https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/programming-socks

TL;DR: It all seems to have started with a (possibly deliberately) misnamed pair of socks for sale on Amazon. They began showing up as suggestions when people searched for programming-related items.

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner’s photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup “options”, which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do it while using the “service” normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these “services” with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I’d imagined.

Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol…

…Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust…

The list is infinite.

Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I’ll show you someone who can’t recognize spaghetti code when it’s written in one of their favourite languages.

In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

I’ve had to interact with too many people who say this with a straight face.

I think it depends a lot on a person’s individual knowledge. If you keep studying far enough away from your main area of expertise, there’ll still be some point where you stop and have to blindly accept that something “just works”, but it will no longer feel like that’s what your main field is based upon.

Imagine a chef. You can be an OK chef just by memorizing facts and getting a “feel” for how recipes work. Many chefs study chemistry to better understand how various cooking/baking processes work. A few might even get into the physics underlying the chemical reactions just to satisfy curiosity. But you don’t need to keep going into subatomic particles to have lost the feeling that cooking is based on mysterious unknowns.

For my personal interest, I’ve learned about compilers, machine code, microcode and CPU design, down to transistor-based logic. Most of this isn’t directly applicable to modern programming, and my knowledge still ends at a certain point, but programming itself no longer feels like it’s built on a mystery.

I don’t recommend that every programmer go to this extreme, but we don’t have to feel that our work is based on “magic smoke” if we really don’t want to.

ADDED: If anyone’s curious, I highly recommend Ben Eater’s YouTube videos about “Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!” It’s a playlist/course that covers pretty much everything starting from an overview of oscillators and logic gates, and ending with a simple but functional computer, including a CPU core built out of discrete components. He uses a lot of ICs, but he usually explains what circuits they contain, in isolation, before he adds them to the CPU. He does a great job of covering the important points, and tying them together well.

So this is a list of responses given by AI when you correct it? My guess was “Things you will never hear from a client when you politely point out a logical inconsistency, an incorrect assumption, or a wild over/underestimation in their project plan.” 'Cause in my experience the response you will get, 99% of the time, is “That won’t happen.”

ASM doesn’t care about your variable types, because it doesn’t care about your variables. What’s a variable, anyway? There is only address space.

Only Winsocks.

Yeah, 3 x 9!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_(British_version)

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I don’t think that even C++ is that bad. Like a lot of shows and music acts, I think it’s more the toxic fan base than the thing itself that really sucks. I’ve had the same feeling with a certain kind of JavaScript programmer.

*Edit for clarity: I’m not saying that the entire C++ community is toxic, just a vocal segment of it, in line with the other examples I gave.

The added difficulty with this in programming is that it can be much harder simply to ignore them, because you may be forced to work with them, or stuck needing to learn something from them (shudder).

Tail recursion in particular is usually just turned back into a loop at the compiler, and typical modern architectures implement a call stack at the hardware level, which allows you to do limited-depth recursion, but breaks like in OP if you try to go too deep.

Yes, in my experience this is what the term “recursion” means in a programming context; it doesn’t usually refer to a mathematical ideal. That was what tripped me up.

Could someone expand a little on this statement, or point me toward an applicable resource? How do “real” (modern?) CPUs prevent unwanted recursion? As in, not the compiler or the OS, but the CPU itself? I’ve been searching for a while now but I haven’t found anything that clears this up for me.

Sure, but as far as I’m aware, no other large group of LISP users exists. My contention isn’t that most AI researchers use LISP now, but that most LISP programmers are (were?) AI researchers.

I’ve been trying to learn about early AI work, and I’m finding that to get any practical details you’re almost guaranteed to have to wade through LISP code, although at least it’s usually pretty well commented.

LISP: You are an AI researcher and a nerd.

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I use 10ten (previously Rikuchamp) for Japanese. I don’t think it does full translation, but it gives thorough dictionary lookups (from WWWJDIC) as mouseover tooltips. Very useful if you’re trying to learn the language, but maybe not so much if you just want to read stuff quickly. I think it’s now available for every major browser, but I mostly use it on FF.

Despite this, I still bet that they post “nvm fixed it” an hour or two later.