, but I want to emphasize it’s two different roles. And we might consider one more of a scientist, and the other more of a worker.

So how much your activity resembles that of a mathematician, or a traditional engineer probably depends on your specific task, and how much your team requires you to generalize or specialize.

The obvious solution is to abandon your project not too late; leave on a high note.

I also found it very useful to document every step of my setup procedures, right after I figured out what works. At least the respective CL.

Right, I get now what you mean. In defense of the other person, they said this may be the case. Which implies that it also may not be the case. It’s a worry spoken out, maybe without thinking too much about how to word it in a way which does not come across as insulting.

I would frown at this in a direct conversation, but not so much in an indirect, general talk about opinions. In the current setting, I appreciated the opinion as open and direct. I don’t think anyone’s feelings have been hurt here, unless someone actively wants to feel offended.

OP asked for opinions, and that was an opinion.

You are right a project author can do as they please, but so can a project contributor. Both spend their mostly free time on that project, so it should be comfortable for both to do so.

There is no need to automatically agree. We can have different styles and disagree, in which case people might prefer to contribute to some other project instead, or work with other contributors instead.

Yes, my favorite comment:

pulls out the power cord for the monitor

Job done!

followed by:

Attacker must have had 5 people on the keyboard.

We also briefly discussed this in Games Master, if only to discover how wide and diverse the range of perspectives are. I feel it misrepresents the subject to talk about a “literal definition”, and to explicitly include “win conditions”. Because there are multiple attempts of a definition, and many do not include win conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

One such example definition:

“To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity.” (Bernard Suits)[14]

You seem to refer to Chris Crawford’s definition, which is in part:

If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

Explicitly calling SimCity “not a game” is purely academic talk, detached from reality. For everyone else, SimCity is clearly a game. If you want to buy it, you look for games, not toys. I feel definitions are questionable which define something to be not what everybody thinks it is.

Was Minecraft not a game until it included “The End”? I loved playing Minecraft, but I rarely cared about The End, even after it was included. When a player cannot tell the difference between a version of a game which includes a win condition, and a version which does not, how can the existence of that condition be a decisive factor?

If we widen the scope to include any game, not just video games, we can also have a look at popular children’s games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association. My theater group loves to play win-free games as a warmup practice.

From my point of view, win conditions are a common characteristic of games, but not necessary or defining. Coming up with a short definition which captures all games and excludes all non-games is surprisingly hard.