On 4/13/19 8:22 PM, mate wrote:
> On Saturday, 13 April 2019 at 07:47:03 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>> On 4/13/19 1:44 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 4/12/2019 9:38 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>>>> It's about the cognitive load.
>>>
>>> As I pointed out upthread, isOdd() has a higher cognitive load.
>>
>> Not for normal programmers.
> 
> If you don’t know the modulo operator you should probably not be programming, and should spend some time in learning the basics of the language first. You don’t drive a car before knowing where the blinkers are.

How many flippin' times to I have point out the freaking difference between knowing something, vs having it so deeply internalized it ceases to be on a separate level of abstraction???

People! Quit using this stupid "...not knowing XYZ..." strawman!!

On 4/13/19 8:34 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 13.04.19 10:22, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>>
>> It's probably because there's nothing in Swift that appeals to the same sheeple who consider it perfectly normal and acceptable in 2019 to hand your entire machine over to a randomly-activated process that hijacks all control over your own personal physical property (including the ability to close the lid, unplug it, and stick it into its own stupid carrying case so you can drive the F*&*ck home without corrupting the entire freaking operating system) for an *unspecified* number of **HOURS**, while requiring both fast internet access and ZERO interactivity, so it can perform the absolute most poorly-implemented update process **in computing history**, at its own discretion, while silently disabling your complex, hard-to-discover, unintuitively-activated pro-privacy settings.
> 
> I'm not sure why similar arguments do not apply to users of Apple devices.

Dunno. I haven't really used Apple devices much in a good while (not a fan for various reasons), but based on what I have seen, Windows Update is faaar worse as of...around Win7? XP? I forget...and has only gotten *worse* with Win10. And I'm not talking OS upgrades, just the ordinary regular updates.

Do Apple devices regularly do force-updates just upon normal shutdown/startup and then take as many as 4 or even 8 or so hours to complete? 'Cause I've seen that on many people's Windows computers many times.

On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 07:18:17PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> Dunno. I haven't really used Apple devices much in a good while (not a fan for various reasons), but based on what I have seen, Windows Update is faaar worse as of...around Win7? XP? I forget...and has only gotten *worse* with Win10. And I'm not talking OS upgrades, just the ordinary regular updates.

Two decades after graduating from college, I thought I had finally grown out of my college years' anti-MS Linux zealotry, only to be rudely awakened when one day my wife's Windows laptop popped up a notice that there were important security updates to be installed, and upon clicking "OK", it suddenly ended up upgrading the *entire lousy OS* to Windows 10 -- with no option of backing out, and which took who knows how many hours, during which my wife could not get any work done.  I beat a hasty retreat back to my former stance of not touching Windows with a 10-foot pole for any non-toy purposes.


> Do Apple devices regularly do force-updates just upon normal shutdown/startup and then take as many as 4 or even 8 or so hours to complete? 'Cause I've seen that on many people's Windows computers many times.

Nothing surprises me anymore, after MS had the audacity to force-feed Windows 10 down my throat under the guise of a "security update". :-/


T

-- 
One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the internet is that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying the internet is reliable to the point of invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from the article "Giving it all away"

On 16/04/2019 11:34 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Nothing surprises me anymore, after MS had the audacity to force-feed
> Windows 10 down my throat under the guise of a "security update". :-/

Strange, I remember it being opt-in.
Are you sure it wasn't already scheduled?

On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 23:02:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> How many flippin' times to I have point out the freaking difference between knowing something, vs having it so deeply internalized it ceases to be on a separate level of abstraction???
>
> People! Quit using this stupid "...not knowing XYZ..." strawman!!

This is a forum rather than interpersonal communication, so you
can't have noticed that everyone rolls their eyes and dismisses you
when you make this argument. Or rather, you just did notice that,
but you attributed the dismissal to inattention.

