Everyone always wants to say worthy things about the qualities that make a good programmer. But I occasionally think that "a sense of humour" isn't given enough credit.
In programming, you're constantly making mistakes, and being told you're wrong (by code reviewers, bug reporters, and the computer itself). If you let that get you down, you'll quickly find another career.
When I realise I've made a mistake, my reaction is often to find it amusing – smile a bit, maybe laugh out loud, share it with a friend if it's funny enough.
I can't remember how I got that attitude in the first place. Perhaps just luck. But I sometimes think it's the main reason I stuck with what would otherwise be a frustrating profession!
@steckschwein_6502 you could see it that way, but I honestly don't experience the feeling I mean as frustration. It is actual _amusement_, like when you get a joke. The combination of understanding why something seemed sensible to me at the time, and also why it's totally wrong, often has (for me) that same contrast and unexpectedness that makes jokes funny.
I do feel frustration (of course), but more often when I'm failing to come up with a good idea at all, rather than when I do something and it doesn't work.
I understand what you mean. It's fun to finally catch that bug. I think there lies a lot of frustration in the underappreciation of the IT profession. Like when your work only becomes visible when something breaks. And then you are viewed as the culprit, not the bug solving hero. That's when humour comes in handy.
I find it's a really useful habit, or talent perhaps, in playing games too. In person or on computers. If something goes absolutely disastrously horribly wrong I'm almost guaranteed to find it hilariously funny.
@lnr when I was at school, we had a guy come to give us a talk, and he started by saying "I'm going to teach you how to juggle". In fact he discussed the mechanics of juggling not at all – what he taught was a technique for transforming frustration into amusement during the initial phase of learning when you're doing nothing but drop the balls and pick them up again, on the theory that that's why most people give up before succeeding.
His suggestion was: every time you drop a ball, tell yourself a joke, and bend down to pick the ball up just as you get to the punchline, so that you learn to associate picking up balls from the floor with amusement.
(And then he went on from that starting point to apply the same ideas to exam revision, which was the main point of his talk.)
Sadly, I'd already learned to juggle when I heard this talk, so I couldn't test whether the idea worked!
@lnr I remember one juggling teacher who started with "throw the ball up in the air and let it fall to the ground on purpose, several times. That way you won't always associate it with failure when it happens by mistake, which it will a lot."
@diffrentcolours @lnr I think the well-known 'Klutz' guide gives similar advice, but if I remember rightly, their rationale is different: you're going to be doing this a lot, so better get in some practice
@genehack Pretty sure I've told this story here before, but I was once responsible for a team that managed daily log file analysis. For various reasons sometimes some of the necessary log files might be missing when the scheduled job ran, so I built a tool admins could use to rerun the daily analysis after trying to fetch the missing logs. In certain circumstances that tool could restart itself, leading to a subtle bug related to an open filehandle.
I (eventually) found and fixed the bug, and added a Bart Simpson style comment below the bug fix:
#I will always close my filehandles. #I will always close my filehandles. #I will always ...
Months after I left that job, I got a text from somebody still at the company, containing just that code comment. He'd gotten a big laugh out of it.
@fedward @genehack I actually hadn't predicted that this toot would cause people to share their funniest bugs/fixes, but I'm completely happy with that unforeseen consequence
@fedward I have a friend and former coworker who is currently maintaining a stack of bioinformatics/sequence analysis stuff originally developed by ...let's be kind and say, "non-coders", that I completely rewrote during a period of pretty high stress, and he periodically toots out comments that I left behind. It's amusing.
(As a sample, the first line of the project's README.md was "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"...)
@genehack @fedward I suspect that's a fairly common opening line of terrifying comments, along with variations on 'here be dragons'!
One of my favourite comments I ever wrote occurred when I found an incomprehensible source file, spent an afternoon making sense of it, and since there wasn't an explanation already, wrote up what I'd found in a big comment at the top, with the opening paragraph
"This module is totally incomprehensible without hours of drawing small diagrams and swearing, so I'm going to write a comment for the benefit of the next poor sucker."
