WTF Bites
-
how is this scam still going on?
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bioring-the-personal-trainer-on-your-finger-fitness-gadget#/
The technology behind BioRing
3-axis accelerometer
Bio-impedance
Optical HR sensorAnd they can find your Calorie intake?
Calorie, carbs, fat and protein intake
Calorie, carbs and fat burn
Sleep level
Water level
Stress level
Activity intensityAbsolute bull crap! It makes more sense to purchase one of these and be honest.
-
Et tu, KDE?
To summarize:
- Searching for
at
showsAtom
as first result - Searching for
ato
showsHugin Calibrate Lens
(Why is that even installed? What? Who? WHY?).Atom
is now the 5th result
Presumably it's prioritizing descriptions over names (Calibrator)? WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
- Searching for
-
Presumably it's prioritizing descriptions over names (Calibrator)? WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
Maybe because Open Source projects suck at naming applications: I have to think twice to remember names such as
apport
but I know that I want to report a bug.
-
@dse yeah, descriptions really help there. Also, they help when it's not my machine and I need, for example, a browser, and I don't know which are installed, so I can just start typing
Browser
and there ya go.Still, I don't get this shit. Are all OSs using the same asinine algorithm? Because Win 10 does the same shit.
-
Still, I don't get this shit. Are all OSs using the same asinine algorithm? Because Win 10 does the same shit.
Yeah, for one thing they should prioritize the name if it starts with what is typed. Google has become pretty good at reading people's minds, maybe they should get their algorithm from google.
-
@dse Google has pretty much the entire corpus of human writing to play with in terms of analysis and building a dictionary for Do You Mean purposes. Hardly surprising they'd get it right most of the time simply by playing the numbers.
But prioritising search to a basic level isn't hard: title first, then description, closer to the start for bonus points.
-
@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
God dammit Microsoft, your service's been down half the time for the last 3 days. You're not amateurs.
You are obviously wrong.
Hah, as if there are any professionals in IT...
Well, unless you count the many whores. In that case, I could see MS being called professionals, yes.
-
how is this scam still going on?
Because people don't trust science.
Arguments with them end up with "well just because it fundamentally violates all known laws of physics and biology doesn't mean it's impossible!!!!!". Yes, it does you moron.
-
@dse does it monitor chakras?
-
@dse does it monitor chakras?
That's in the deluxe addon, you need to imbibe a particular drink though to enable it.
-
But prioritising search to a basic level isn't hard: title first, then description, closer to the start for bonus points.
You often only want to apply full-text searching algorithms to the description, which prioritises things like being good prefixes of a word and so on. Requires some setting up though, and thinking in terms of a DB query (there are several DBs that can already express this thing too; no code reinvention required), which seems to scare off the types of programmers who write desktop search programs.
-
@JazzyJosh said in WTF Bites:
You're violating the whole idea of a constructor.
It depends enormously on what you are constructing. If you're constructing a
Proof
object and the thing it is talking about is an unsolved conjecture, you might take an unbounded amount of time to do the construction. There are applications where this makes sense (though in practice you want the code to limit the amount of work and throw aGeeThisAintGoingNowhereException
after a few hours).Game loops? Don't do it.
-
This answer
-
-
@Dreikin what's not safe about a byte array?
Strings are probably the least fucked up thing in PHP.
They're still somewhat fucked up:
A string is series of characters, where a character is the same as a byte. This means that PHP only supports a 256-character set, and hence does not offer native Unicode support.
(Granted, that's no worse than C/C++ - but that's a pretty low bar when it comes to strings.)
This nature of the string type explains why there is no separate “byte” type in PHP – strings take this role. Functions that return no textual data – for instance, arbitrary data read from a network socket – will still return strings.
Type safety? Wazzat?
Given that PHP does not dictate a specific encoding for strings, one might wonder how string literals are encoded. For instance, is the string "á" equivalent to "\xE1" (ISO-8859-1), "\xC3\xA1" (UTF-8, C form), "\x61\xCC\x81" (UTF-8, D form) or any other possible representation? The answer is that string will be encoded in whatever fashion it is encoded in the script file.
