That is a very unlikely approach.

Rich text in the modern world is almost exclusively solved by using markdown because it’s such a trivial solution.

In previous words it was usually solved either using range tags (similar to HTML, sometimes literally HTML, more often custom stuff) or embedded boundary markers (something that marked a new boundary and then had a full definition of the styles to follow, sometimes omitting styles that didn’t change, often times in some insanely dense binary format for predictable scanning).

Usually, it’s more sane to embed formatting in the string itself rather than having styling separately defined (i.e. CSS, kinda). Because otherwise storage would be a huge pain and reading would require a lot of non-consecutive disk scans.

I love the superstitious z-index just in case it does something to help.

I still constantly bitch about not being able to pin the taskbar to the side of the screen in windows 11.

There will always be some static-friction to UI changes, even if it’s a change that makes the UI more accessible overall. Everytime you alter your UI you’re taxing your users as it will take them some time to adapt to the new system. You should minimize how often you do this for that reason. Additionally, sometimes you may be unaware of an unintentional feature users appreciate that you’re depreciating.

I dislike your comment because it’s making a lot of sweeping generalizations (like that the UI changes are actually good) and ignoring the fact that users may have legitimate complaints.

The other joke is a reference to Ellison’s story, in case it wooshed.

I understand your pain - the real reason for that is that PHP was the first “hobbyist” programming language so a lot of self trained folks built websites that ended up slowly morphing into successful businesses.

One of the things I’m actually most proud of from the PHP community is that around 5.2 the maintainers looked around and saw sites like Quora and StackOverflow were littered with the worst fucking PHP advice endorsing functions like mysql_query and ill-advised features like magic_quotes so the community invested a lot of resources in purging answers that preached anti-patterns and replace them with non-terrible answers.

I work in PHP and it’s perfectly serviceable now, we’ve got strict typing, namespaces, lambdas, all the nice shit you’d expect in a modern language.

PHP and C are both fine languages, they have their strengths and their weaknesses. They’re tools and if you feel the need to shit on them then you clearly need more practice using a diversity of languages.

I work professionally with actually useful ML stuff (we parse a lot of weird ass files and it’s extremely powerful in that context) - we’ve looked at integrating gpt3 and it scored much worse on accuracy than the model we trained in-house. We’re also investigating adding front-end AI bullshit to placate the CEO. Even at the good shops, you’ll probably get buried in this bullshit - but there are good opportunities out there!

Fucking awesome writing style there - and a lot of salient points. The only weakness is that it’s preaching to the choir - the use of jargon and technical references probably makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t agree with its conclusion.

That said, it’s wonderfully cathartic.

So… I’m old. All my time working in C++ was pre-C++11

Good Afternoon Sir, have you heard about our lord and savior pthreads?

My mind also immediately went to Elon Musk.

Yea, pointer arithmetic is cute but at this point the compiler can do it better - just type everything correctly and use []… and, whenever possible, pass by reference!

One of my proudest university moments was getting a 50% on an exam. I built this absolutely fucking glorious solitare implementation in Java as a first year student that dove deep into how image buffers work and stayed up all night doing it. I got 100% on the project and 0% on the presentation that I slept through (my prof did offer me some extra credit which I took advantage of).

Never have I ever felt more validated in preferring to be a code monkey with zero interactions with clients than in that moment - I produced unimpeachably perfect results and completely fucked the communication side (thankfully, I’ve worked through a lot of my social anxiety but I’m still strongly in the introvert camp).

You can absolutely read my code. The ability (similar to functional languages) to override operators like crazy can create extremely expressive code - making everything an operator is another noob trap… but using the feature sparingly is extremely powerful.

This graph cuts off early. Once you learn that pointers are a trap for noobs that you should avoid outside really specific circumstances the line crosses zero and goes back into normal land.

Honestly, yea… badass.

It is insanely interesting to me whenever I come across details in old file formats that were included specifically to work around hardware limitations. The wide knowledge required to be aware of all these wild factors is amazing.

As you can tell, I’m fun at parties.

“To contrast, the human brain apparently can’t remember a simple piece of information like not getting attached to their companion cube. I think we know who would be better at a party, the punchcard.”

My dad converted old assembly programs into Cobol for spending money in uni - his textbooks were full of cast offs.

MicroSD cards also don’t look nearly as badass if woven into a skirt.