In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s concept for a Dune film from the early 1970s, each house has their costumes and architecture designed by a contemporary artist. Giger was the designer for the Harkonnen, and several of his ideas persisted beyond the failed film.

The Harkonnen Castle

A Harkonnen chair

I assumed Villeneuve was calling back to those designs.

People in times of desperate oppression and violence rarely turn to the uncaring vastness of the chaotic universe for comfort.

Is it just me, or is it worrying how companies keep packing up and selling off the only parts of their businesses that actually, you know, make stuff, in favor of becoming full time bullshit peddlers?

I’ve been wanting to get a pipe Garfield tattoo since first seeing this. It changed me. Made me better.

I’m definitely getting my blog going regularly again… next year…

All these jokes about naming variables and yet no serious suggestions that if you have a turtle2, what you really need is a turtle array. I like to block out all the memory I’ll need for the whole program up front, put it all in one big array, and then I can use clean, easy to remember numbers for all my variables!

He can’t even, it used to be a widespread problem

It’s posts that are a step up from piss-posting, but below regular unmodified posting.

I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.

You’re right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.

JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don’t really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I’m sure something like XLT exists, but there’s no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.

That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there’s no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.

I’ve written Go code; they were right to fear.

I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it’s automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with // comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.

I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.

Seeing this actually sent a small wave of dread through my body

What’s with the downvotes on a silly joke? Is the Linux kernel team on Lemmy?

That’s why Rust had to be developed! Oxidize all those computers and stuff back to nature.

To be fair, this is also how VS looks when you open a project fresh from the clone. Or after updating .net versions. .NET is awful about losing references and then claiming thousands of errors. Sometimes just running the build will fix it by relinking the DLLs it couldn’t find.

But also yes, VS with a team can be “fun” if people don’t sync their formatting settings. I once had a junior that kept converting spaces to tabs on every file he’d touch. You’d get it fixed and then he’d screw up his settings again with a VS update or something.

Oh you have no idea how deep my paranoia on this goes! We’ve been implementing Dynamics 365 at my office, MS made software that manages your entire business from the accounting ledgers on out. Copilot AI is everywhere in it, trying to encourage you to teach it how to do things.

MS wants to offer the next generation of knowledge worker. No more accountants, no more senior managers of inventories and all those many miscellaneous titles it takes to run a company. Certainly no more technical support. AI is going to do it all. MS wants to tell every business how to do business.

I was curious if (since these are statistical models and not actually counting letters) maybe this or something like it is a common “gotcha” question used as a meme on social media. So I did a search on DDG and it also has an AI now which turned up an interestingly more nuanced answer.

It’s picked up on discussions specifically about this problem in chats about other AI! The ouroboros is feeding well! I figure this is also why they overcorrect to 4 if you ask them about “strawberries”, trying to anticipate a common gotcha answer to further riddling.

DDG correctly handled “strawberries” interestingly, with the same linked sources. Perhaps their word-stemmer does a better job?

Usually Julian is the one drinking, I think Rick is more likely to give it a toke!

I went on a tear at one point trying to really understand, rigorously (I’m a computer and maths person by trade and training), what dialectics are and how, specifically, the material dialectic (the foundation of Marxist thought!) should work.

I was a bit dissapointed to understand that they can’t really be “rigorous” in that fashion and that they’re really more of a philosophical and rhetorical tool. I do still get a lot of use from them, and in discussions with other people the framework of the dialectic (“Ok, what if we took these two ideas and put them on opposite ends of a spectrum, how does that look?”) is very useful for explaining and expounding upon ideas.

“Trending on Occupied Twitter”