The reason I liked this so much was that, ten years later, it turned out that the next poor sucker was Future Me, who was very grateful to Past Me!
you may also have a history of jobs where you could feel safe generally. The first thing we all need is to normalize mistakes and feel like they're ok and part of learning. Laughing at what we've done can't happen when we're afraid for our jobs. Glad you're in a tolerably healthy place, however you got there tho!
totally agree – a workplace that puts you under constant pressure to never make a mistake is utterly toxic. _Especially_ if you feel under that pressure from day 1 when you're still learning your way around, because it's even more obvious that people will make mistakes while learning than that they'll carry on making mistakes once they're up to speed (though both are true).
Not only that, but a workplace of that kind isn't even serving its _own_ interests, because if it's trying to incentivise employees to never make a mistake, what it's really doing is incentivising them to never _look_ as if they make a mistake. So the mistakes get covered up and the company never finds out about all the problems.
Google's new TV's will have built in mics, so your TV will hear you without your direct intervention. gemini "AI" assistant built in. And you no longer have to use a trigger word like “Hay Google" to get it's attention. Basically this means that a Google TV with this trash in it will be always listening and collecting data on every word said within earshot.
Google will use more mics and Gemini AI to get you to talk to your TV https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337314/google-tv-gemini-integration-ai-ces-2025
Makkora, the bird barbarian boy, charges into battle despite his wounds, collecting unexpected strength and energy thanks to the aid of his ancestral guardians. These spirits not only empower him in combat but also protect him from harm. Among them are ancestors from an ancient time when his species had only wings and no hands, reminder of his lineage.
This piece was created for a charity auction and donated to Nutrias de México, an initiative dedicated to the scientific study and conservation of otters in Mexico. Picture for Flurrabell
Digital. Procreate
There is a short video where I show the time-lapse process of this piece, you can find it on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco Or you can watch the full video, download the full resolution version, and see WIPs and other works by me that I haven't shared publicly yet, at supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco or Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you! :D
Atari 130ST and 520ST first public demo from the Winter Consumer Electronics Show 1985, hosted in Las Vegas in January 1985.In it the unknown announcer discu...
My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be – just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.
And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.
I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.
I went once to an exhibit of the Gobelins tapestries workshop. Zone women explained that they used scissors blades to get some fluff and thus blur the stitches on diagonal lines. By the XIIth century, someone had discovered antialiasing.
Beautiful, Simon! I’ve been similarly interested in seeing pixel type from the lens of cross-stitch, weaving and knitting patterns, and studying traditional patterns across scripts has been nothing short of revelatory (I even wrote a little something about it last year https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?u=00db3d2423772a3f86d6e22a1&id=4fa7cefeef).
Vaguely remembering that old X11 displays had a similar constraint: there were 256 different colors max, dynamically mapped from a much larger set. Then, when the stuff displayed ran out of those colors, things got literally ugly...
@martinvermeer yes, I started writing X apps myself when that was still a real possibility. Indeed, the GTK version of PuTTY still has code in it to handle that case – search unix/window.c for function calls starting 'gdk_colormap_'! Surely hasn't been tested in years, though.
The standard Amiga GUI (at least in the original A500 days when I had one) just said "Here are the colours you have, use them or make your own separate Screen". X11's idea of trying to let multiple apps _share_ a limited-palette display and ask for the colours they need is much more ambitious!
I remember seeing cross stitch art in the mid eighties, and being confused at how much crossover there was between the super cool futuristic demoscene graphics of the homecomputer underground, and these ultra dorky grandma things.
@pixelambacht I think that this is actually tentstitch or another tapestry stitch rather than cross-stitch.
There were many adaptations of European tapestries onto canvas needlework patterns available from a firm in France in the 1990s. For those, one chose tapestry wool oneself rather than having it come in a kit.
