The Zojirushi are pretty damn magic.
I've come around to this position after seeing the mess people make.
I just got a new job where I contribute to a fancy open source database. They do have unit tests. Barely. Most things are tested in SQL though. You have to build/link the whole thing to run the tests. But lots of things are plugins so it's fast enough.
If you can get away with it, this is better.
The way Ghibli's villains work says something special to me.
The ultimate villain in Howl's Moving Castle isn't the Witch of the Wastes or the heart eating fire demon. It's the court magician causing a war.
The ultimate villain in Spirited Away isn't the uncaring parents or the dragon no one trusts or the scary spider dude or the grumpy frog guys or the giant baby who hurts Chihiro or even the greed demon. Or the woman who tries to kill the love interest. It's the woman what owns the bath house.
In Porco Rosso the villain isn't the air pirates who kidnap children or the asshole rival ace or Porco's last male friend who joins the fascists. It's the secret police. It ends with everyone making peace to flee the fascist Italian Air Force.
In Castle In the Sky the air pirates are big softies. The villains are the military and the intelligence officer with the nuke.
That isn't to say the other villains aren't bad. The air pirates shoot up a town and rob people. The Witch of the Wastes is cursing everyone. Noh Face eats people! But they are redeemed in my heart. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe because everyone lives after Noh Face vomits them up. Or because the air pirates can't hurt the kids they kidnap.
I love The Witch of the Wastes. She never stops being bad. Never stops hurting people. The state cripples her and she still fights back. She fights everyone. Hurts Calcifer. Taunts Howell. She's so angry. So broken. If she had the power of the state she'd be worse than Madam Sullivan. But she doesn't.
Porco doesn't look at the camera and say, "It's better to be a pig than a fascist." The whole thing just.... Says something. To me at least.
I just that with my kid and it for some reason I laughed so hard my kid thought the whole thing was funny. It's just so absurd and terrible and wonderful. He's this nightmare murder dude in a kids movie.
It's genuiy terrifying. But I made it fun for my kid somehow.
When I killed your brother, I talked just. Like. THIS.
I think it came up more like
if ($inString =~ /^([ \t]+)(.*)$/ && has_a_cow($2)) {
For me. I dunno. I was never good at perl. I just wanted to hack something together.
I genuinely love the idea of the $1 after a match. It feels so natural in perl! So many things are text matching.
But! But! But!! Those $ variables are dynamic scoped! If you call a method and it matches stuff you lose the variables!
I'll bet there is a way around it. But it made me so sad.
"I did not say this. I am not here." Goes so damn hard. Too bad only the guild decided to act in that scene.
Wikipedia has a search feature. Not many people use it, but Wikipedia is huge, so enough people do. Back then, a couple dozen full text searches a second. And maybe 100 quick prefix searches.
Anyway, one thing I made for it was a way to search the wiki text with regular expressions. It's useful for maintainers.
Wikitext is the funny markup language Wikipedia uses. If you know html or md it's like that, but it can kind of "call" other pages. Whatever. Doesn't matter. It's text. And people have strong opinions about it.
You can see it by clicking "edit" (sometimes looks like a pencil) and then clicking "edit without logging in" then "source editing". Those lovely boxes at the top for a person are made with something like
{{Infobox person
| name = Douglas Adams
| birth_place = [[Cambridge]], England
}}
Imagine you have 1000 articles that use birthplace instead of birth_place. Both work, but it's driving you and all your editor friends crazy there are two ways to do it. This is believable. Trust me.
You want to find every page that has an {{Infobox person followed by birthplace. Then fix them. The nerds who came before us invented a language to ask that question called "regular expressions". The one for this looks like \{\{Infobox\wperson.+birthplace. Maybe. Nerds will know regular expressions are bad for this. But nerds will also know that regular expressions being bad has never stopped anyone from using them anyway.
One way to run these regular expressions is to convert them into an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automaton . You build these in memory and they are not big. But you can't really run them directly. They are pretty and fairly easy to read once you get used to them. But you can't easily ask "does this match this text". At least, not with the tools I had.
I could only run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton . It's deterministic! Much nicer. And you can go from a nondeterministic one to a deterministic one. Easy. Our forenerds solved the problem. You use a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_construction .
The trouble is, it can make very very very big deterministic finite automata. Like, if there are 3 states in the nfa you can get and 8 state dfa. 4 is 16. 5 is 32. In the worst case. Usually you get much better. But a fairly big but not super frightening regular expression can turn into a big nfa. And the dfa would need more states then there are grains of sand on earth. Too big for computer.
So, user asked for this regular expression. The search servers tried to convert it, and filled up their memory and died. They ran Out Of Memory. OOM. The usual thing is you copy the full memory so you can look later and start the server again.
But that can take time. And sometimes people are confused and haven't set up the restart to be automatic. And they can't find you. So search stays broken for a while.
Tooks out search on Wikipedia. I exposed a path that can perform an unconstrained Powerset Construction concurrently on 7 servers. It filled up memory and died. User retried. While cluster OOMing.
Try A Link to the Past Randomizer sometime.
I'd spend the rest of my life looking for my kids.
I have to leave it just like that.
When I last talked to Richard he had company to work on SQLite. It was like four people.
SQLite is still deployed on everything, everywhere. You browser. Your phone. Macs. Half of Linux machine. Your airplane. It's super impressive.
I've been remote since 2013. We said "distributed" because it was important that we didn't have a central office. This kind of thing happened much less. A company can do distributed well.
That hasn't held up forever. Because, well, gestured wildly at entire sub.
That one's so good it makes me want to learn French.
I live in the US South and "folks" is a normal word for "people" here. I'm intentional not looking it up and trying to go from memory to get my dialect. I don't use it for "humanity", but will for any subset. "The folks who live in that house." "White folk." "City folk." I dunno. There's a shit ton of dialects in the US South East and they differ by geography and income and race and all kinds of stuff. And maybe they aren't dialects. I've heard "register". I'm not a language knower.
Should you use the term "black folks"? Ask a couple black folks if it makes em feel bad. Do what they say. Don't listen to this white boy.
It's built into my dialect so I'd use it. But if folks told me it made them feel bad if stop.
I have no idea when I pluralize it and when I don't.
In the Alpha Cenauri game there was a wonder you could build called The Longevity Vaccine. If you were a planned economy two sad citizens were made happy at every city. Amazing. If you were Green economy it made happy one per base. Amazing.
If you were capitalists, the base that built it made a bunch of money and nothing else. It's a lot of money, but isn't global.
It's the only wonder like that. And I've been thinking of it more lately.
Yes, but it needs to be the creamy kind. There is a barista blend. Think of more like half and half than milk.
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