• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: May 7th, 2024

help-circle


  • Some rural place down in BaWü. The headmaster wasn’t even a fan of advanced education. I wonder how state policy may have had an impact on this. Maybe BaWü was just more bent on being internationally attractive in its education policies?

    Also, my current employer’s company has been internationally active and accordingly multilingual for over two decades too, from what I hear, so that might introduce additional bias.

    I guess it boils down to “our country is too diverse to allow sweeping generalisations”. I am glad to learn your perspective on this :)


  • Idk what you average over, but I learned English in school from the first grade over twenty years ago. When I was done with school, I worked as a tutor for it too. At least the youth seems to be getting on with it alright, and in the IT world, a level of English proficiency is expected and in places even required. I can mix in English phrases if I can’t think of the German one and my colleagues understand me well enough.

    Sure, the other person’s “better than native speakers” might be hyperbolic, but English proficiency isn’t as awful as you make it out to be.

    In the particular context of a Hamburg Airport sign, I think the language requirements for working in aviation mean that anyone working there will speak English. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that their IT system would be configured in English at an intersection between two English-heavy industries.











  • Then do some digging and find that the GitHub instructions omitted some particular dependency, make a mental note to contribute a PR to the documentation later once you’ve got it working, get it working, promptly forget contributing that documentation, move distro later, try to reinstall the same program, make the same mistake, same discovery, learn nothing, repeat ad nauseam.




  • [The list concatenation function] ++ is an infix function i.e. [1,2,3] ++ [3,4,5] = [1,2,3,3,4,5] (which will be equivalent to doing (++) [1,2,3] [3,4,5] by virtue of how infix functions work in Haskell).

    I think that’s the part I was most confused by. I’m coming mostly from Java and C, where ++ would be the unary operator to increment a number. I would have expected that symbol in a functional language context to be a shorthand for + 1. The idea of it being an infix function didn’t occur to me.

    Partial applications I remember from a class on Clojure I took years ago, but as far as I remember, the functions always had to come first in any given expression. Also, I believe partial fills the arguments from the left, so to add a suffix, I’d have to use a reversed str function. At that point, it would probably be more idiomatic to just create an inline function to suffix it. So if my distant recollection doesn’t fail me, the Clojure equivalent of that partial function would be #(str % " Is Not an Emulator").

    iterate works the same though, I think, so the whole expression would be (def wine (iterate #(str % " Is Not an Emulator") "WINE") )

    This code was typed on a mobile phone in a quick break based off of years-old memories, so there might be errors, and given it was a single class without ever actually applying it to any problems, I have no real sense for how idiomatic it really is. I’ll gladly take any corrections.

    NGL though, that last, readable version is sexy as hell.


  • Game Conqueror also works, but is missing a lot of features too from what I can tell. Don’t know how it holds up against PINCE.

    I’ve had success getting CE to run with Proton though, specifically by using SteamTinkerLaunch to run it as additional custom command with the game. There are other ways too, like protontricks. In my experience, it has been mostly stable, with the occasional freeze, but generally usable for pointer scanning and such.


  • I’ve never worked with Haskell, but I’ve been meaning to expand my programming repertoire (particularly since I don’t get to do much coding at work, let alone learn new languages) and this makes for a nice opportunity, so I wanna try to parse this / guess at the syntax.

    I assume iterate function arg applies some function to arg repeatedly, presumably until some exit condition is met? Or does it simply create an infinite, lazily evaluated sequence?

    ( ) would be an inline function definition then, in this case returning the result of applying ++suffix to its argument (which other languages might phrase something like arg += suffix), thereby appending " Is Not an Emulator" to the function argument, which is initially “WINE”.

    So as a result, the code would produce an infinite recurring “WINE Is Not an Emulator Is Not an Emulator…” string. If evaluated eagerly, it would result in an OOM error (with tail recursion) or a stack overflow (without). If evaluated lazily, it would produce a lazy string, evaluated only as far as it is queried (by some equivalent of a head function reading the first X characters from it).

    How far off am I? What pieces am I missing?


  • Cognitive disabilities are a thing. Accommodating for them would be a good thing.

    Not that that’s the intended purpose of that AI, probably, but if it can simplify the form without twisting the content*, it could be a great tool to make complex works more approachable. It’s not necessarily a question of “can they understand it” as much as “can they be arsed to read it”. I know plenty of people that just straight up didn’t read one of the books relevant for our finals and just skirted through with guides laying out the things you were supposed to know. The book wasn’t necessarily impossible to understand, but so tedious to dig into they just couldn’t muster the motivation.

    I don’t know how many books worth reading for their point remain unread by people who didn’t find the wrapping around that point appealing. Simplification may help them, even if it butchers the artful use of language others enjoy.

    *The issue I’m concerned about is that the content may be inadvertently twisted in the process of being parsed and rephrased by an AI with no actual sense for the semantics. Who would notice? Would you have someone proof-read it? What about repeat queries of the same book? Would you assemble a library of simplified books?

    At that point you might as well make manually supervised “translations” into simpler language that take care to preserve the point, can be written once and revised when language shifts. You’d still get the benefits, but also be less dependent on an AI doing a good job.