WTF Bites

Bulb

@ixvedeusi To be fair it's not like Visual Stupido is alone in this. All IDEs I've ever seen have this Retarded™ Errors™ dialog and pretend it's useful. Also to be fair most languages other than C++ have much simpler error messages that don't need as many additional notes to make sense.

ixvedeusi

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

Also to be fair most languages other than C++ have much simpler error messages that don't need as many additional notes

And then there's Rust where every error message fills a book, including the table of contents, bibliography and accompanying illustrations

izzion

@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

Also to be fair most languages other than C++ have much simpler error messages that don't need as many additional notes

And then there's Rust where every error message fills a book, including the table of contents, bibliography and accompanying illustrations

Guess that explains why Rust is about to make the Linux kernel.

Bulb

@izzion No, it does not. Linux kernel has been pure C so far, C++ was not only not acceptable for inclusion, but not really possible to use, because the Linux headers do not compile as C++. And C does not generate these long error chains much (only for includes).

cvi

@ixvedeusi Vulkan's validation layers have a similar approach. They say what's wrong (mostly), cite relevant portions of the standard, and indicate which chapter of the standard you should read if you aren't yet sufficiently beaten over the head with legalese.

hungrier

@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:

@hungrier said in WTF Bites:

Error List:

Hey, VS, stop shoving that useless crap into my face! Give me back the perfectly functional Output tab I was just looking at and that actually contains the info I need!

I don't care right now about those pointless linter warnings in that other project I'm not even building or using right now and that you insist on always putting on top! And no, "no operator found that takes a left-hand operand of type X" by itself doesn't tell me anything useful, I also need those "could be this_overload or that_overload" messages, the "while trying to match the argument list (X, const Y)", and most importantly the series of "see reference to function template instantiation" messages that tell me where and what the problem actually is.
</rant>

TBH I'd rather have a working, useful error list than having to sift through build output, but most of the errors I see nowadays are vague and not actionable from the error list, like some problem in generated code or some mismatched version number in a project reference

dcon

@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:

Hey, VS, stop shoving that useless crap into my face!

You mean with this option:

(Options -> Projects and Solutions / General)

Rhywden

WTF of my day: So sometimes I get C# stuff recommended by YouTube. Some of those guys have a clue - some don't. Today was one of the latter.

You know how you previously did poor man's string concatenation like this:

string baz = "bar";
string foo = "bar " + baz + " foo";

Of course, now there's either the string builder or the other option which doesn't annoy you with additions everywhere. Plus, you can easily see where you missed a space or have one too many.

string baz = "bar";
string foo = $"bar {baz} foo";

And then there are people who do this and completely miss the point (and also the space between the two variables):

Gribnit

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:

Hey, VS, stop shoving that useless crap into my face!

You mean with this option:

(Options -> Projects and Solutions / General)

This Is Not A Help Thread.

TimeBandit

@Gribnit said in WTF Bites:

~~This Is Not A Help Thread~~ I didn't ask for help.

FTFY

Bulb

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

A jackknife opens in my pocket every time I see “FirstName” and “LastName” variables, and especially when they then just get concatenated like this. The variability between different cultures in how names are written is so big that it is guaranteed to be wrong for someone. Just have a name and let the user use it whichever way they like.

Unless you need to match it to official documents, but those have “given name” and “family name”.

Gribnit

@Bulb I put some micrometer counters in to see how measurably retarded one approach to first and last names was, given that it was not on the block for actual change but was visibly retarded. And yes, it's also retarded per those measurements, it turns out. Almost motivated to look at the current results even. But not actually in fact motivated.

Benjamin Hall

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

A jackknife opens in my pocket every time I see “FirstName” and “LastName” variables, and especially when they then just get concatenated like this. The variability between different cultures in how names are written is so big that it is guaranteed to be wrong for someone. Just have a name and let the user use it whichever way they like.

Unless you need to match it to official documents, but those have “given name” and “family name”.

I actually just had this fight and won. Our current system used bifurcated names (badly and inconsistently), and all of us but the architect (who is also the grand poobah of the engineering department) wanted to gone. So I went over his head to product/design and they agreed with me. One name field it is. And a separate "display name" for different contexts (groups the user might be part of).

Gribnit

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

And a separate "display name" for different contexts (groups the user might be part of).

Hopefully there are suitable controls to prevent the use of reserved names.

ixvedeusi

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

You mean with this option

Apparently at some point I found this box and unchecked it (with great prejudice) in VS2019. So sad that it's literally impossible for VS2022 to pick up the settings from the previous version when it gets installed.

