Thorry

Very good! Your spidey senses are working perfectly. Hey I want to comment this calculation, why don’t I move it into a function so the name can explain what it does. Good call! Sometimes the algorithm is inlined for performance, sometimes it’s a class with a bunch of functions that as a whole is primarily based on an algorithm, so comments might make sense in those cases. Most of the times it’s a library, so the name of the library kinda gives it away and hopefully has good documentation as well.

Asking an LLM to add comments is actually pretty much the worst thing you can do. Comments aren’t meant to be documentation and LLMs have a hand of writing documentation in the comments. Documentation is supposed to be in the documentation, not in the code. LLMs are often trained on things like tutorials, where super obvious statements are commented to allow people to learn and follow along. In actual code you absolutely do not do this, obvious statements should be obvious by themselves. At best it’s extra work to read and maintain the comments for obvious statements, at worst they are incorrect and misleading. I’ve worked on systems where the comments and the code weren’t in line with each other and it was a continual guess if the comment is the way it was supposed to work, or if the code is correct and the comment wrong. So when do you actually add comments? That’s actually very hard, something people argue about all the time and a bit of an art form to get right. For example if I have some sort of complex calculation, but it’s based on a well known algorithm, I might comment the name of that algorithm. That way I can recognize it myself right away and someone that doesn’t know it can look it up right away. Another good indicator for comments are magic numbers. It’s often smart to put these in constants, so you can at least name them, but a small little comment to indicate why it’s there and the source can be nice. Or when there is a calculation and there’s a +1 for example in there somewhere, one might ask why the +1, then a little comment is nice to explain why. Comments should also serve like a spidey sense for developers. Whenever you are writing comments or have the urge to add some comments somewhere, it might be an indicator the code is messy and needs to be refactored. Comments should be short and to the point, whenever you start writing sentences, either start writing documentation or look at the code why it’s required to explain so much and how to fix that. Another good use for comments is to warn away instincts for future devs. For example in a system I worked on there is a large amount of code that seems like it’s duplicate. So a new dev might look at it and see a good place to start refactoring and remove the duplicated code. However the duplication was intentional for performance reasons, so a little comment saying the dupe is intentional is a good idea. I’ve also seen comments used to describe function signatures, although most modern languages have official ways of doing that these days. These also might border on documentation, so I’d be careful with that. LLMs also have a habit of writing down responses to prompts in the comments. For example the LLM might have written some code, you say: Hey that’s wrong, we shouldn’t set x to y, we should set it to z. And the LLM writes a comment like // X now set to Z as requested. These kinds of comments make no sense to people reading the code in the future. Keep in mind comments are there to make it easier for the next guy to work on the code, and often that next guy is you. So getting it right is important and hard, but very much worth while. What I like to do is write code one day and then go back and read it the next day or a few days later. And not the commit, with the diff and the description, the actual files beginning to end. When I think something is weird or stands out, I’ll go back and edit the code and perhaps add comments. IMHO LLMs are terrible at writing code, it’s often full of mistakes and oversights, but one of the worst parts is the comments. I can tell code was AI generated right away by the comments and those comments being present are a good indicator the “dev” didn’t bother to actually read and correct the code.

This meme is brought to you by math nerds! "I swear we have a sense of humor"

It's a boomer world, you are just living in it. And as you know the boomers are the main characters, you are just an NPC

Wait what do I do with my hands? No idea, I just let them hang awkwardly and lean forward like this.

Yeah but the machine is in ounces, where the can is in Florida ounces. Once you convert it's perfectly fine.

They've been an imminent threat for decades now!

I have been working as a professional in the dev space for over 25 years. I have contributed to developing the same software over a dozen times, some even at the same company. Over time the tools have changed, the people have changed and my role has changed. But the overall specs have remained very similar if not the exact same. Recently I did a job for a company where I was a consultant on a large project, they specifically sought me out for my expertise in the subject matter (having been involved in many similar projects). One of the C suites left the company near the end of the project, no reason given. This week he contacted me, he is now a C suite at another big company. They want to do the exact same project and want to hire me because of my expertise. I laughed my ass off, but am very happy with the work and he is a good guy (as far as C suites can be at least).

You are the only one who can answer that. Things will change, but if you qualify that as a loss that’s up to you. In my experience with Linux, where there is a will there is a way. If you want something to run badly enough it will simply work. Personally I still play Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 a lot, including mods, randomizer etc. I’ve even used cheat engine on those, for example to spawn items at the start of the game to do challenge runs. That’s old software and primarily designed for Windows, it runs just fine on Linux tho.

Pico gang rise up!

Well that would lump all user into one instance. Costs of that instance would be huge, leaving the owner to seek out ways of monetizing the whole thing. Downtime and disruptions would then also impact a large part of the user base. And if the instance goes belly up, those users are shit out of luck. It would also place a lot of power in the hands of that instance. Basically what you describe are the exact things the fediverse is meant to fix. Otherwise you are just creating a new single large social media, with all the same issues. The whole point is to have people be distributed over lots of instances or even run their own instance. The point however is valid, this is an issue that deserves some thought. But it’s a hard problem to solve. This is true for more aspects of Lemmy in my opinion. For lots of things it’s too similar to other larger social media, where I feel better choices exist. Or it’s similar to one kind of social media, where it could use aspects of other kinds of social media. We are seeing some of that being fixed now with Lemmy being able to integrate with other parts of the threadiverse.

If the staple is near the corner it’s perfectly fine, the disc itself is round in a square sleeve. So the corners have nothing in them

It would be funny if it wasn’t absolutely true for anything and everything

Why didn’t Jesus ask the giant eagle to take the ring to Mordor?

Someone send this to Randall Monroe, how fucked would we be if we actually created this piece of land?

Do people actually leave spoons or knifes in the honey? I just open the jar, scoop out what I need with my knife and spread it on my bread. And a lot of honey also comes in squeeze bottles, that way you can just squeeze it directly on the bread or waffle or whatever. But even with those I still use a knife to spread it around. And most utensils are made from highly corrosion resistant materials right? As they get wet and exposed to all sorts of stuff all the time. And what about that Nilered video about the taste/smell of metal?

Really? How does that work? I’ve never heard that before

Many many proposals have been made in the past to utilize waste heat, some with success, others not so much. One of the few that have worked is taking waste heat from industrial processes, connect that to a regular heater (usually gas powered) and connect that up to tens of thousands of home as a central heating source. One of the big issues is waste heat is usually in a very low energy high entropy form. The way we normally use extract work from energy is by moving it from a high energy low entropy state into a low energy high entropy state. This is due to the laws of physics and can’t be worked around, so extracting anything useful from waste heat is very hard. Most projects involve simply transporting the heat and using it as heating, that way no transformation is required for it to be useful. I don’t know if this dude is onto something, but with the laws of physics being what they are, I would be surprised if what he has actually works very well. Like enough that it’s worth doing. It’s for example very easy to plop a tec (peltier) device onto something a bit warm, cool the other side with the surrounding atmosphere, and out comes electric energy. Useful energy and with a lot of devices you get out a lot of power. However it is not worth doing, those devices cost money to produce and install and would need some maintenance. This makes the power it produces more expensive than what we get from even expensive regular power sources. And the power is only there locally, transporting electric energy is pretty hard. So it isn’t all that useful and not economically attractive. So it’s never done. Usually it’s better to put that time and money into making the thing producing the waste heat more efficient, that pays off a lot more often.

Yeah I think around the Pentium 200mhz point was the sweet spot. Powerful enough to do a lot of things, but not so powerful that software can be as inefficient and wasteful as it is today.

On second thought, let’s not, for it is a silly place.