Yeah, I think it’s kind of just a way to be like “OKAY, SEGUE TO RANDOM CRAZY THOUGHT”. Like it makes it seem a bit more zany too me while also acknowledging that without more context the post seems kind of unhinged.

There’s operations that treat bits like floats and operations that treat them like various kinds of ints, but the meaning of bits is in the eye of the beholder. There’s even good examples of mixing and matching integer and floating point operations to clever effect, like with the infamous fast inverse square root. I feel like people often think mathematical objects mean something beyond what they are, when often math is kind of just math and it is what it is (if that makes sense… it’s kind of like anthropomorphizing mathematical objects and viewing them through a specific lens, as opposed to just seeing them as the set of axioms that they are). That’s kind of how I feel with this stuff. You can treat the bits however you want and it’s not like integer operations and bitwise operations have no meaning on supposedly floating point values, they do something (and mixing these different types of operations can even do useful things!), it just might not be the normal arithmetic operations you expect when you interpret the number as a float (and enjoy your accidental NaNs or whatever :P).

The difference of static and dynamic typing being when you perform the type checking is partially why I consider it to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction for a language (obviously decidable static type checking is limited, though), and projects like typescript have shown that you can successfully bolt on a static type system onto a dynamic language to provide type checking on specific parts of a program just fine. But obviously this changes what you consider to be a valid program at compile time, though maybe not what you consider to be a valid program overall if you consider programs with dynamic type errors to be invalid too (which there’s certainly precedence for… C programs are arguably only real C programs when they’re well-defined, but detecting UB is undecidable).

I kind of feel like “untyped” is a term that doesn’t really have a proper definition right now. As far as I can tell when people say “untyped” they usually mean it as a synonym for whatever they consider “dynamically typed” to mean (which also seems to vary a bit from person to person, haha). Sometimes people say assembly is untyped exactly for this reason, but you could also consider it to have one type “bits” and all of the operations just do things on bits (although, arguably different sized registers have different types). Similarly, people sometimes consider “dynamically typed languages” to just be “unityped” (maybe monotyped is more easily distinguished from untyped, haha) languages at their core, and if you squint you can just think of the dynamic type checks as a kind of pattern matching on a giant sum type.

In some sense values always have types because you could always classify them into types externally, and you could even consider a value to be a member of multiple types (often programming languages with type systems don’t allow this and force unique types for every value). Because you could always classify values under a type it feels kind of weird to refer to languages as being “untyped”, but it’s also kind of weird to refer to a language as “typed” when there isn’t really any meaningful typing information and there’s no type system checking the “types” of values. Types sort of always exist, but also sort of only exist when you actually make the distinctions and have something that you call a “type system”… In some sense the distinction between static and dynamic typing is sort of an arbitrary implementation detail too (though, of course, it has impacts on the experience of programming, and the language design makes a bit of a difference in terms of what’s decidable :) (and obviously the type system can determine what programs you consider to be “valid”)… But you can absolutely have a mix of static type checking and dynamic typing, for instance… It’s all a little more wishy washy than people tend to think in my opinion).

That sounds cool…

God, did you ever hear about core wars? Very different thing but another weird programming “game”

http://corewars.org/

Redcode is kind of a bonkers assembly language too. I never really got into it because it’s kinda boring, but I could see this being crack for the right person.

It sort of lived on as Apache wave which I think you could self host, but it died in 2018. Never used it… Vaguely aware of what it did and kind of want it now :(.

Okay, I’m probably super ignorant and in need of a lesson… Every piece of DLNA software I’ve ever messed with sucked and was a massive security and privacy issue? I haven’t looked at it much, but it didn’t seem worth it? Is it good? What’s good about it?

Unfortunately your statements should be past tense :(. They died kind of tragically.

I feel like if you don’t know any different assembly will look like any other programming language. Just a bunch of words on lines that you don’t understand.

People are judgemental and kind of brainwashed to respect the property of corporations.

I would try not to worry about what others think so much in these kind of situations. Eat your Quaker Oats in peace.

Even if you’re not trying to steal from the self checkout half the time they don’t even have the item in the database… Like I’m not paying for a dozen doughnuts when that’s the only option, but I got one… so I guess it’s a roll now…?

I think I might have cared in the past because “it’s against the law” but I’ve grown up and don’t care about that at all anymore… My opinion on shoplifting is now just “why would I even care?” I wouldn’t do it personally, but I have no problem with other people stealing shit (especially shit they need to live and thrive) from a soulless corporation. I wouldn’t be happy if they mugged a random person… But Target? Why would I care?

Ooof, I dunno… You can probably get by with cheap headphones, but they’re probably one of the objects you’ll spend the most time with and a good set can really make a difference. Good noise cancelling is essentially a requirement for me to live.

Eh. It can kind of cause a lot of problems in the workplace, and not just for the people dating… Especially if somebody is the type to get jealous if you have to work with their partner on something, which is sadly not uncommon. If you’re mature and can deal with it… fine. But, frankly, there’s plenty of fish in the sea and it’s probably better to date outside of work (or at least your team) for everybody.

To be fair, it’s ideal to not date your coworkers anyway.

Probably, but my exposure to Wayland has just been people complaining about how much X11 sucks and then proceeding to have more problems than everybody else.

Wow. I’m sorry to hear about your illness, but I’m really happy you seem to have thoroughly enjoyed living and have made your peace. I have such a hard time enjoying life sometimes, so I really do appreciate hearing your perspective.

I think the best thing you can do in life is appreciate what you have, and not worry so much about the things that are out of your control, and you seem to have this all figured out.

I hope you do go through with these notes and don’t decide to delete them or anything. Genuine perspectives from people are a rare treasure in this world, and I think if you’re comfortable sharing them you really should!

If you want to hold yourself accountable, maybe the easiest thing is to upload to a GitHub repo or something, and I’m sure some of us would be happy to download it and mirror it. I’m sure many of us will happily run a script to fetch it every hour or so, and then you wouldn’t be able to delete it from me and other volunteers. If you gave us contact information we could make sure it gets to whoever you wanted. Might be a bit of an awkward email to send, but I guess it would be for the best 😅

I don’t really have much of an opinion about Wayland but it’s still funny to me whenever somebody using Wayland shits on X11 and then tries to share their screen on Zoom or something. If Wayland ends up being great I’ll be happy, but for now X11 just kind of works, so I don’t understand why people are so eager to switch? This isn’t to say I don’t understand the desire to build something better and more secure than X11, I’m just not sure what the end user gets out of Wayland right now. I don’t have VRR monitors and stuff, though, so maybe I’m not running into problems I would be if I wanted fancier features. Plus, I use xmonad and some other stuff right now that won’t work on Wayland, so I don’t have much incentive to try it. Hopefully everything gets Wayland updates eventually.

Yeah, this was mentioned in another part of the thread. I wasn’t really aware that BestBuy had electronics recycling because I don’t drive so I kind of stick to smaller shops in my area, and I don’t really go to big box stores like that very often if at all. Where I live is super walkable, but I don’t think I’ve seen recycling for electronics in the nearby stores. I might need to look harder when I’m there again, though.

Oh good, you wrote basically the exact response I was going to give!

The only other thing I would mention is… if you don’t know what a command is, you can and should look it up! You can use the internet, but you can also try “man sudo” or “info sudo” and do a bit of reading. It might not make sense at first, but you’ll start building up a vocabulary really quickly.