Interesting Links for 23-05-2025
May. 23rd, 2025 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- 1. Why are Scotland's councils so short of cash when tax is going up?
- (tags:scotland tax )
- 2. Greenland Signs Lucrative Minerals Deal with Europe in Blow to Trump
- (tags:Europe USA materials Greenland trade )
- 3. How I Beat NES Mario in 0.000005 Seconds (the nerdiest video I have ever watched. If you've seen something nerdier then do let me know)
- (tags:video games programming technology mario )
- 4. Trump's image of dead 'white farmers' came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa
- (tags:USA politics Africa southafrica )
- 5. Programmers spend 5% of their time editing code, the rest is mostly understanding it/the issue they're trying to solve..
- (tags:programming research )
- 6. Which word made you old? (Mine was GOAT)
- (tags:language age change comic )
- 7. Explaining "what a species is" turns out to be very very tricky
- (tags:video ontology life )
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Date: 2025-05-23 11:07 am (UTC)I looked it up. Apparently it has a wider meaning of "well done for doing a thing the speaker approves of in spite of the thing also being controversial or unpopular", and an alt-right narrower meaning of "well done for opposing wokery" in particular.
In my case the comment was a response to a software tool I recently wrote to help people with anomalous colour vision, i.e. specifically intended as a disability-ish aid. (It's general enough to have other uses too, but that was the use that I particularly intended it for.) That might well make it the single most explicitly woke program I've ever written, so I have to assume the commenter didn't have the alt-right meaning in mind!
(The program has a certain bodge-nature, which I assume is the controversial-ness the commenter had in mind.)
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Date: 2025-05-23 12:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 12:16 pm (UTC)And they were right, an awesome thing to do.
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Date: 2025-05-23 01:35 pm (UTC)My colour vision is anomalous (I have weak red cones). How can I find more about this tool ?
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Date: 2025-05-23 01:43 pm (UTC)The inspiration was that a friend with anomalous colour vision said, elsewhere on Mastodon, "I find red on black text hard to read, but authors of colourful terminal software use it a lot. It would be nice if I could change it to be white on red, which I can read easily".
They didn't want to do this by hacking on their actual terminal program (which is perhaps the most obvious approach, at least if you're a programmer), because carrying a downstream patch to a program like xterm is a pain, especially if the program is constantly receiving updates from your distro.
I had the idea that you could do the same job by means of a separate program that sits between xterm and your shell session and just rewrites colour-setting control sequences, eliminating the problem of merging two sets of changes to the same source code. So I threw one together, and there it is (in a pointless demo mode where it just changes the colours). It has the key feature that it can think about both the foreground and background colours together, and rewrite them as a pair, so that it could map "red on black" into "white on red" as specified.
But at the moment, it's a starting point for experimentation: it doesn't have a built-in set of colour translations intended for any given type of unusual colour vision, and it also doesn't have a convenient configuration language. Anyone wanting to try it out at the moment will have to edit the C source code and recompile (which I know the friend in question is capable of). If it turns out to be useful in the long term then maybe I can change that, but I'd want to get some input from potential users first, because I don't even know what kind of configuration language would be convenient.
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Date: 2025-05-24 12:14 pm (UTC)I too would be curious about your tool! I work for an organization that encourages disability inclusion and educates educators accordingly as well as providing direct services to students. They mostly use Chromebooks and tablets with students, though, as that's either what the school uses or what the students have for communication apps. In the office we have to use Microsoft Windows.
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Date: 2025-05-24 12:34 pm (UTC)(But I suppose it might be possible to run it in a Windows console, now that those are – or can be – mediated through the same system of escape codes. Hmmm.)
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Date: 2025-05-23 11:19 am (UTC)My manager's response was something like "You should be neither typing nor mousing that fast". He felt that if your input speed is the limiting factor in working with a computer you're doing it wrong – you should be thinking more and inputting less.
I disagreed with him then, and I still disagree with him now. But I don't disbelieve your statistic of only 5% time spent editing code. (In fact at work it might be even less than that, for me – both editing code and understanding the problem have to share my work time with meetings, bug-tracker paperwork, etc…)
But the thing is that, for me, "understanding the issue I'm trying to solve" also involves a lot of input, because I very highly prioritise hands-on investigation. Much more so than a lot of my colleagues, who are constantly looking at an error message and then just scratching their head trying to work out what might have gone wrong. If I can't see it immediately, I'll try to get more information, by typing more commands – running the program under
strace, or under a debugger, or filling it with diagnostics and re-running, or running it differently, or cutting down the input file, or something which will give me more clues than I already have. So my speed of input is still important even though I'm mostly trying to understand the problem, because the way I understand the problem is highly interactive!no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 11:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 12:21 pm (UTC)For about the last 30 years, I have played it (and/or the unix implementation xdemineur) without using the flags, so my scores are much lower.
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Date: 2025-05-23 01:34 pm (UTC)I also played it without flags. I found it both easier and more fun this way, plus it was neat seeing all the flags suddenly appearing when I won the game.
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Date: 2025-05-23 11:29 am (UTC)Also I simply find text-based interfaces less annoying and confusing than GUIs. I don't want to try to be aiming my clicks precisely and suchlike when I just want to get something done. (And goodness, modern UIs where things pop up unexpectedly based on hovers and such.)
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Date: 2025-05-23 11:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 12:37 pm (UTC)My READING comprehension speed however, has always been insanely fast. So, I guess you win some you lose some
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Date: 2025-05-25 10:16 pm (UTC)Those aren't incompatible if your manager had thought about it. I type quickly and this helps me with those bursts of "ok I know what to do here and let me get it out Right Now". That doesn't mean I spend most of the day that way. I'm guessing you're in a similar position.
And I'm with you on "to understand it I need to interact with it". Yes we also need to stare at code, but it's too easy to make assumptions while reading that a little actual poking would quickly dispel.
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Date: 2025-05-24 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-25 10:18 pm (UTC)I felt like I'd entered an alternate reality when somebody said, of another friend, that she was going to "yeet the yute", which is the strangest way to talk about a hysterectomy that I've ever heard. (I had not heard "yeet" before and had to look it up.)
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Date: 2025-05-24 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-24 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-25 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-25 05:30 pm (UTC)On #5: THIS. The exact numbers aside, this is why I consider AI-based coding tools to not just be problematic in terms of their quality -- more importantly, they're solving the wrong problem.
Writing code shouldn't be the thing that needs automation; frankly, if it is, I generally think the codebase isn't well-enough factored.
What I find LLMs useful for is simply as a glorified search engine. That's not a small thing: my experience over the past six months is that phrasing my question as a question in Kagi (which turns on the Quick Answer feature), and then double-checking the citations, takes me about half as much time as a conventional search does. Given how much of my time is spent on simply looking stuff up, that's not a small thing.
But code automation? Until and unless that produces truly high-quality code, without dumb bugs, based specifically on my codebase, it's taking the minor problem and making it worse, which is a foolish waste of my time.