cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 275 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:

    The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)


  • The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

    The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

    I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

    (there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)


















  • even if it’s from its own repository, it is still on F-droid

    There is nothing to stop anyone from running their own f-droid repo and distributing non-free software through it, which is what futo is doing.

    seems open source enough

    This is the definition. Compare it with Futo’s license; it fails to meet both the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition in several ways. After insisting they could redefine the term for a while (despite the definition’s wide acceptance) and inspiring some of their very vocal fans to promulgate their dishonest argument on their behalf, Futo themselves finally came around and agreed to stop calling their software open source.





  • Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that’s concerning and something I didn’t know.

    Yes, something you’re missing is that it was your (our) instance which removed the word from your comment. I believe the slur filters are effectively a combination of the configured filters on the writer’s instance, the reader’s instance, and the community’s instance.

    If you view this thread from other other users’ instances (via the fediverse icon link on their comments in the web view), you will see that the word which was removed from your comment is not removed from comments by users on some other instances (despite that it is also removed from their comments when viewed from our instance). HTH.

    (imo false positives from the slur filter are annoying, but so are the people casually using slurs who are prevented from doing so by it; it’s a tradeoff i don’t feel strongly about. although i do think it would be much better if the writer-side version of it could notify users of the impending bowdlerization prior to posting.)