Cross-stitch isn’t the only one that’s natively pixelated.
Even some of the rug hooking patterns that are trending again are very pixelated.
As you've probably already guessed, I'm not remotely an expert on tapestry or any other kind of stitching, and my interest in this kind of design is focused on its relevance to computers, so I just had to make my best guess out of types of stitch I'd heard of.
The use of long (horizontal) threads for the half-tones (as opposed to dithering patterns) also has parallels with compression under RLE (run-length encoding). Not sure if computer artists ever changed their style just for a few bytes under RLE, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ahoySoundtrack is available on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/6P6RP2Ad0L4klna5GdiBlIalso on Bandcamp:https://xahoy.b...
there were companies selling these images as kits, and designers working for these companies; it would be great to investigate their choices and processes..
I said in that post that it would be cool to digitise it back to a paletted image suitable for actually loading into Deluxe Paint. I didn't get round to doing it … but someone else did! https://kaberett.dreamwidth.org/ put in a *lot* of effort (more than I would have dreamed of asking for) and sent me a PNG.
I thought the only reasonable thing to do with that was to convert it back to IFF ILBM, transfer it on to an Amiga floppy image, and load it in _actual_ Deluxe Paint. Tada!
But even given a starting PNG, getting it into DPaint was a challenge. (1/8)
I keep seeing lists of 'pointless things they teach in school', followed by lots of people telling stories of they have never used trig, or differential calculus or English lit.
The point is to teach different ways of learning and thinking, to expand your mind in different ways so that you can apply the different ways that arts and sciences require you to think.
If all you learn at school is how to do things, you are at very real risk of manipulation and of being utterly unable to handle any new situation that you might find without help or direction.
Now imagine a whole nation like that. Easy to mobilise, easy to use for anything for which AI is too expensive. Easy to dispose of, easy to control without question.
Remember what it is alleged the Nazi, Werner Von Braun said "Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labour".
@claude Maybe I was fortunate that my teachers did. But I had the good fortune to go to a school that had been a grammar school, and where the head teacher still insisted that certain standards be maintained.
It has since become an academy and, I am told, lost the ethos and resorted to fact stuffing to get exam results.
"We don't need the humanities taught in schools, you can go somewhere else for that, schools should be for hard sciences" from something trying to defend ai art in reply to an unrelated youtube comment i came across
@TheTenuousOrder Exactly. I think that some of this comes from what I decided today to call 'CEO syndrome'. CEOs are so used to being able to say 'I want ....' and the people around them make it happen, that they cannot conceive of any other way of existence. They don't want to understand why 'just stop being poor' is not an answer. Give those people political power, and they will try to dictate reality and then throw temper tantrums when things don't work out the way they planned.
That's why they are so keen on AI, it doesn't question, it doesn't disobey, it just does whatever they want it to do. At least in principle.
@lightspill A group of people have decided that education should be about stuffing people with facts and fitting them out to do a job. A CEO I know through a friend still says 'I want a work force educated enough to work a machine, but not educated enough to question me.' Those are the people with political power, and have had it since the days of Thatcher.
@lightspill There is nothing against vocational training in what I say, it really works better for some people and our education system should accommodate that. But it should be about producing people, not unthinking slaves.
My prediction for 2025: A bump for digital security engineers as AI slop code gen writes a bunch of difficult to understand or diagnose exploits. 2026 a bumper crop.
@rey the question came up because the only non-furry in the chat (is associated with the project in some capacity) said something about letting everyone else beta test the new zigbee2MQTT release first before he switched x3
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Digital. Procreate I shared a time-lapse process video that you can watch on the first comment of this submission on my art Telegram channel: https://t.me/panda_paco But if you want to see the full video, with the full resolution version of this picture, WIPs of my future works and to see my art before I post it publicly, support me either at Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco) or Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco). Thank youu!!
I've wanted to do this dance for such a long time! It sure was tricky getting these big bappers to move fast enough, and doing footwork on carpet, but we made it work!