Default string encoding isn't even system-defined - it's source-file implicitly defined, if I'm reading that right.
There are no limitations on the values the string can be composed of; in particular, bytes with value 0 (“NUL bytes”) are allowed anywhere in the string (however, a few functions, said in this manual not to be “binary safe”, may hand off the strings to libraries that ignore data after a NUL byte.)
Of course, in order to be useful, functions that operate on text may have to make some assumptions about how the string is encoded. Unfortunately, there is much variation on this matter throughout PHP’s functions:
Also, can't be buggered to insist on all functions treating strings the same way.
OTOH, yes, this is the least fucked up part of I've seen of PHP so far (although I've only skimmed the page linked above).
-
@Dreikin oh yes, it's still pretty fucked up, this is PHP after all, and totally deserving of all the TRWTF status it has.
However, most of that stuff simply never bites anyone too hard, especially in 5.4 and up where most of the functions people are likely to use, e.g. htmlspecialchars default to treating things as UTF-8.
More can still be done, of course, but breaking backwards compatibility is a thing that can never be done, or something.
-
@Dreikin Not saying PHP strings are perfect, but proper Unicode support is hard. PHP tried to implement it properly in the aborted "PHP6" branch and they did not succeed. One of Perl's developers, Tom Christiansen, wrote up a long list of reasons why Perl doesn't do it by default either.
-
<wearing my fortran hat> @Dreikin Actually, that doesn't sound too bad. </wearing my fortran hat>
-
proper Unicode support is hard
It's even harder to do it and make the code fast (and what people mean by “proper” is rather varying too). Tom's good summary misses out just how much more complicated things get internally, and there are also a few bits in his list where they should have just made some assumptions and forced the broken systems to do the special thing. For example, making indexing work right with unicode strings is potentially non-trivial (which has a lot of implications, despite some wooly-headed programmers thinking otherwise) and keeping multiple models of what a character is is brain-bending.
All of which is quite aside from the weirdness that is Unicode itself. You need a lot of Denver's finest to think that Unicode gets everything right…
-
@DCoder said in WTF Bites:
All of which is quite aside from the weirdness that is Unicode itself. You need a lot of Denver's finest to think that Unicode gets everything right…Yup. For Windows each OS version introduce a new sort weight table.
-
They're still somewhat fucked up:
A string is series of characters, where a character is the same as a byte. This means that PHP only supports a 256-character set, and hence does not offer native Unicode support.
Well, UTF-8 string is just a series of bytes. As long as there is UTF-8 and normal-form-aware collation, comparison, normalization and ability to iterate over the codepoints and graphemes (not sure if there actually are for PHP), that would count as Unicode support¹. That's basically what the decent localization libraries like ICU do for C/C++.
Of course, without distinction between byte arrays and strings it is all rather unwieldy. That's why Python added Unicode support as a separate Unicode type (and in version 3 renamed
str
tobytes
andunicode
tostr
to make it make more sense). But that distinction did not come with Unicode. It is there for any character set you use. Because collation does not sort by binary values for any language. It is just less obvious for English-speaking developer majority because ASCII does not have compatibility-equivalent characters and similar fun.
¹ There is, of course, a lot more to Unicode. But all of it can be built on top of byte arrays containing UTF-8 data.
-
REALLY, YouTube
-
If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device.
In a world where Windows is the norm, that's the first step to debug anything.
-
@bb36e “Device” in this case might mean browser.
-
-
Still, I don't get this shit. Are all OSs using the same asinine algorithm? Because Win 10 does the same shit.
Was that KDE 5? I know using 4 it's pretty much learned my patterns and the thing I want seems to generally be the default option.
-
@dkf 2025: we've skipped the OS and started running the browser on bare metal!
-
@dkf 2025: we've skipped the OS and started running the browser on bare metal!
Google called. They want their version of Chromium back! :D
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@dkf 2025: we've skipped the OS and started running the browser on bare metal!
Google called. They want their version of Chromium back! :D
Firefox OS
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@dkf 2025: we've skipped the OS and started running the browser on bare metal!
Google called. They want their version of Chromium back! :D
Firefox OS
Oracle. And now I've ruined it. You're welcome.