You get silence rather than refutation because it's hard to
actually refute your claims. I can't point to any of my own
language knowledge and give it a 1..10 rank of "internalization". I
can't point to anything and say "aha, that's internalized its way
to a different abstraction level". For me you may as well have
argued that the problem with &1 is that it resembles a rune of
confusion and that the reader of bitwise math accidentally casts a
spell that makes it harder to read the surrounding expression. I
don't believe that at all but I also don't want to get into magical
runes with anyone making the claim.

Although it's true that there can be a preferred description to
code that isn't literally expressed in the code, ex. "x&1" as "test
if x is odd" or "x++" as "advance to the next field" or "x++" as
"count this additional connection" or "x++" as "include the zero
byte in the length", I don't think "levels of internalization" has
anything to do with this. It's just, to risk using an obvious
synonym, simple familiarity. When you see "x++" you have a small
set of ideas about what that can mean and foremost are those
you've used yourself or see frequently. And I'd say the bar for &1
"internalizing its way to a different abstraction level" is to have
used it deliberately (not as a copy&paste) even once in your code
in any language even once in your life.

On preferred descriptions, you might find this fun reading:
https://mises.org/library/must-austrians-embrace-indifference

On 4/15/19 7:34 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 07:18:17PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>> Dunno. I haven't really used Apple devices much in a good while (not a
>> fan for various reasons), but based on what I have seen, Windows
>> Update is faaar worse as of...around Win7? XP? I forget...and has only
>> gotten *worse* with Win10. And I'm not talking OS upgrades, just the
>> ordinary regular updates.
> 
> Two decades after graduating from college, I thought I had finally grown
> out of my college years' anti-MS Linux zealotry, only to be rudely
> awakened when one day my wife's Windows laptop popped up a notice that
> there were important security updates to be installed, and upon clicking
> "OK", it suddenly ended up upgrading the *entire lousy OS* to Windows 10
> -- with no option of backing out, and which took who knows how many
> hours, during which my wife could not get any work done.  I beat a hasty
> retreat back to my former stance of not touching Windows with a 10-foot
> pole for any non-toy purposes.

Yup, exactly. But what adds insult to injury is that in post-XP Windows-land this sort of "abruptly locked out of your own machine for the whole day, can't even pack it up to drive home" is common even for ordinary updates, not just the OS-upgrade ones.

That *might* have been acceptable if they had ever bothered to address the patently absurd amount of time it's always taken to install Windows Updates ever since "Windows Update" was first introduced. (What the hell is it even doing?!?!?!? Downloading and overwriting three entire OS-sized blocks of data wouldn't take this long!!! So what in the hell are they *continuing* to waste their own customer's time with???) I can download and install an All-GUI-Bells-And-Whistles-Linux installation in *less* time than it frequently takes Win7 through 10 just to update itself with the latest patches. So just how incompetent are they?

And on top of that, there are SOOOOO many perfectly-capable machines out there (including mine, as it turns out) where Win8/10 are rendered 99% non-interactive for literally an hour or more upon booting just because of Windows Update and/or other such default "background" services. (Unless you jump through enormous hidden hoops to kill the services...which doesn't always even survive the update!)

I've been...umm...conned...into trying to "fix" other people's computers just because, as it turned out, the non-optional, no-warning, guerilla Windows Update forced them into shutting down their computers in the middle of an all-day update, which, unsurprisingly (*HINT!**HINT!* Microsoft! *HINT!**HINT!*, left their OS installations corrupted. And *that* was on Win7! Win 10 is famously even *more* forceful about incompetently-slow upgrades!!!

I still (technically) have a Win10 dual-boot on my machine (upgraded, legitimately, from factory-installed 8.1), just for the ability to run non-wine-compatible tools (and games) when I need to. But personal experience had conditioned me to be SO incredibly afraid of booting into it (lest I face the wrath of the Windows Update Of Death commandeering both my machine and my life for as much as a day or so), that I haven't *dared* do so for well over a year. From what I recall, 8.1 was only slightly better.

