Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "and other jargon"
-
This one is for devs and gamers.
But first some background story.
My girlfriend is special. Not just generically lovey mush mush special. She is 1 in 100 more accurately 1 in 10000. She was born with a rare Congenital Heart Defect {CHD}. Called Truncus Arteriosus or TA for sake of brevity. TA's main thing is the two main arteries going into the heart are fused together and never seperated at birth. It's bad news. There is no cure for this kind of thing. Simply repairs that happen over the course of life.
So here is me. Desperately trying to find a way to get the word about this and the 40 other types of CHD out there in the world. I thought. "What if I make a game..." Not based around the medical jargon but on a level people could understand. I spent the better part of the last six years attending appointments with her and still don't get it. What I do get is her Emotional state. How her CHD causes her to think and feel.
So here is the pitch.
The game is about a girl who is diagnosed at birth with a CHD. She is now in her 20's and has to undergo an open heart surgery to repair the defect. The day comes. She goes under but when she wakes up she find herself in a final fantasy style environment. This new world has a darkness cast over it. She is unknowingly the hero of this world and she has to face off with multiple bosses of varied degrees of evil.
Then after beating these bosses she really wakes up from the surgery. Waking up to the realization that the world she saved was herself. And all the bosses were manifestations of her own internal feelings. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness, Denise, desire and so on.
I would sell this game with the caveat that 2/3 of all profits get split between the Adult Congenital Heart Association and Project Heart. As those are the two main organizations that deal heavily with creating standards of care and raising awareness for CHD survivors.
Thoughts?
Note: I am still learning game dev. This is an eventual goal for me.33 -
FFUUUuucccckkk me sideways. So I decided to look into USB type-c's power delivery and alt modes. Cause I kinda want to make an adapter card to run my displays over a single cable. TLDR of the rest: USB-C has some huge capabilities which noone is interested in using since its way to complex to handle for what its worth in the end.
Now PD alone is kinda ok to deal with since a lot of powerbanks use it and some hobby guys documented how to work with it. I find it really odd thou that you NEED to use a dedicated IC for using the configuration chanel to negotiate how much power you can draw. Why the USB standard didnt use some simple 5V low speed signalling? Also the standard says that you only have to implement 5v 0.6A with every other power level being optional. (This is also true for cables. Most manufacturers use only the USB 2.0 standard for them and brag about how fast type-C is. ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) )
Now to the alt modes. These motherfuckers are a real shitshow to deal with. First you need a Mux to deal with USB-C's two way insertion, so your signals wont get flipped. Next thing is that you have four lanes at your disposal in alt mode. Which you can either use for four Display Port Lanes or two DP lanes and two USB 3.0 lanes. (You always get USB 2.0) Now you may think that there would be one simple chip to do it all? Nope you need atleast two at the price of 6$ each. One for PD and one for Alt modes. Both are very hard to solder (QFN, 0.5 mm pitch 40+ pins) TI ended up being the only one with a decent offering of IC's that do what I need. As for working with them, you would think that you just slap a simple MCU on there that communicates over I2C or SPI to configure the chips? Nope! You program the chips memory from which it configures itsself. And the programming is done with some TI tool which gives me no idea as to how you can handle everything whith no control logic behind it.
Looking into alternative IC's leaves me with cypress semi. And their documentation is basically a total mess. I wanna know what that chip is good for and what I need to do to make it work. I dont care about technical details mixed with marketing jargon nobody understands. And I really despise that I have to register just to download a datasheet. Especially since there is no info about it on the main page.
And this whole rant hasnt even touched the topic that USB-C only uses DP and nothing else. So you better hope that you have DP++ so you can use a passive conversion.
This was my Ted Talk about USB-C. Some info in it may be subject to my stupidity and errors as it currently is 02:15 in the morning and I need some sleep.14 -
Buckle up, it's a long one.
Let me tell you why "Tree Shaking" is stupidity incarnate and why Rich Harris needs to stop talking about things he doesn't understand.
For reference, this is a direct response to the 2015 article here: https://medium.com/@Rich_Harris/...
"Tree shaking", as Rich puts it, is NOT dead code removal apparently, but instead only picking the parts that are actually used.
However, Rich has never heard of a C compiler, apparently. In C (or any systems language with basic optimizations), public (visible) members exposed to library consumers must have that code available to them, obviously. However, all of the other cruft that you don't actually use is removed - hence, dead code removal.
How does the compiler do that? Well, it does what Rich calls "tree shaking" by evaluating all of the pieces of code that are used by any codepaths used by any of the exported symbols, not just the "main module" (which doesn't exist in systems libraries).
It's the SAME FUCKING THING, he's just not researched enough to fully fucking understand that. But sure, tell me how the javascript community apparently invented something ELSE that you REALLY just repackaged and made more bloated/downright wrong (React Hooks, webpack, WebAssembly, etc.)