Kamil Podlesak

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

A jackknife opens in my pocket every time I see “FirstName” and “LastName” variables, and especially when they then just get concatenated like this. The variability between different cultures in how names are written is so big that it is guaranteed to be wrong for someone. Just have a name and let the user use it whichever way they like.

Unless you need to match it to official documents, but those have “given name” and “family name”.

I actually just had this fight and won. Our current system used bifurcated names (badly and inconsistently), and all of us but the architect (who is also the grand poobah of the engineering department) wanted to gone. So I went over his head to product/design and they agreed with me. One name field it is. And a separate "display name" for different contexts (groups the user might be part of).

From practical perspective: You are missing the "sort name", because the expected behavior is to sort by "family name" first.

In the end, however, this is not a big deal because the two-name system is already legally enforced around the globe. If it does not match someone's culture, well, tough luck. And then we get into politics (in your particular example, I would expect lots of whining about this "woke political correct bullshit").

Arantor

@Kamil-Podlesak but it isn’t as enforced as you’d believe. I have had to deal with HR systems failing to cope with individuals with only a first name because that’s their legal name as per their government issued paperwork.

Just because it is legally enforced in the West does not make it consistently legally enforced elsewhere, and if you’re dealing with parts of Africa or Eastern Europe, you’d be surprised how much this actually comes up…

Carnage

@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

A jackknife opens in my pocket every time I see “FirstName” and “LastName” variables, and especially when they then just get concatenated like this. The variability between different cultures in how names are written is so big that it is guaranteed to be wrong for someone. Just have a name and let the user use it whichever way they like.

Unless you need to match it to official documents, but those have “given name” and “family name”.

I actually just had this fight and won. Our current system used bifurcated names (badly and inconsistently), and all of us but the architect (who is also the grand poobah of the engineering department) wanted to gone. So I went over his head to product/design and they agreed with me. One name field it is. And a separate "display name" for different contexts (groups the user might be part of).

From practical perspective: You are missing the "sort name", because the expected behavior is to sort by "family name" first.

In the end, however, this is not a big deal because the two-name system is already legally enforced around the globe. If it does not match someone's culture, well, tough luck. And then we get into politics (in your particular example, I would expect lots of whining about this "woke political correct bullshit").

The tax man in good old does it by having a single yuuuge name field, with a second string with numbers saying which name is what. And also a third field with a short form name, if you're one of those retards whose name is longer than 36 characters which is the limit in a lot of old government mainframes. My name is one of those on account of having several first names, that has a short form with just "tilltalsnamn" and "efternamn"
For instance some families use parental names instead of family names, such as if a woman named Gudmin has ha daughter named Linda, her name can be Linda Gudminsdottir.

Kamil Podlesak

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

@Kamil-Podlesak but it isn’t as enforced as you’d believe. I have had to deal with HR systems failing to cope with individuals with only a first name because that’s their legal name as per their government issued paperwork.

Just because it is legally enforced in the West does not make it consistently legally enforced elsewhere, and if you’re dealing with parts of Africa or Eastern Europe, you’d be surprised how much this actually comes up…

Eastern Europe?? That is actually the place that is already well fit in the shape of first/last name (with a patronym in the middle, sometimes).

Anyway - yes, Africa or India allows people to have just one official name, or something other. It is, however, commonly accepted practice in "the West" to mold that in official databases. So yes, it does come up, and some bureaucrat decides. No need to solve it on the software level, that's what I mean. BTDT

I suppose it will eventually change in the future, but I don't think there is a political will to do that. And the fact that country like Sweden allows alternative naming schemes is actually something that is and will be used against the very idea.

Arantor

@Kamil-Podlesak until you have the bureaucrat saying the software should deal with it. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt with the little world-map-on-grid logo.

Orbiter

Normally, the Shuttle can't quite safely reach the orbital inclination required to pass over both those points from a Canaveral launch, but this is an alternate history in which either it launches from Vandenberg or everyone hates the Outer Banks.

dkf

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

A jackknife opens in my pocket every time I see “FirstName” and “LastName” variables, and especially when they then just get concatenated like this. The variability between different cultures in how names are written is so big that it is guaranteed to be wrong for someone. Just have a name and let the user use it whichever way they like.
Unless you need to match it to official documents, but those have “given name” and “family name”.