-
@Tsaukpaetra edge
-
If the variable
rd_marine_ignine_immediately
is set to 1, fire damage dealt to a marine ignites the marine without any other requirements.
-
@accalia must have been involved?
-
Why does it say I have 12 notifications? If we count each individual upvote as a separate notification, it only adds up to 9.
-
Why does it say I have 12 notifications? If we count each individual upvote as a separate notification, it only adds up to 9.
Because that's the total number of unread IIRC. It shows minimum of 3 read notifications and... well huh.
I got nothing, read the source, it's probably funny.
-
Why does it say I have 12 notifications? If we count each individual upvote as a separate notification, it only adds up to 9.
You have to click "See all notifications" to see them all. Sort of. Some unread notifications won't show up until you've cleared other unread notifications, often with several already-seen notifications in between. Because who would ever want all the new ones clustered at the top?
But yeah, unless its state is messed up (refresh to see if the number is the same), there are actually that many new, separate notifications, but you can't see them all until you clear enough of the ones you can see.
-
Because who would ever want all the new ones clustered at the top?
I'd ask Facebook, they don't do this either...
-
Guess who's apparently getting a lot of tech support calls?
-
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
Guess who's apparently getting a lot of tech support calls?
That's unfortunate, not WTF.
-
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
Guess who's apparently getting a lot of tech support calls?
True Story: One time I spent about $70 because I loaded up on apples and Cherry Butter for the winter. By the time my credit card bill came a month later I'd forgotten all about it, so I was startled to see a charge for the Apple Store and immediately called Visa figuring somebody had ordered computer equipment with my number online. Visa verified the charge was made at the Apple Store on Mason St in Green Bay and right as I argued "But we don't HAVE an Apple Store in Green Bay!" I realized...DOH!
-
Firefox OS
Soon we'll be saying that Firefox is a good operating system, but it lacks a good browser.
-
-
-
@Yamikuronue Saw this just as Rollin' came up on my playlist
-
Jumping into a struggling react native project with our new outsourcing partners.
Trying to figure out why Facebook's fancy debugger and dev tools don't work. Oh look, the previous coder had manually turned off the dev switch in the project file. I turn it back on.
Dozens of warnings, deprecation notices, failed asserts and unresolved promises jump on the screen.
Now I know why.
-
proper Unicode support is hard
Somehow Python3 seems to (mostly) manage it.
Besides, "it's hard" has never been an excuse. Of course it's hard, that's why you have a job doing it. You can't just call your client and say "oh yes we replaced all the weird names in your database with Joe Smith because unicode is hard".
-
@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
Somehow Python3 seems to (mostly) manage it.
There'll be a few bits left because Unicode is a really foul moving target, but they're also not trying to maintain ass-backward compatibility with every
Perlshitty script out there. Also, Tom Christiansen is one of those people who is inclined to think that anything other than perfection is tantamount to useless.The big break to making things work is to stop confusing bytes and characters. That's the thing that breaks most programmers' brains.
-
but they're also not trying to maintain ass-backward compatibility with every Perl shitty script out there
Well that's their problem right there. Breaking compatibility will have to happen sooner or later, so DESIGN YOUR SYSTEM FOR IT. Include a version number in every script, ship Perl6 and Perl5 interpreters together so you can still seamlessly run both, and add the best interoperability you can (that's where Python failed). Now people can write new Perl6 while Perl5 scripts continue to work (hopefully forever).
-
@anonymous234 Unfortunately, lots of people just write Perl or Python (without being at all certain about what version they're using) and because of their habits of programming by cut-n-paste from random online sources (not just SO either), they end up with a script that really requires a frankenversion to work correctly. Or that the code be simultaneously valid in several different programming languages entirely.
I wish I was joking. :(
-
@anonymous234 Unfortunately, lots of people
juststill write Perlor Python (without being at all certain about what version they're using) and because of their habits of programming by cut-n-paste from random online sources (not just SO either), they end up with a script that really requires a frankenversion to work correctly. Or that the code be simultaneously valid in several different programming languages entirely. I wish I was joking. :(Simplified that for you