It's ***NO FREAKING WONDER*** smartphones and tablets have been making PCs look like yesteryear!!!! It's *not* because of "mobile" devices being so much better (they objectively AREN'T, not by a longshot)...It's because first, Microsoft has managed to equate its own shitty operating system with "Laptop" and "PC", and THEN managed to fuck it all up so incredibly badly, that even something as patently shit as the iOS and Android devices are...actually manage to look good by comparison to Microsoft's complete and utter platform-destroying epic-scale ineptitude.

Apple never managed to achieve anything remotely resembling majority marketshare on PCs and Laptops what with MS's stranglehold over that mindshare (nevermind Apple's insane marketing-driven insistence that Macs somehow aren't Personal Computers, I mean f*ck, it was Apple..or rather Apple's *GOOD* co-founder Wozniak...who pretty much *INVENTED* the personal computer! But *no* they're not "PCs"...ok, sure Apple, fine, whatever...) But, despite MS's stranglehold over "PC"/Laptop mindshare, Apple easily won a major share of an alternative -to-"PC"/Laptop platform. Sooo...Anyone out there *really* wanna try to claim Apple's mobile success was in anything less than *huge* part due to the fact that they...just...simply...*didn't* screw it up as absurdly horrifically bad as MS continues to screw up, poisoning the well of the entire category of PCs/Laptops?

>> Do Apple devices regularly do force-updates just upon normal
>> shutdown/startup and then take as many as 4 or even 8 or so hours to
>> complete? 'Cause I've seen that on many people's Windows computers
>> many times.
> 
> Nothing surprises me anymore, after MS had the audacity to force-feed
> Windows 10 down my throat under the guise of a "security update". :-/

Ehhh...no surprise to me that MS had the audacity to pull that. It was extremely unfortunate, criminal even IMO, but the writing there was already on the wall. The REAL bets here are all on what clearly is a cutthroat industry-wide race to see which monolith (MS/Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon/some-underground-newcomer) can secure the crown of "World's Largest Anti-Human T&rd".

I can guarantee you one thing though: The winner of *that* mis-title will NOT be one formed under the "Socially Responsible Corporation" notion that a pathetically minuscule *3* states out of 50 even offer. Such an organization would be at a severe disadvantage in that race.

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 11:41:14AM +1200, rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 16/04/2019 11:34 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Nothing surprises me anymore, after MS had the audacity to force-feed Windows 10 down my throat under the guise of a "security update". :-/
> 
> Strange, I remember it being opt-in.
> Are you sure it wasn't already scheduled?

The laptop was running either Win 7 or Win 8.  It was only "scheduled" in the sense that that was the time when MS decided that everything before Win 10 was no longer supported / deprecated / whatever, and was pushing for everyone to upgrade to Win 10 (I was not the only one caught by surprise by this move).  The notification was something like "you have important upgrades to install" or something like that, which we usually just press "OK" to -- it's one of those constant annoyances we've developed a knee-jerk reaction to.

I vaguely remember at the time there were some security issues that needed to be patched, which was the only reason I even paid any attention to my wife's laptop at all, but the way it was done was basically "either upgrade to Win 10, or don't install any upgrades at all and leave your computer vulnerable to the latest nasty security flaw and ignore every Win Upgrade notification from then on, which will constantly pester you with reminders and further notifications".  I actually googled online at the time and found several other similar complaints and descriptions of how the only way to *not* be force-upgraded to Win 10 was to turn off Windows Update completely by hacking some obscure registry setting.  But by then it was already too late, since installing those "security updates" automatically puts your computer on the Win 10 installation track, and I didn't even want to think about what state it will leave your computer in were I to dare to interrupt the process.

Needless to say, my wife & I were very unhappy about that "security update" taking many hours to install itself (IIRC we gave up waiting and left it to run overnight), during which she couldn't get any work done, and after which we were confronted with a brand new installation with a completely new, unfamiliar desktop with stuff randomly moved around so they weren't in the familiar places anymore, and random applications went "missing" or no longer working because they're now gratuitously incompatible with the OS, and thus required wasting several *more* hours to relearn how to operate the silly "desktop", reinstall/reconfigure stuff, and move icons back to where they used to be.  Talk about adding insult to the injury of essentially having our arm twisted to upgrade to Win 10 even though we consciously decided *not* to when we bought the laptop in the first place.


