Oh I wish it was. Eg. here in Finland sharing movies etc. among friends or downloading them off the internet used to be legal as long as you weren’t doing it for profit or distributing stuff to a huge audience, but that changed in 2006 because the new EU Copyright Directive required it, and that directive was hugely influenced by the likes of WIPO.

Governments rarely realize anything related to IP that the copyright mafia doesn’t spoon-feed them, unfortunately.

Urr, I don’t think that’s it, I don’t think stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary and it wouldn’t really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?

A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls

Yeah I doubt those particular comments have anything to do with “AI”. It just seems fashionable to blame AI for absolutely everything nowadays

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

More of a tragicomedy, really

No thank you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8pxmNi-eiw

Not nearly as horrifying as advertised

Where’s your sense of adventure?!

Calling reverse() on a function should return its inverse

You’re no fun

Use a dynamically typed language and you won’t have to: just override the default reverse() method on strings like a Real Programmer!

Unintended consequences you say? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong?

"E".reverse() == "∃"

I dint know many OO languages that don’t have a useless toString on string types.

Well, that’s just going to be one of those “it is what it is” things in an OO language if your base class has a toString()-equivalent. Sure, it’s probably useless for a string, but if everything’s an object and inherits from some top-level Object class with a toString() method, then you’re going to get a toString() method in strings too. You’re going to get a toString() in everything; in JS even functions have a toString() (the output of which depends on the implementation):

In a dynamically typed language, if you know that everything can be turned into a string with toString() (or the like), then you can just call that method on any value you have and not have to worry about whether it’ll hurl at runtime because eg. Strings don’t have a toString because it’d technically be useless.

Everything that’s an Object is going to either inherit Object.prototype.toString() (mdn) or provide its own implementation. Like I said in another comment, even functions have a toString() because they’re also objects.

A String is an Object, so it’s going to have a toString() method. It doesn’t inherit Object’s implementation, but provides one that’s sort of a no-op / identity function but not quite.

So, the thing is that when you say const someString = "test string", you’re not actually creating a new String object instance and assigning it to someString, you’re creating a string (lowercase s!) primitive and assigning it to someString:

Compare this with creating a new String("bla"):

In Javascript, primitives don’t actually have any properties or methods, so when you call someString.toString() (or call any other method or access any property on someString), what happens is that someString is coerced into a String instance, and then toString() is called on that. Essentially it’s like going new String(someString).toString().

Now, what String.prototype.toString() (mdn) does is it returns the underlying string primitive and not the String instance itself:

Why? Fuckin beats me, I honestly can’t remember what the point of returning the primitive instead of the String instance is because I haven’t been elbow-deep in Javascript in years, but regardless this is what String’s toString() does. Probably has something to do with coercion logic.

This is absolutely true, but it still seems to me that we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water when we just stick to extremely terse symbols for everything regardless of context.

Reading articles would be so much easier if they used even slightly longer names – thankfully more and more computer science articles do tend to use more human readable naming nowadays, at least.

Sure, longer names make manipulation harder a bit more annoying if you’re doing it by hand, but if you do need to manipulate something you can then abbreviate the terms (and I’m 60% sure I’ve seen some papers that had both a longer form and a shorter form for terms, so one for explaining shit and one for the fiddly formal stuff)

Of course using terse terms is totally fine when it’s clear from the context what eg. ∆x means.

Which naturally means it’s impossible for it to be an issue for literally anybody else anywhere at any time

And no, before some dumb fuck has any bright ideas, I’m not saying this will be an issue for everybody, just that it’s absolutely fucking idiotic to pretend it’s never an issue.

It’s always great fun when people who have absolutely zero fucking clue how something works declare it “stupid”.

I got smoked out of a company I helped found because I had health issues, even though I was still capable of doing my job. It’s illegal to fire people for health issues here, but it’s not like firing someone is the only way to get rid of them.

Everybody who’s telling you you can legally use these appointments is probably completely correct (depending on your jurisdiction). Whether the legality actually matters is another thing entirely.