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It also uses them correctly—with no spaces. I have never seen anyone do that on the web.


Almost everyone I’ve seen using them on the web (myself included) does that. Very few people I’ve seen set them open.

(Lots of people use en-dashes set open instead of em-dashes set closed for the uses for which they are interchangeable as a matter of stylistic preference, though.)


I believe this is specific to the US. Writing from other English-speaking countries often uses an en dash surrounded by spaces instead of an em dash.


I didn't know that was the correct way to use them. It feels incorrect in a space delimited language. Interesting.


English is not actually a space-delimited language; that's an approximation which is, in this case, throwing you off.

Punctuation is usually set closed on at least one, if not both, sides, though there are exceptions.


Come to think of it, you're right. Hmm...


The write(2) libc function is just a C wrapper for the syscall. It's the functions from stdio.h that are buffered.


Ah ok sorry I got confused by the comments nesting level. I thought we were talking about the OpenBSD's version which uses puts


I have different reasons for avoiding AI.

I enjoy understanding what my programs do to the deepest level, so making or using AI are both boring; they remove the fun part of programming and leave only the boring parts (mainly debugging). I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.

I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body. A thinking body part is always more annoying to deal with, because you have to reverse-engineer what it's doing to get it to do what you want.

I don't think this reasoning applies to everyone. I think it's fine for other people to use ML algorithms. I just don't want them myself.


Also dont forget about deskilling. Right now its fine because you are able to debug. But it would get gradualy lot harder if you are not flexing that muscle.


> Also dont forget about deskilling

de-skilling (reducing skills), not desk killing, for anyone else as illiterate as me


>I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body.

Yup, that is exactly what AI autocomplete is. AI does the boring parts, you do the thinking.

>I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.

That is your problem. You are stuck in 2010s. But the last couple years have had giant enormous leaps.


Since you need to understand your programs at the deepest level I assume you write in assembly and don’t use third party libraries.


There was an era when car owners were expected to be their own mechanics.

When that started going away, I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".

"Deepest level" in GP presumably refers to the deepest level of the existing source code.


> I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".

Those were the days. Nothing like that delicious smell of crude oil vapour as the fractionation column warms up…


Layers of abstraction vs. predigested programming slop.


If copyleft is desired, the EUPL is very similar to the AGPL, but isn't viral, so you can link it as a library to a closed-source program. It's also compatible with most open-source licenses.

Not sure if it's what the OP wants, but I think it's a neat license and I don't see it used anywhere.


I agree that abortion is evil, but in my perception, once someone gets to a situation where they're willing to murder their own child, it won't be a law that'll stop them.

This problem should be considered moral, not legal.


Just finished it (APL beginner). It's really fun as a game.


SAaaS: Staying Alive as a Service


It feels like this is aimed more at intermediary programmers (and seniors with careless attitudes).

A lot of them have this bizarre idea that since bugs will happen anyway, there's nothing we can do to avoid them. Then they come up with some bad architecture, or poorly-thought-out convention, or use a problematic library, which makes it easier for logic bugs to happen later, when someone else changes a convention elsewhere that interacted with it.

There often is a way (usually multiple ways) to architect software to avoid bugs. What Rust does to memory bugs and Haskell does to state bugs, can often be done manually in other languages, for whole categories of logic bugs, by being careful with your conventions and making sure they are easy to follow correctly.

I.e. software can be designed to avoid bugs. That requires some thought many people don't care to put in.


I have a theory that this generalizes to some extent.

Pitch perception is also logarithmic; an octave in music is a 2x ratio.

Memory is sort of logarithmic; you'd say a thing happened 1-2 days ago or 1-2 years ago, but not 340-341 days ago.

Same with age; someone being 10 years older than you is a much bigger deal when you're 10 than when you're 80.


It does! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevens's_power_law

> Stevens' power law is an empirical relationship in psychophysics between an increased intensity or strength in a physical stimulus and the perceived magnitude increase in the sensation created by the stimulus


If we're counting only programming languages (and not fill-out forms), Prolog had it in 1971, before ML. ASCII didn't include _ until its 1963 draft, so it's probably somewhere in that time.

I'll guess it's probably Prolog, but maybe Planner (Prolog's predecessor) had it too.


ASCII 1963 was the first version of the standard and it lacked _ https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/366707.367524

The 1965 draft had _ https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363831.363839

The first standard edition with _ was 1968 https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc20

The 1977 version is also available https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub1-2-197...


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