Python item 1

Mutable default arguments don’t get re-initialized with each function call.

got an audible wtf from me… Been using for years, totally unaware.

The “internal business tool” was a well known industry wide product that I had experience in. I should have known that changing an email address in any environment caused that new email address to be notified. It was my fault yes

My first week at a major fund company I was assigned to an internal business tool used by thousands. I noticed all the company email addresses in the sandbox weren’t correct, so I ran a script to correct them. Cue a call from C-level to my boss asking why he got a “email changed notification”. Followed by another… And another… And another…

I went out to lunch

I think also because it’s become impossible for a major game to be someone’s passion project. They’re designed by committee out of necessity. The level of organising required creates processes and structure and stultifyies individual flair.

Gamers are responsible for this too. The amount of moaning and pouting if things aren’t perfect…

Great! Stop poorly integrating every single thing you can lay your hands on and maybe tend to some of the feature fix requests on idea exchange with hundreds of thousands of votes…

This is just portable stenography, right?

I’d been there one way or another since 2005.

Sometime in 2024 was asked to explain a Bible passage -> did so -> site wide ban for anti-semitism. Passage in question was Ezekiel criticising the behaviour of Jews in the 6th century BC

Reddit is a disaster. Unless you’re generating bland, safe, family friendly slop that’ll rake in ad impressions they don’t want to know.

Just let it die and move on

Patient: poops self

AI Nurse: “would you like to hear a poem?”

KFC and chocolate

There were two goldfish in a tank. One says to the other “do you know how to drive this thing?”

To my recollection, this feeling happens every January. I’ve seen posts like this for years and years. January is known as the most depressing month. Many people fast from alcohol, maybe fast from media til 1st Feb? I don’t know if it’ll make you feel good. It might make you feel less bad?

By “the cloud” people are generally referring to all the services and storage that you are connected to across the internet. This exists on other computers owned by companies or other individuals. Yes there are lots of storage services available from Apple iCloud to Google Drive to OneDrive (Microsoft) to lots and lots of others. They tend to work in slightly different ways. Some just “backup” your device and you can’t really use them as a replacement for browsing photos for example. Others do exactly this. Most have a small amount of free space available after which you pay. If you are looking to free up space on your SSD I would make sure the one you go with is a well known, reliable one, as they will be the only ones with a copy of your data- you want to make sure they look after it properly!

Manipulative headline? In the technology community?? Que devient ce monde…

South Korea + US better elevate their threat model of the NK army to “now thoroughly trained by someone who once shot themselves in the leg”

For sure. Askhistorians is still good, as are some niche technology ones and regional ones. But the rest are trash compared to 10-15 years ago

It’s all bullshit. Reddit is an increasingly low quality magazine for ‘B grade students with a superiority complex’. AITA is just the very-obviously-made-up agony aunt section…

There’s a thin line between being entertained and being informed. The latter requires more energy to repel BS. Often a community is started by genuine people who want to share high quality articles. The reputation attracts a larger crowd who are ‘entertained’ by this, and while valuing the integrity of the content, do not themselves exert the same effort. At some point the ‘entertained’ crowd start contributing content themselves, of lower quality, but which is popular for its entertainment rather than truth value. Times this progression by ten if the platform owners are monitising attention. ‘casuals’ and the pursuit of profit drive enshitification.

“one blink for everything’s ok, two blinks for nothing’s wrong…”

Good. They should stop frantically adding new features and tidy up some of the crap we have to use day to day.

It’s simpler code to re-download the file than retrieve what cached version may or may not exist in memory

This seems incredible

There would already have to be a data layer that serves the main web page renderer. That layer would already have to handle looking in the cache or making an http request in event of a cache miss. It would seem almost trivial for a UI operation like ‘save to disk’ to simply call that layer in the same way

For a few hundred K image file I can understand why some might not bother, but I’ve seen this behaviour where a browser already has an MP4 cached (such that it can replay any part of it without subsequent http traffic) and yet it still makes a new request when saving. It’s weird to be honest…