Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March, 2025 Read more
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Migration PSA
Once Retrospring.net shuts down, I plan to migrate to Fragsturztaube.
If you're moving there too, feel free to follow me, but don't expect me to answer questions in a timely manner yet. I do not intend to be fully active on here until the OG Retrospring shuts down. My limit for how much social media I can handle is low so I don't intend to be on two instances at once!
I might put up a page somewhere on one of my websites to include some of the long answers I posted on Retrospring.net, so they don't disappear after it dies.
Is it the thought that matters?
Thinking only impacts your own thoughts. Actions can change your thoughts, change the thoughts of others around you, and change things around you. So thoughts don't matter much compared to actions.
But considering that we are absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of the universe, or even just the entire world (one human is 0.0000000126% of all humans), we can't expect anything we think or do to ever really matter much anyway.
Instead of plastic bottles, why don't you put in your lap, for warmth, a fair lady?
That lady-shaped plastic bottle probably has a lower water capacity, so it won't keep me warm for long, and has a lower contact surface with my lap so it also transfers less warmth to me and most of it is wasted. And since this is now probably some old collector item, it will definitely be much more expensive.
Which is your favourite letter of an alphabet?
Do you love your station?
Why not put the hot water bottle into your dakimakura?
Is there any particular vehicle that fascinates you ?
What kind of hot water bottles do you have, is it the Jayne Mansfield Hot Water Bottle from that article? How do you use them, do they need to be reheated frequently?
I just have some basic rectangular PVC bottle, probably the most common kind out there, with a fluffy cover so you don't touch the plastic directly and get softer warmth instead. I can get some warmth for like 6 hours with it, especially if I place it between me and a blanket. I usually keep it on my lap with a blanket on top covering it and my legs while sitting down at a desk, or in my bed, near my legs which get cold easily. I certainly am not the type to get a woman shaped bottle lol
What do you think of kotatsu? Have you ever tried one? Does it look comfy?
It's a good idea, probably less wasteful than heating up an entire room. You could achieve similar results with just a hot water bottle under a blanket in your lap (you are not immune to hot water bottle propaganda).
I don't think I can easily access one because they are not a thing in Europe, so I never tried one, but I did try the hot water bottle thing, and thanks to that I keep my home at 15°C in the winter without trouble, so I halved my gas bill.
They look comfy if you are supple enough to handle sitting on the floor with your legs stretched under the kotatsu I guess. My back and legs would hurt for sure, since I can't sit comfortably on a floor.
What's shameful about liking woman?
Being a man who likes women means I am basically a cishet white guy. The fact that I don't want to have sex with them would label me as asexual but they don't know that. To every woman out there, I'm just like every other guy, I'm a threat to them. I am in an area where feminism still strongly sends a message of "kill all men". By being male I am automatically excluded from tons of queer events, because inclusive here means excluding men. To accept that I can like women, I would first need to change my gender, which I am not going to do, so I just keep feeling ashamed of that.
Dear wise feed master, I was looking for some feeds for the https://meteofrance.com/, more precisely their https://vigilance.meteofrance.fr/, but so far no luck. Do you happen to know the sacred URL to one ? I have found https://meteoalerte.com/france/rss.php?dep=01, which is already quite nice, but I’m surprised there is not a more official feed.
I was looking for one for a while, but a lot of Météo France's data has been behind paywalls for a long time until some open data laws changed that, so an official machine-readable format is not what they would tend to provide. Now that feeds considered to be obsolete for the general public because they all moved on to social media and newsletters, it's very unlikely that they are going to consider starting one.
Fortunately I have been going down a rabbit hole (for five minutes a month of course) on an XML standard for alerts that I have seen in use by various weather services or disaster management agencies, which will someday lead to a whole bunch of RSRSSS posts on that standard and its uses. And that got me to find the closest thing to an official feed we can have, since it is provided by a service of the European Network of National Meteorological Services: RSS 2.0, Atom
It reports all warnings in English for all departments. While the website does allow to view the details for each department, that's not handled in the feeds, so you will have to use your feed reader's filtering features to pick what you want.
Are you a pervert?
I often make lewd jokes or puns, and I explore sexual content related to my kinks online anonymously, but I am repulsed by most sexual acts, and feel shame for being a cis guy who likes women, so it won't show offline, or in an online context where I don't feel safe. I don't know if that makes me count as a pervert or not.
I will rember you
Will you rember me?
Did you ever want to confess your love to someone but couldn't because no sound came out of your mouth?
How would you do deliberate practice for programming?
There is way more involved in programming than just the coding: writing specifications, learning about the problem domain and the users, doing database design, user interface design, API design, software architecture, code reviews, manual testing, automated testing, technical documentation, user documentation, project management, internationalization, regulatory compliance, community management (mostly for FOSS), accessibility design, accessibility testing, deployments, monitoring, and more.
There also are tons of different types of programming that require different skillsets and priorities: web frontends, web backends, web APIs, distributed computing, mobile apps, games, desktop apps, command line tools, drivers, open source libraries, IoT, scientific computing, etc.
In some of those activities and domains, you will also need to split further on the operating systems, programming languages, DBMSes, cloud providers, spoken languages, countries, target users, and whatever else.
Many still think programmers can do everything in every domain and technology at once, when this actually involves hundreds of different skills. This is one factor in many that make muggles non-technical people expect all computers to not work and to only hinder their lives.
So the term programming is quite unclear, and you will first have to split this up into many parts and figure out which of those you want to actually master. I'm not saying you can only master one of these, I'm just saying these likely need to be handled separately. I certainly don't think you will live long enough to master them all though.
You also need to define for yourself what mastering means. Whether you see programming as an art form, as a science, as a field of engineering, as a job, or as something else I didn't think of, can change that significantly.
Then, what you should actually do really depends on what you picked, and I don't know everything about every option.
If you are trying to code a resilient server, you could first write it while assuming that everything will always go right. Then you could bring down a database that your program relies on, then start your program. If it fails, fix it, and try again. When your program at least gracefully handles this situation, you could try to start it while the database is running, and nuke that database while the program is running, which could introduce more failure modes. Or you could cause deadlocks, introduce random lag, or make the database read-only. And continue with other dependencies and other failure modes that you can imagine from your code.
If you run out of dependencies that you can mess with, try to dig deeper into the dependencies that you are not seeing; what if you just lose power then restart? What if you remove some kernel module that your program needs? What if you time travel (change the system clock or go through leap seconds)? What if you run your program in every locale? What if multiple instances of your program are running? Did you try to run a static analyzer to see if it complains about something that could go wrong? Did you try to run every single tool you can get your hands on that could help with resilience, to see if they complain about other things?
When you think you have done all you possibly could on this poor piece of code, update it. Add some requirement, something that requires changing that code, not just working from scratch, and test again. Did you reintroduce bugs? In my experience, updating existing code requires more skill, especially when it comes to other people's code or old code, and that's the thing we should be doing the most if we want to improve our coding.
Who are some of your "he's literally me fr fr" characters?
I tend to avoid or abandon most media that involves characters I could relate to too much, because it becomes a reminder of my own situation and I end up feeling bad. I want to escape reality, not to be reminded of it. So I don't think I know any character that is truly me.
As a child, my favorite character was Jeremy Belpois from Code Lyoko, since I did things with computers, and that cartoon played a big role in me becoming a developer. He's socially awkward, codes, and rides a scooter, so I still have some things in common with him.
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