I fixed it, but that is weird. I originally thought it had a double “r”, but I looked it up to check and I’d swear that the results spelled it with only one. Now I check again and it’s a double “r”.

Must be arrabbiata, 'cause it’s got quite a burn.

I know it’s a really picky take, but I resent the implication that I should want to keep my personal files mixed in at the same level of the file hierarchy as all my applications’ random settings, cached data, and temporary garbage. Documents, Music, Videos, Projects, .config, .cache, SelfishAppName, OtherSelfishAppName…

It bothered me when Microsoft started doing it in Win95, and it still bothers me in Linux. Especially when software acts surprised (or occasionally indignant) that I don’t keep all my files in those directories. I have lost small bits of my own work over the years by forgetting to back up things that recalcitrant software refused to store anywhere else.

But I am amused that this is the same name that I use at the top of my own storage hierarchy for self-made things.

Your comment seems to be trying to disagree with me, but I think you wrote almost the same things that I wrote in the comment that you’re replying to:

• The Rust book is about much more than just what’s in its title (my point being that this also goes for the cited C++ book).
• C++ is a baroque and sometimes unwieldy language.

Initialization in C++ is so simple that somebody wrote a nearly 300-page book on the subject

There’s a book about 101 ways to cut potatoes. Perhaps that could be a real mike-drop bit of evidence that we shouldn’t be cooking potatoes.

Here’s a 249-page book “just” about atomics and locks in Rust. Does a book this large about only one aspect of Rust prove that it’s a terrible language? No, because as with the C++ book, if we look at the summary of contents we can see that it actually covers a great deal more, simply with a focus on those topics.

Luckily we don’t have to be compete masters of every aspect of a language in order to use it.

Honestly, I think that modern C++ is a very piecemeal language with no clear direction, and it has many issues because of that. But the title and page count of a single book is not a convincing argument of anything.

I’m all for humourous roasts of things, but does anyone really find this funny? Was the author possibly being serious? I don’t know. What I do know is that I stopped watching after the first four examples because they were all deliberately incorrect or misleading, but also didn’t seem funny to me.

1. Crazy initialization
   That sure is a lot of ways to initialize a variable! Even though some of these variables are quite different and would be initialized differently from each other in many other languages, even only counting the initializations that are functionally equivalent, there are a bunch of abuses of syntax that I’ve never seen used in the wild.

At this point I had hope that this was meant to be amusing.

2. Printing to the console
   C++ has had a version of C’s printf function from the very beginning. That weird stream syntax has some hardcore fans but many people ignore it. I did my CS degree close to 30 years ago, and the only time I used stream syntax was for one lab class exercise in which we had to show that we understood how to use stream syntax.

They still could be going for a comedy roast, I guess.

3. Getting a random number
   Much like the printf statement for number 2 above, C++ had its own version of C’s rand function from the start. I’ve never even heard of the stuff that’s being shown in this part of the video.

OK that was virtually the same fake point as the previous one, and still no punchlines in sight.

4. Having to type “static_cast” every time you recast a variable
   Nope, you don’t. You’re free to ask the compiler to automagically recast your variables to another type without giving any further detail just like you can in C. In fact, they’re often called “C-style casts”. There are even implicit casts, where you literally don’t add anything, and just cross your fingers that the compiler does what you think it should do. It’s like a little bit of the thrill of dynamic typing brought into C++! By using the static_cast keyword, you can tell the compiler that you understand that there’s a potential issue with this recast, but that you expect that the standard way of handling it will be fine. There are other keywords for more unusual situations; it’s not just a random bit of busywork added for no reason.

The original StarCraft and Brood War expansion didn’t require Internet for installation. And while the original boxed copies (I got the “Battle Chest” re-release which is the same) required the CD to be in the drive, the last one or two official update patches let you copy the .mpq (?) data files from the CDs into the installation directory so you can play without them.

Reading current discussion, it seems more like “You say that it’s impossible to dirty your house, yet nothing’s stopping anyone from dumping out this bucket of mud on your floor, curious!”

Sorry for not being clear; when I said “keep track automatically” I meant dynamic typing. Of course you’re right that “keeping track of your variables” could also be interpreted to refer to static typing.

I started programming in a time when the idea that the computer could keep track of your variable types for you automatically was a fever dream, so it’s wild for me to see some programmers now throwing shade at particular langages for “not implementing proper variable typing functionality”.

It feels like someone saying that low-fat milk producers are too cheap or lazy to put enough fat in their milk.

Fashion really does go in cycles.

Years ago I used to have Lakka on a bootable USB drive to turn an old, low-powered laptop into a dedicated emulation machine.

The specs are hard to read, but I believe the main processor is an AMD A6-1450 APU, designed for tablets and released some time in or after 2013. Not a powerful chip by modern standards, but IMO still useable depending on your expectations. It’s definitely capable of emulating SNES without breaking a sweat. Even PS1 shouldn’t be a problem at native resolution. N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast are probably where you’ll start seeing slowdown in some games, and anything more, like PS2 or GCN, is unlikely to be playable.

I have no expertise in this field and this is what I got just from reading the article without doing any further research.

It seems that a consortium of giant tech companies got together to make a royalty-free video codec called AV1. This included getting legal agreements from a bunch of relevant patent holders that they wouldn’t pursue legal action against anyone implementing AV1.

However, due to the U.S. patent office’s current policy of issuing patents left and right and letting applicants sort out whether or not their patents are actually unique in court later, lawyers representing Dolby and a couple of other companies that hold some separate video-related patents have smelled money in the water and are trying to sort out whether or not their patents are unique in court.

Drum memory predates the Sinclair by quite a while. But there is an often repeated story involving an impossibly-optimised Blackjack program for a drum memory computer called “The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer”.

A friendly heads-up: I think you mean “Liberation Serif”. Serif and sans-serif (“without serif”) are common categories for fonts.

I sympathize with the point of the article, but if someone’s seriously citing Flash, which had widespread success for a run of about 15 years before being overtaken by later developments (driven in part by a billionaire with an axe to grind), as a short-lived “dead end” that was best avoided, then how long do they think is a sensible amount of time to wait to see if something’s worth spending time and effort? Nothing remains on top forever.

Man pages are the only reference material I know that has more information-free circular definition chains than Wikipedia. And I imagine that it’s for much the same reason; they’re primarily written and fought over by experts who only need terse reminder notes for themselves, and who can’t remember what it was like not spending every day up to their elbows in the subject.

I think that the big, highlighted quote a few paragraphs down–which I believe is also by the author of the article, even though they refer to themselves in the third person–seems somewhat at odds with what they say in the rest of the article. I would guess that they started writing it to make an emotional argument, then tried to back it up with logic, but along the way they lost their emotional momentum and forgot exactly what they were supposed to be arguing.

There’s an interesting section further down, though:

What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn’t let it, anyway.

There’s no need to get it back in the barn; the thing is lame, and only being kept propped up by a lot of (cash) injections and diversions. The facade will fall before they actually get it to work the way they pretend it works.

It’s the first law that I’m aware of that legally requires an automated system that you own and operate to snitch on you at any time, to anyone who asks, without asking your permission.

For the moment, it only has to report a piece of data that you are free to lie about. For the moment.

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You reminded me of a story I recently read, where the author highlighted just how much awesome programming someone had done by describing how their hands were cramping up.

It’s like estimating how well an artist paints by looking at how much paint is on their clothes, or judging how good a cook is by how many cuts and burns they have. The actions that cause those things are incidental to the process, not central, and an excessive amount points to incompetence, not hard and skillful work.