I remember when I applied to college, the (paper) form asked me for my full name, and to underline the part I wanted to use as an ordinary name. I'm not quite sure how things work out with a common name that isn't formally part of one's name (which is something I know some people do) but otherwise it seems like an extremely sensible approach.

dkf

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

Just because it is legally enforced in the West

It isn't enforced everywhere there. The UK does not require multiple parts to your name at all; it's just convention. There have been people who have legally changed their name to a single word. (In the case of the individual I'm thinking of, it was after a particularly nasty bust-up with both of his parents while they were having a divorce.)

Benjamin Hall

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

and if you’re dealing with parts of Africa or Eastern Europe, you’d be surprised how much this actually comes up…

Or Latin America, where having multiple names, all of which are important in various contexts, is common. Or Slavic countries, where not including a patronymic is wrong. Or Asia, where several countries put the family name first. Etc.

dkf

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

Or Asia, where several countries put the family name first.

Hungary's pretty keen on that too, but not always.

Benjamin Hall

@dkf said in WTF Bites:

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

Or Asia, where several countries put the family name first.

Hungary's pretty keen on that too, but not always.

And that inconsistency is one big reason to let the user tell us how they want to be called. It's not like this is checking the legal name database. Or, heaven forfend, has to be unique at any level. Or can be validated. So having one opaque string, with a separate field elsewhere for "what do you want to be called in group x" makes the most sense.

Arantor

@Benjamin-Hall the drama comes when you have lists of people and want to sort them by “default ordering” which for many is “by surname”.

It’s a nightmare to explain to people who can’t understand why “just sort by surname first” is a problem.

Zerosquare

@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:

Just make it configurable. Ideally per-user

: I took a look at 's computer, and it doesn't show the same things as mine. Fix it!

Arantor

@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:

@Kamil-Podlesak said in WTF Bites:

Just make it configurable. Ideally per-user

: I took a look at 's computer, and it doesn't show the same things as mine. Fix it!

And this will be the cause of so much WOMM it’s unreal.

Medinoc

@dkf said in WTF Bites:

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

Or Asia, where several countries put the family name first.

Hungary's pretty keen on that too, but not always.

France is pretty inconsistent with it. It's family name last in common parlance, but often first in official documents or lists. That's why we added the practice of putting the family name in ALL CAPS (which I was surprised to learn was not nearly as common outside of France as I thought).

Arantor

@Medinoc in my dealings with this, I was always given to understand the reason for SURNAMES was because it wasn’t that uncommon for people to have surnames that plausibly could be first names so it was done as a clear disambiguator.

For example something like Michel Henry.

Medinoc

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

@Medinoc in my dealings with this, I was always given to understand the reason for SURNAMES was because it wasn’t that uncommon for people to have surnames that plausibly could be first names so it was done as a clear disambiguator.

For example something like Michel Henry.

Yes, that too (I should know).

Bulb

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

It’s a nightmare to explain to people who can’t understand why “just sort by surname first” is a problem.

Sort by surname works in most countries, except the few left that don't have them and only use patronymics.

And then it of course depends on how the Asian names were entered, because the surname usually comes first.

Which reminds me, at the previous company I contracted for (a huge multi-national corporation) the European employees consistently got e-mails in the form givenname.surname(.ext)@company.com, with the associated fullname in form SURNAME Givenname (department). But for the Indian employees it looked like there was no rhyme or reason to whether their given name was first or last in the address and whether it was first or last in the label (and it was never uppercased).

dcon

@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

You mean with this option

Apparently at some point I found this box and unchecked it (with great prejudice) in VS2019. So sad that it's literally impossible for VS2022 to pick up the settings from the previous version when it gets installed.

That's odd... I don't remember setting it in 2022 (I did in 2019). But then I actually login to VS with my dev acct, so maybe that's the difference?

Arantor

@Bulb Exactly - this kind of thing is complicated but trying to explain why this is complicated to manglement is a nightmare because it never occurred to them that names came in any format unlike their own.

JBert

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

@ixvedeusi said in WTF Bites:

@dcon said in WTF Bites:

You mean with this option

Apparently at some point I found this box and unchecked it (with great prejudice) in VS2019. So sad that it's literally impossible for VS2022 to pick up the settings from the previous version when it gets installed.

That's odd... I don't remember setting it in 2022 (I did in 2019). But then I actually login to VS with my dev acct, so maybe that's the difference?

I believe Visual Studio migrates the configuration from previous versions the first time you open it. I customized a bunch of shortcuts and as far as I remember I didn't have to define them again in newer versions.

