mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Programmer and game developer.
Added vertical writing support to the Calibre eBook reader.
My current project is working on a new, simplified approach to creating programming languages that are written without the need for traditional grammars or parsing.
This line from the XDG Desktop Specification documentation is making me lose my mind. They are going over reserved characters:
> Reserved characters are space (" "), tab, newline, double quote, single quote ("'"), backslash character ("\")
Then they get to parenthesis and my brain just throws a parse error here:
> parenthesis ("(") and (")")
- https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry/latest/exec-variables.html
I was trying to figure out what version SteamVR was last updated to and I was looking at the list of releases, as in this image.
I saw all the beta updates but I wasn't seeing the main app updates until I realized that my brain was apparently filtering out the large, bright banner in the middle here announcing the "Major SteamVR Update!" as irrelevant information and only seeing the smaller "SteamVR Beta Updated" banners above and below it.
This is your brain on internet advertising.
LLMs teach us just how far you can get writing code by thoughtlessly parroting what you've seen without actually understanding it, but they also show us the limits of this approach.
The output can be misleading, it can solve the problem, and it can do it poorly or well. But as it is partly RNG guided, the results will also depend on how lucky you are!
For me, the biggest lesson here is we don't have to get lucky, we can use our brains.
Don't code on autopilot like an LLM. Be a human: think!
This is incredibly good news. I hope for the sake of Hungary and the European Union that Tisza brings pro-democracy and other pro-citizen reforms to that country.
RE: https://mas.to/@skeletor/116386626151252209
While I do support the idea of justice, there's a lot of wisdom here. "Should" is such a loaded word, anyway!
The *Lord of the Rings* movie series kind of made a silly blunder by, I think accidentally, communicating as an overall message that the mistake Bilbo made was telling Gollum his real name.
In the books, it was quite strongly implied that Sauron didn't need that sort of technique to find the ring, he could locate it by a sense of its magic.