One dancing wolf, just for you! ❤️I've wanted to do this dance for such a long time! It sure was tricky getting these big bappers to move fast enough, and do...
A 40 second long video will be re-encoded to around 7MB. This is plenty for a short clip with mostly static camera, though might be insufficient for high motion videos such as recordings from video games. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/#media
@PupShadowNH @kakurady thank you! I don't suppose you know where the server side admin setting is to make use of the new 99Mb limit instead of 40? I checked a few config files but haven't found it or any useful articles online.
@thumper I am not sure on that one! I've somehow managed to avoid setting up my own mastodon instance so far, so my experience with mastodon is client side only at the moment 😅
In about five billion years, when the world dies by fire as the Sun in it's death throws engulfs the Earth, only half of the radioactive material in Chernobyl's damaged reactor 4 will have decayed.
Provided to YouTube by DistroKidThe Washing Machine Song · MennielThe Washing Machine Song℗ Broken Speakers RecordsReleased on: 2024-12-17Auto-generated by Y...
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.jpg "painting by Johannes Vermeer at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany")
@steckschwein_6502 you could see it that way, but I honestly don't experience the feeling I mean as frustration. It is actual _amusement_, like when you get a joke. The combination of understanding why something seemed sensible to me at the time, and also why it's totally wrong, often has (for me) that same contrast and unexpectedness that makes jokes funny.
I do feel frustration (of course), but more often when I'm failing to come up with a good idea at all, rather than when I do something and it doesn't work.
@lnr when I was at school, we had a guy come to give us a talk, and he started by saying "I'm going to teach you how to juggle". In fact he discussed the mechanics of juggling not at all – what he taught was a technique for transforming frustration into amusement during the initial phase of learning when you're doing nothing but drop the balls and pick them up again, on the theory that that's why most people give up before succeeding.
His suggestion was: every time you drop a ball, tell yourself a joke, and bend down to pick the ball up just as you get to the punchline, so that you learn to associate picking up balls from the floor with amusement.
(And then he went on from that starting point to apply the same ideas to exam revision, which was the main point of his talk.)
Sadly, I'd already learned to juggle when I heard this talk, so I couldn't test whether the idea worked!
And the best way to think about your code is that it's disposable, but your skills are not.
Hence, in a code review worry about learning what you can improve, not your precious words laid end to end.
@genehack Pretty sure I've told this story here before, but I was once responsible for a team that managed daily log file analysis. For various reasons sometimes some of the necessary log files might be missing when the scheduled job ran, so I built a tool admins could use to rerun the daily analysis after trying to fetch the missing logs. In certain circumstances that tool could restart itself, leading to a subtle bug related to an open filehandle.
I (eventually) found and fixed the bug, and added a Bart Simpson style comment below the bug fix:
#I will always close my filehandles.
#I will always close my filehandles.
#I will always ...
Months after I left that job, I got a text from somebody still at the company, containing just that code comment. He'd gotten a big laugh out of it.
@fedward I have a friend and former coworker who is currently maintaining a stack of bioinformatics/sequence analysis stuff originally developed by ...let's be kind and say, "non-coders", that I completely rewrote during a period of pretty high stress, and he periodically toots out comments that I left behind. It's amusing.
(As a sample, the first line of the project's README.md was "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"...)
@genehack @fedward I suspect that's a fairly common opening line of terrifying comments, along with variations on 'here be dragons'!
One of my favourite comments I ever wrote occurred when I found an incomprehensible source file, spent an afternoon making sense of it, and since there wasn't an explanation already, wrote up what I'd found in a big comment at the top, with the opening paragraph
"This module is totally incomprehensible without hours of drawing small diagrams and swearing, so I'm going to write a comment for the benefit of the next poor sucker."
The reason I liked this so much was that, ten years later, it turned out that the next poor sucker was Future Me, who was very grateful to Past Me!