Jeff Martin @cuchaz@mastodon.technology

@shadowfacts It looks amazing! Hopefully mine will get here soon.

Because, you know, I keep running out of RAM on my current laptop and THE DAMN CHIPS ARE SOLDERED ONTO THE MAINBOARD!!

Talk about a startup really hitting an urgent customer pain point.

“You don’t study the research to convince others. You study the research because you’re rather be technically correct than happy.”

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/

JetBrains says:

“User feedback is crucial for us when we’re designing new Kotlin features.

Would you like to help shape the future of Kotlin? Fill out this survey to give us your contact info, and we’ll send you invitations to participate in studies and get cool gifts.”

https://kotl.in/ux-study

@xorowl I’d say that’s totally true, but for your brain, not your computer. =D

@xorowl Hmmm… I’ve always had a good experience with Nvidia drivers in Mint. But that was a few years ago now. My daily driver these days is a laptop without any discrete GPU at all. Maybe the state of driver support had lagged behind in more recent times.

@xorowl My favorite distro these days is Mint. It’s like Ubuntu used to be before they apparently decided I’m not in their target audience anymore. Mint is based on Ubuntu (and therefore Debian), but the Cinnamon desktop has a much simpler more classic style desktop experience than whatever madness Ubuntu is up to these days.

This! All of this. All day long. Every Day. Twice on Sundays.

https://underjord.io/trust-in-software-an-all-time-low.html

if I use a debugger, does that mean I'm engaging in debuggery?

Struggling with a hard bug at the moment? Me too. You’re not alone.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/06/08/reasons-why-bugs-might-feel-impossible/

For me, its a combination of 1, 3, and 5 right now. Hope I find it soon!

“The world is dominated by “free” software and platforms, for which we pay by other means (like rent-seeking and surveillance). European software companies can’t (and won’t) fund themselves this way.”

What a scathing indictment of the US/VC style model for building large-scale software, from a EU point of view:

“In many countries there is a deeply held belief that it will always be possible to eventually exploit users in order to make money, even if you currently aren’t yet sure how you’ll do that.”

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/europes-software-problem/

@emartin The FUBAR connection is often repeated, but it looks like "foo" entered the language much earlier. So maybe the FUBAR connection is just a coincidence?

There are other possibilities for "bar"'s origin story too. Apparently IBM had something called a "base address register" (BAR) which was sometimes named "foo".

Some seem to think "baz" is a memeification of "bar" from another university at the time.

I found this resource really helpful when researching:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/80609

I just submitted a bug report this morning and my example code used canonical metasyntactic variable names like "foo", "bar", and "baz".

I was curious where these names came from and found a Wikipedia article on it (because Of Course there's an article on this. I <3 Wikipedia).

The article suggests foo is maybe similar to 福 ("fu"), which can mean happiness.

So "foo" in your code can be an expression of happiness. 😋

@xorowl Lol, sometimes finding the bug is the hardest part. Especially when it's not in any of the code you're looking at.

Good luck with your problem.
You can do it!

@xorowl Sweet, sweet vindication! Turns out the bug was a concurrency issue in a library. 🤩

And better yet, the bug has already been fixed in a newer version of the library.

https://github.com/eobermuhlner/big-math/commit/86abdd34d0e5935f19b3fa43d25bdcfeb772b825#diff-f7db7f4fb9dfc3e93389037b7430f885cbd002388821200b4a449a7706a741e9

So fixing my issue is as simple as updating to the new version of the library.