I typically do too, or userIndex or something for nested loops, but I will accept i and j for the first two levels of nesting when reviewing a PR because they’re such a convention. I wouldn’t accept variable names like that anywhere else though and try and avoid them myself.
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Outside of the for loop counters i and j, short variable names are awful. Coming back to old code written with abr var nams is like talking to someone in the military who just constantly throws out jargon and acronyms that they know you don’t know.
But so are Java style ObserverFactoryManagerTemplateMachinistTemplater names.
There’s a sweet middle ground of short, but actually descriptive name. Sometimes it’s not possible but that’s usually a code organization / language / framework smell.
Too short variable names is usually a sign that you need to use a proper ide, with auto complete, or that you need to use a proper build process that will minify your code after the fact.
Too long names are usually a sign that your module of code (function, class, namespace, etc) is too large, or that your language/framework naming conventions are too strict, or the language doesn’t encapsulate scope properly.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•3.5" floppy disks were peak tactile feedback in storage: easy to stick in, drives had a button to immediately eject them, big enough to get labels, thin enough that stacks didn't take too much spaceEnglish
27·6 天前They’re talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•Turing speculated that the ability to act human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise.English
1·6 天前While the tester is blind as to which is which, the experimenter knows the construction of the machine and can presumably tell if it’s artificially constraining itself.
In the case of intelligences and neural networks that is not so straight forward. The humans and machines that are behind the curtain have to be motivated to try and replicate a human, or the test would fail, whether that’s because a human control is unhelpful or because the machine isn’t bothering trying to replicate a human.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•Turing speculated that the ability to act human would be the best indication of humanlike thought, but a better indication would be the inability to act otherwise.English
4·6 天前I see what you’re saying but I think the problem is that you would need to test an AI while it’s unaware of being tested, or use a novel trick that it’s unaware of, to try and catch it producing non-human output.
If it’s aware that it’s being tested, then presumably it will try to pass the test and try to limit itself to human cognition to do so.
i.e. It’s possible that an AI’s intelligence includes enough human-like intelligence to completely mimic a human and pass a Turing test, but not enough to know to keep to those boundaries; but it’s also possible that it both knows enough to mimic us and enough to keep to our bounds, in which case the test then needs to be done in secret.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
politics @lemmy.world•Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take GreenlandEnglish
1·7 天前deleted by creator
masterspace@lemmy.cato
People Twitter@sh.itjust.works•Silicon Valley investor who went to Stanford explains how she is raising her sonEnglish
36·7 天前It is incorrect. No one is so good at math that they can design and build a full useful system on their own. That means they have to work with other people as part of a team. That means that their lack of social skills will doom or limit them.
It is also a mistake to equate psychopaths with having no social skills. They don’t have empathy, but they often have excellent social skills.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
People Twitter@sh.itjust.works•Silicon Valley investor who went to Stanford explains how she is raising her sonEnglish
28·7 天前Are you in academia? This has not remotely been my experience in private industry.
Social skills pretty much trump all in engineering. If you write the most hyper efficient machine code, it will be a removed to maintain and costs the team 10x as much going forward, but if you write code empathetically so that a normal human can pick it up, understand it, and fix it easily, then everyone will love you.
Same thing back when I was in physical engineering, you could have a brilliant idea for a design, but if you can’t communicate why it’s brilliant and why it’s worth getting everyone else to change to accomodate it, then it will get shot down.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
21·7 天前Maybe reconsider throwing around words like “naiive” when your source is a Europol briefing document covering various threats at a high level with no stats or numbers.
Especially since if you actually dig into it, you’d find that Europe’s illegal gun trade comes partially from old military and police weapons from the Balkans / collapse of the Soviet Union, partially from the theft of legal firearms, partially from weapons that are imported (legally and illegally) from the US and Turkey, and minorly from weapons smuggled in from other war zones / 3d printed guns.
i.e. three out of four of the biggest sources of illegal guns in Europe are caused by legal firearm ownership, and one is the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The fact is that gun control works. Dislike that all you want but it doesn’t change the stats or reality of the world. Here in Canada the vast majority of gun crime is perpetrated using guns illegally smuggled from the US and another ~15% is from legal Canadian guns that were stolen. That’s not an argument that makes wide spread gun ownership look like a good idea.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
41·8 天前Maybe so, but we live in a world where guns exist.
No, you live in a country that chooses to manufacture guns in response to people buying them, and you choose to actively perpetuate that by going and spending money buying guns and gun infrastructure, directly funding gun companies / their lobbies, and then by going online to try and spread that justification so that you can feel slightly less guilty about choices you’ve made that you know are wrong.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
31·8 天前And where did they smuggle those guns from? Countries where it is easy to purchase legal firearms?
Even with 3D printed guns, literally no illegal entity is manufacturing them at scale, because that is still very, very traceable and catchable.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
103·8 天前No, I misread your comment and thought it was from someone who had been in a situation where a gun would have made it better, rather than one where it had.
Interesting to note though, that at least one of those situations was caused by someone having easy access to firearms.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
209·8 天前And some of you may be upvoting any plausible argument for gun ownership, even in the face of overwhelming objective evidence that it makes societies vastly unsafe.
Here’s the thing about guns and victimhood, access to guns causes far more victims then access to guns prevents, and it always inherently will. In that environment, a predator intent on committing a crime will always have one, and a victim only ever might have one.
If you rely on mutually assured destruction arguments, then you have armed and killing each other over road rage because humans are dumb emotional children who think they’re more mature then they are.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
133·8 天前In this thread: Americans who literally cannot comprehend that they are not the only country on earth.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Showerthoughts@lemmy.world•I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter.English
61·8 天前How did those situations resolve without having a gun?
masterspace@lemmy.cato
politics @lemmy.world•US will be ‘strongly involved’ in Venezuela oil industry, Trump says after Caracas attacked and Maduro capturedEnglish
7·9 天前Goodbye Ukraine, Taiwan, and Palestine. The US has unfortunately, ensured their ultimate destruction.
Maybe Ukraine can hold on with help from Europe. Maybe. But the rest of the world will no longer listen to the West about anything rule of law related.
masterspace@lemmy.cato
Technology@lemmy.world•LG Electronics unveils 2026 Gram Laptop line with aerospace composite - up to 50% lighter than macbooksEnglish
38·10 天前If you want a heavy brick that doesn’t need to move around, then buy a desktop for the power.
If you want a heavy brick that does need to move around, then buy a Think Book so that it can survive a fall.
And if you want a light laptop that’s easy to carry around, then buy a Gram so that it can survive a fall and do basic 2007 things like include a numpad.
MacBooks heavy feel is literally just them overcharging you for something brittle. It’s like being charged more for furniture because it’s heavy only to find outs it’s made with MDF.
Macbooks have decent chips that are limited by Apple’s crappy software, a flat out badly designed OS, nice screens, and way too much weight for their utility.



I think the English media is misreporting this somewhat. He’s been remanded to jail pending trial as a potential flight risk, but he can leave jail by posting a bond / bail.
I think Swiss media just reports it differently because it’s more common to be let go with a promise to reappear for your trial and no bail, so they report this as his being remanded as a flight risk, whereby in American and Britain the default is typically being released on bail, so reporting that they were remanded implies that bail was denied.
In English language news this is more commonly headlined as “judge sets bail for Swiss bar owner”.