T

-- 
The fact that anyone still uses AOL shows that even the presence of options doesn't stop some people from picking the pessimal one. - Mike Ellis

On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 at 06:12:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Needless to say, my wife & I were very unhappy about that "security update" taking many hours to install itself (IIRC we gave up waiting and left it to run overnight), during which she couldn't get any work done, and after which we were confronted with a brand new installation with a completely new, unfamiliar desktop with stuff randomly moved around so they weren't in the familiar places anymore, and random applications went "missing" or no longer working because they're now gratuitously incompatible with the OS, and thus required wasting several *more* hours to relearn how to operate the silly "desktop", reinstall/reconfigure stuff, and move icons back to where they used to be.  Talk about adding insult to the injury of essentially having our arm twisted to upgrade to Win 10 even though we consciously decided *not* to when we bought the laptop in the first place.
>
>
> T

I have a different experience. Windows 10 is one of my favourite OSes. I didn't really like Windows XP that much. Sure, it was better than 98, but it was buggy and unstable. 7 was a very solid OS. Vista had a rough launch, but was OK overall. 8 was a bit awkward with the metro interface, but they fixed most of it in 8.1.

I don't ever have problems with updates. They usually install when I leave my PC to go to bed, and it doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes to update.

Also, I'd love to get an update to 10 on my old laptop, unfortunately I missed the opportunity, so now I am stuck on Windows 8.1 there :( I installed Ubuntu with Unity instead, because it's the only Linux desktop environment I can stand, but it's not supported anymore, so yeah...

On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 02:20:22 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 14.04.19 02:42, mate wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Probably not. What would be the trigger for that?

I would think that having an isOdd() is… odd. It seems so trivial and short that I would suspect something different.

>> [...]
>
> Maybe. However, often, the quickest way to make the thing I was working on work with sufficient code quality is not actually to implement the missing standard library functions, even though it would have been easier with those functions there. (E.g., compute the thing with a a few for loops instead of with a more elegant and readable range-based solution.) I'll consider writing some libraries in the future, but right now I don't really get enough of my productive time to work on projects I already started, such as getting better tuple support, and I'd really prefer obvious omissions to be in the standard library. I see that scan has finally been added, but I'm a bit disappointed it was called cumulativeFold.

I understand. I did not mean to suggest you to start a new project. I am already grateful for the contributions you made to dlang, thank you.

> Here, I was mainly objecting to the general idea that functions that are simple to implement in terms of a few other functions/built-in operators have no business being in the standard library. (This has come up before.) It's not even consistently applied in Phobos. E.g., there is max and min even though they are trivially implemented in terms of each other by switching around the comparison predicate, but it would clearly be ridiculous to require this by arbitrarily picking one over the other. On the other hand, we have until, but not takeWhile, even though it is more common to want to specify the kinds of elements that you like instead of a condition on the first one that you don't want.

I see. I was not arguing for the minimum set by removing reciprocal functions though. What would be your criteria for inclusion?

On 4/15/19 10:40 PM, Julian wrote:
> On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 23:02:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>> How many flippin' times to I have point out the freaking difference between knowing something, vs having it so deeply internalized it ceases to be on a separate level of abstraction???
>>
>> People! Quit using this stupid "...not knowing XYZ..." strawman!!
> 
> This is a forum rather than interpersonal communication, so you
> can't have noticed that everyone rolls their eyes and dismisses you
> when you make this argument. Or rather, you just did notice that,
> but you attributed the dismissal to inattention.

I've already clearly pointed out multiple times that I am NOT talking about the case where somebody "doesn't know" something. Therefore, counter-arguments based on "If somebody doesn't know..." have NO bearing whatsoever.

No amount of your eye rolling, dismissing or flat out excuse-making is ever going to change that.