Speaking of Javascript, "tree shaking" is impossible to do with any degree of confidence, unlike statically typed/well defined languages. This is because you can create artificial references to values at runtime using string functions - which means, with the right input, almost anything can be run depending on the input.
How do you figure out what can and can't be? You can't! Since there is a runtime-based codepath and decision tree, you run into properties of Turing's halting problem, which cannot be solved completely.
With stricter languages such as C (which is where "dead code removal" is used quite aggressively), you can make very strong assertions at compile time about the usage of code. This is simply how C is still thousands of times faster than Javascript.
So no, Rich Harris, dead code removal is not "silly". Your entire premise about "live code inclusion" is technical jargon and buzzwordy drivel. Empty words at best.
This sort of shit is annoying and only feeds into this cycle of the web community not being Special enough and having to reinvent every single fucking facet of operating systems in your shitty bloated spyware-like browser and brand it with flashy Matrix-esque imagery and prose.
Fuck all of it.20 -
Deleted accounts could have a skeleton/corpse as the picture.
Adding "no offense" in the tags just to be a bit polite.6 -
Why do people who cannot write specs still write specs? There are guys who just cannot produce anything human readable.
- Don't list 50 things in the same sentence separated with semicolon. Don't you have list bullets in your Word?? Or table, anyone??
- Now that you managed to add a table, don't write a novel into the cells. Especially now that you have decided to use 30pt font size and 3cm wide columns.
- If it's not an equation, don't use parenthesis. Why? Since they (and this is just my opinion (someone else might think otherwise)) are a little bit (or a lot, depending on the reader(s)) annoying (or otherwise irritating) since they (the parenthesis) tend to make the text (of any kind) very difficult (hard) to read especially (there can be other reasons) when you (or someone else in the company) have decided to write reaaaally long and complex sentences which add no information but make the reader go back and forth of the text trying (and sometimes not succeeding) to make any sense out of it.
- Always remember to use cross-reference number like [1] but don't tell what it is referring to. Special bonus will be awarded, if the link is broken!
- Save space and time by not explaining things that you can just refer to. Just add vague "read from [1], [2] and [3] for info about this." And then expect the reader to go through thousands of pages of boring jargon.
And oh yeah, please ask comments in the review session and then ignore all of them, since "well technically all the information was in the spec". You just need to be Sherloc Holmes to connect the dots.2 -
I was inspired to be a programmer when I was 7 yrs old.
I started out using my dad's old Macintosh, it was pretty good at the time when I was 7. I played a game called "On The Run" at miniclip. I thought that one day I want to become a programmer who can do more than this or any other game.
Later when I was 9, my father bought a laptop but then he gave it to me. So I started and learn how computers work. It was a Acer 4376G I think, Windows Vista. (I didnt know vista was bad) I started with how to mod Java on a game called Need for Madness. That was when I learned about all sorts of jargon when looking up stuffs. I was able to somehow understand code but not write it. It was 9 years later, when at the end of 2015, I found khan academy and codecademy thru howtogeek. That was when I understand the most basic function that led me to build my entire knowledge or else I can only write -
On C++ forum and see reference to Type Erasure (TE). Search around, some Java shit bleeding into other programming languages. Finally find an article that not only explains what TE is, but why you would use it in C++. ITS JUST FUCKING DUCK TYPING. Please stop using stupid names for stuff. You don't sound smarter. You sound like an asshole. Anyway, thinking about it does make sense to call it Type Erasure, but I still think it sounds pretentious. Cool concept, stupid name. Will continue to confuse people saying: "oh, you mean duck typing?"
Cool article:
https://davekilian.com/cpp-type-era...
The wikipedia article about TE doesn't explain shit about why you would even use it. Just repeats the same word salad of words I first saw about TE. I get that its jargon, but from the outside it just sounds like bullshit. I have never heard anyone I work with spew out shit like that. Even the ones with masters degrees in computer science.
I am not even sure I want to learn more about CS than what keeps me employed. I don't want to sound like this when I talk. I have already said shit in meetings about modern C++ that has colleagues (other sparkies, and some CS people) wondering what I was smoking. It wasn't even that jargony.
Don't mind me, just a sparky starting to understand why the CS world is so fucked. Maybe its just academia I can't stand. I dunno.
I should ask in a meeting if someone can define a monad for me.25 -
A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.3 -
!rant
Software development has acquired some interesting jargon over the years, but I keep wondering if other languages and cultures have commonplace expressions for what can be translated as "improvisation-oriented programming" or "hammering code" (i. e. hacking something in a brutish way) -
I had my meeting hijacked by two managers yesterday. One just bitched about a problem I couldn't solve. The other came in, uninvited, and bitched at the first manager for pretty much the same problem lol. Isn't it their only job to be good at communicating? Then why do they suck at it more than 200 kindergarteners playing the fucking telephone game?!? And the second manager was like, "I don't understand your jargon, just fix this." Bitch, I don't think you understand english!