Rhywden

A little different from the usual

Swantje Unterberg, DER SPIEGEL / Oct 14, 2022

München: Plagiatsvorwurf gegen Rechtsmediziner war offenbar konstruiert

Der Plagiatsvorwurf gegen Matthias Graw stützt sich offenbar auf eine Fälschung: Der fast 400-seitige Sammelband, aus dem der LMU-Professor angeblich abgeschrieben hatte, soll gefälscht sein.

A leading pathologist was discovered to have massively plagiarized for his thesis due to him having copied several passages out of an omnibus.

However, as it turned out, this omnibus was a forgery. A well-done forgery. Just look at it:

A short summary of the steps the forger had to implement:

Reading the original thesis, taking one topic out of it (Colchicine) and then inventing a whole congress out of thin air. Since the thesis was published in 1987, the supposed congress was placed even before that and all "attendees" were deceased.
Engaging a ghostwrite agency to put all the texts together. Not a cheap service. Though those guys made several errors (like switching the last and first name of a supposed author)
Printing the book (though he neglected to artificially age the book and made several other errors like using fonts not available in the 80s)
Publishing the book via eBay

But seriously, this is a next level stunt.

JBert

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

[...] trying to explain why [sorting names on surname] is complicated to manglement is a nightmare because it never occurred to them that names came in any format unlike their own.

I just spotted this on StackExchange, showing that programmers will also try to make things more "exciting":

Can I legally include a line break in my child's name?

Ethics aside, is it legal (or even possible) to include a line break (newline) in my child's name? Preferably at the end of the child's first name, directly after the last letter. So instead of (for

topspin

@JBert what an idiotic question. A newline is whitespace. In documents you fill in letters, not ASCII codes / UTF character sequences. I mean, if the officials allowed it, He could try any of these:

Bobby \n Tables
Bobby CRLF Tables
Bobby 0x0D0A Tables
Bobby  Tables

But that still wouldn't mean the \n in his name is a newline.
Might as well ask if he can make his child's name be in Comic Sans 18 pt bold.

JBert

@topspin I think it wasn't a very serious question, but it felt appropriate for this thread.

Or should I have added an ABZUGSZÜNGELWARNUNG like @Gąska loved doing?

Tsaukpaetra

@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:

@Bulb said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

A jackknife opens in my pocket every time I see “FirstName” and “LastName” variables, and especially when they then just get concatenated like this. The variability between different cultures in how names are written is so big that it is guaranteed to be wrong for someone. Just have a name and let the user use it whichever way they like.

Unless you need to match it to official documents, but those have “given name” and “family name”.

I actually just had this fight and won. Our current system used bifurcated names (badly and inconsistently), and all of us but the architect (who is also the grand poobah of the engineering department) wanted to gone. So I went over his head to product/design and they agreed with me. One name field it is. And a separate "display name" for different contexts (groups the user might be part of).

I secretly abolished the first/last name as well.

Now so long as your data fits within 500 bytes, it's all good!

kazitor

Status: committing crimes against C

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
	char greeting[] = " \n Hello, index abuse!";
	int i = 10;
	while(i --> 1)
		putchar((2*i)[greeting-1]);

	return 0;
}

While it does compile and run, is of course the braces and partial lack thereof

Tsaukpaetra

@kazitor said in WTF Bites:

While it does compile and run

I was pondering what the expected result was, so I slapped it in $randomOnlineCompiler.

It did what I expected. So I decided to click this mysterious "beautify" button and...

#include <stdio.h>

 int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  
char greeting[] = " \n Hello, index abuse!";
  
int i = 10;
  
while (i-- > 1)
    
putchar ((2 * i)[greeting - 1]);
  
 
return 0;

}

The more I click it, the more carriage returns there be...

Edit: In case perhaps the thought was Markdumb might be erasing leading whitespace...

Arantor

@Tsaukpaetra beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if that series taught us nothing, it taught us that there are some right monsters out there.

dkf

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if that series taught us nothing, it taught us that there are some right monsters out there.

It's the extra eye tentacles, isn't it?

dcon

@JBert said in WTF Bites:

@Arantor said in WTF Bites:

[...] trying to explain why [sorting names on surname] is complicated to manglement is a nightmare because it never occurred to them that names came in any format unlike their own.

I just spotted this on StackExchange, showing that programmers will also try to make things more "exciting":

Can I legally include a line break in my child's name?

Ethics aside, is it legal (or even possible) to include a line break (newline) in my child's name? Preferably at the end of the child's first name, directly after the last letter. So instead of (for

In a few years: "Child Acquitted Of Killing Parents By Reason Of Necessity"