Humor Random Comments Thread

N_Molson said:
First swim in the North Atlantic waters this year. Quite hot water here, defintively way above 20°C. The plains of mud that the sea discovers when the tide is low can store an impressive amount of heat, kind of like brick. Then cool water (19°C) of the high tide gets heated. You absolutely can't see your toes, but you can really stay in the water for hours. And it is said that that mud isn't bad for the skin. 🌊
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That's the charm of the Noirmoutier and Retz area. Calm, warmer waters, and the air is cooler during heatwaves, and warmer when the rest of the area starts cooling down. I think the season up there lasts well into September. One cool thing I noticed while visiting the Blockhaus at the northern tip of the island, you can actually see where the calm waters begin, and the transition happens in a few feet at most, right at the northern tip.
N_Molson said:
First cycle fall of the Summer, stupid (and harmless) one lol. There was a railroad crossing with a train stopping in the village, got distracted by that, didn't watch where I was trying to step down from the bike and fell on the side as there was a slight incline. And just next to a stopped car, the people inside were like 'OMG are you OK?' lol, as my arm hit their door a bit. It was a bit 'ridicule' 😅
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Had a total of three falls these last few years, with one particularly nasty and I think the most dangerous areas are the bike paths on the coast, not the roads. I have nothing against seeing them full of cyclists, but some of that stuff is truly kamikaze. Groups riding at speed on e-bikes, ignoring the rules and all that. I've always wondered how that happened, and I think some of them might be Parisians/ people from large cities, even though it sounds cliche. Had the same 'wtf is this chaos' feeling while renting a bicycle in Paris and discovering nobody else around me followed any rules :LOL:.

Urwumpe said:
Today, I managed to run over 6,25 km in three 15 minute laps with 2 minutes walking in between... and that with still over 100 kg... Only 1 1/2 weeks left until the company run and I finally return to the living...
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That's quite good actually, and the actual event will probably feel easier than the training runs, especially if you're well rested. I keep trying to take up running again, but I keep falling into overuse injuries. It gets a bit demoralisung after a while. I guess a few long bike rides might work as well, just to take the edge off, so to speak
 
The US financial system might be a more critical system running on Cobol, and much harder to replace when push comes to shove (ever completely replaced a system in production that might bankrupt your company if it stopped for a day? Me neither, luckily...).

They're training new ones. But it is going to be the first language that will become what I'm tempted to call "arcane languages". Languages that, due to seeing no real productive use anymore (in terms of development, not runtime), are not really living anymore. I.e. almost nobody really knows them anymore in-depth. But they're not entirely dead yet, because they're still used to maintain working systems. They'll become this weird mythic construct, syntax and procedures still in place, but true understanding lost. Either that, or we pay a couple hundred or thousand people to write useless software day in day out just to stay practiced with the language.

Vernor Vinge had this concept of "code archeologists" in "a fire upon the deep". People poking around in and messing with code thousands of years old to unearth forgotten treasures and occasionally accidentally re-awaken some evil transcendent AI that went on to wreak havoc by infecting entire civilizations automation infrastructures.

I thought it was an intruiging, but somewhat funny notion when I read it first. Now I'm 10 years a software developer, and have realized that the man had a much clearer picture of the future of information systems than any other author might ever have had...
 
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jedidia said:
The US financial system might be a more critical system running on Cobol, and much harder to replace when push comes to shove (ever completely replaced a system in production that might bankrupt your company if it stopped for a day? Me neither, luckily...).

They're training new ones. But it is going to be the first language that will become what I'm tempted to call "arcane languages". Languages that, due to seeing no real productive use anymore (in terms of development, not runtime), are not really living anymore. I.e. almost nobody really knows them anymore in-depth. But they're not entirely dead yet, because they're still used to maintain working systems. They'll become this weird mythic construct, syntax and procedures still in place, but true understanding lost. Either that, or we pay a couple hundred or thousand people to write useless software day in day out just to stay practiced with the language.
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Is it the language that's arcane, or is it the culture; the assumptions about hardware capability best practices, etc.
 
Linguofreak said:
Is it the language that's arcane, or is it the culture; the assumptions about hardware capability best practices, etc.
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All of it. The development environment is also largely unknown among developers today. Also, the programming style of old COBOL is not for the weak, you might know GOTO, but COBOL has GOTO with overwritable labels - the symbol can point to different code locations, depending on runtime state. Thats even harder to debug than function pointers in C++.
 
Never having played the games, I wasn't sure what to expect from the Devil May Cry show on Netflix. I absorbed a few things by internet osmosis, so I was at least expecting fun gory action scenes with cheesy one-liners and kick-ass sound. It fell a bit short on the one-liners but delivered on the other two, and quite surprisingly also turned out to be a decent exploration of the recursively reinforcing natures of Xenophobia and Terrorism. I have no idea how it holds up as a game adaptation, but it is quite a good adult animated show that I can recommend. Not quite up there with Castlevania, but not that far off either.
 
jedidia said:
Never having played the games, I wasn't sure what to expect from the Devil May Cry show on Netflix. I absorbed a few things by internet osmosis, so I was at least expecting fun gory action scenes with cheesy one-liners and kick-ass sound. It fell a bit short on the one-liners but delivered on the other two, and quite surprisingly also turned out to be a decent exploration of the recursively reinforcing natures of Xenophobia and Terrorism. I have no idea how it holds up as a game adaptation, but it is quite a good adult animated show that I can recommend. Not quite up there with Castlevania, but not that far off either.
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I agree there, it worked out well. Did you see Vinland Saga already?
 
Finished the ~5 km (in reality it must be closer to 4.8 km) company run in Brunswick yesterday, in 34:52 min. I am pretty happy with the result, I expected a 37 minute time. Was a pretty big event, with over 6000 runners in four waves, another thing I didn't expect before. (And yes, it was "only" rank 4327. Still great for the first running "competition" since school)
 
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Me: "I wonder what characters I need to escape in commands/config files/source files for this program/language, and can I precautionarily escape things, or can I only escape characters that require escapes?"

Most programs: A Google search to the effect of "XYZ config file escape characters" returns useful results.

Your friendly neighborhood lexer and/or parser generator: A Google search to the effect of "(f)lex/yacc/bison escape characters" returns a bunch of results on how to implement escape character recognition in a language using (f)lex/yacc/bison/whatever.

I spent far too long trying to figure out if a flex rule can contain a literal ":" or whether it needs to be escaped.
 
Slight lingual uncertainty: Does something accrete, or is something being accreted? Is it correct to say "It was accreted by natural forces", or should it be "it accreted through natural forces"?
 
Turns out GPT can churn out some.interesting fiction sometimes. I asked it to describe Earth from the perspective of a species evolved on Titan. This is what I got:

*"From beneath our amber skies, the Ancients tell of a world beyond Saturn’s rings. A pale-blue orb, burning in the void, where seas scald instead of soothe.

Its air is thin, clear — offering no veil against the Sun’s cruel eye. The ground writhes with fire; forests ignite and mountains spew molten stone. Its breath is poison, an invisible fire that corrodes and consumes. The inhabitants — if such frantic things exist — must live fleeting lives, for the world never rests. Day and night whip past in a fevered cycle; storms howl and vanish in hours; even the land trembles under its own fury.

We call it Akhéron, the Tormented Sphere. A place where time runs too fast, where fire is worshiped as life, and where matter itself screams under the weight of chaos. No Titan could survive such torment. To us, it is Hell — a reminder that not all stars gift warmth, and not all worlds gift peace."*
 
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