Humor Random Comments Thread

[Fabri91]

A few days ago I managed to run 10 km without stopping for the first time ever

Let's make that 14 km as of today

 

[Urwumpe]

View attachment 44616

I thought its written in JOVIAL....

 

[Linguofreak]

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.

Is it the language that's arcane, or is it the culture; the assumptions about hardware capability best practices, etc.

 

[Urwumpe]

Is it the language that's arcane, or is it the culture; the assumptions about hardware capability best practices, etc.

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++.

 

[jedidia]

Is it the language that's arcane, or is it the culture; the assumptions about hardware capability best practices, etc.

They are not really separable. A language is always also an ecosystem, tools, mindset, processes...

 

[jedidia]

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.

 

[Urwumpe]

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.

I agree there, it worked out well. Did you see Vinland Saga already?

 

[jedidia]

I agree there, it worked out well. Did you see Vinland Saga already?

I watched the first couple of seasons until they ran out, but haven't picked it up again yet after the new season came out...

 

[Urwumpe]

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)

 

[Fabri91]

Nice, well done!

 

[Linguofreak]

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.

 

[jedidia]

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"?

 

[Frilock]

https://imgur.com/rEtXIuJ

 

[Urwumpe]

 

[steph]

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."*

 

[Notebook]

Ctrl Alt Deleaf blows away competition as new leaf-busting train name.​

Ctrl Alt Deleaf wins public vote to name track cleaning train

Other names on the shortlist included Leaf-Fall Weapon, Pulp Friction and The Autumn Avenger.

www.bbc.com

 

[Urwumpe]

So, leaves on the track is the English equivalent to "Störungen im Betriebsablauf" (Disturbances in the operating processes) in Germany?

 

[Notebook]

I would guess so, as the article suggests its a standing joke during Autumn as a reason for delays.

We are getting a lot of train stories as its coming up to the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway line.

Railway 200

In 2025 Railway 200 celebrates the 200th anniversary of the modern railway. Nationwide celebrations are planned.

railway200.co.uk

 

[Urwumpe]

Oh, then the 200th for Germany shouldn't be far away, ours started in 1834.

Of course with a British train engine, from the Stephenson company. And of course, the first train cargo in Germany was beer.

 

[Notebook]

That sounds perfectly reasonable, especially the cargo.