augustk

Bill Hicks on Marketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

After Pascal Niklaus Wirth designed Modula-2 and then Oberon which is even tidier. Oberon is both smaller and more capable than both of its predecessors.

https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

"Accept everything"

Turning off Javascript made the dot go away.

That sounds like shoulder pain.

The hospital information system Millenium from Oracle was bought by two regions in south of Sweden for around 400 million USD. It turned out to be unusable for Swedish healthcare and had to be shut down after just three days. Actual users of the software (doctors and nurses) were not involved in the procurement.

And knowing how to get the version of an application (which used to be in Help -> About).

For group chats in Microsoft Teams with more than seven participants, if you click on "View and add participants" (an icon with two people and a plus sign) you see a list of seven participants. At first I didn't know that you could scroll in this list.

Then it turns out that the book was written by an LLM.

Why don't we instead focus our energies on the user. For some very important software applications the customer is not the user. Let the sales department focus on the customer.

Isn't the manufacturer to blame if I get neck problems then?

Something that would be useful in my case is a monitor stand stand. Does anyone know why almost no current monitor can be raised so that the upper edge is at eye level? Is it due to incompetence among the current breed of designers? Quite a few of my colleges have a stack of books beneath the monitor stand.

Postconditions are in conflict with programmers' love of early returns.

The argument in the article was that the for loop is (potentially) "lying" and that is still true in my example. Niklaus Wirth's Modula-2 had a LOOP statement in which an EXIT statement could occur anywhere. That statement was at least not misleading. In Wirth's last revision of his last programming language Oberon the loop statement is removed and return is no longer a statement but a clause at the end of a function procedure. This makes Oberon a purely structured language.

https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

It's also worth noting that statements like

  for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++) {
    S;
    if (P) {
      break;
    }
  }

are just as bad since `break' (and `continue' and early `return') are a just gotos in disguise.

"universal access to a large universe of documents"

It's a sad fact that a large part of the web doesn't work without Javascript, a technology which enables privacy-invasive practices (and surveillance capitalism). It wasn't as bad when progressive enhancement was the norm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

With so many ready meals to choose from I don't understand why anyone nowadays would cook anything from scratch.

Should be easy to correct the default behavior for the next release if the issue is reported.

It's also worth noting that a customer is not necessarily a user. As a developer I don't care so much about the customer but I care wholeheartedly about the users.

In the best scenario the developers are also active users of the software they produce. Then a design flaw or an error that affects the users will also affect the developers and will (hopefully) motivate the latter to correct it.

Progressive enhancement is the way to go if you care about technical excellence. For some reason it fell out of fashion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

And also bring back progressive enhancement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

Or create the family

If the input parameters are invalid there is an error in the program so it makes more sense to use the assert function. Why would you need to undo something due to the restriction of a single point of exit?

Better stick to a single point of exit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311080

Then there is the joy of making the program source code as easy as possible to comprehend. This motivation seems to be rather unusual among programmers unfortunately.

> Now just UTF-16 and non '\n' newline types remaining to go

Also ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) should be the default date format.

Just tech bros being tech bros.

https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly

After installation you need to enable it in Settings -> Apps -> Safari -> Extensions -> uBlock Origin Lite.

I also uninstalled my previous advertising blocker AdBlock Pro by selecting "Delete App" in Settings -> General -> iPhone Storage -> AdBlock Pro.