That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.

So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.

A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.

Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!

My type is a dying breed too, the guys who do their best to write robust code and actually trying to consider edge cases, race conditions, properly sized variables and efficient use of cycles, all the things that embedded guys have done as “embedded” evolved from 6800 to Pic, Atmel and then ESP platforms.

Now people seem to have embraced “move fast and break things” but that’s the exact opposite to how embedded is supposed to be done. Don’t get me wrong there is some great ESP code out there but there’s also a shitload of buggy and poorly documented libraries and devices that require far too many power cycles to keep functioning.

In my opinion one power cycle is too many in the embedded world. Your code should not leak memory. We grew up with BYTES of RAM to use, memory leaks were unthinkable!

And don’t get me started on the appalling mess that modern engineers can make with functional block inside a PLC, or their seeming lack of knowledge of industrial control standards that have existed since before the PLC.

Some of the concepts in this book really stuck with me, but I had no idea what the title was! Thanks!

“Some days you’re the original, some days you’re the copy” or something like that

Am farmer, can confirm. I also have my chequebook with me… Non-farmers, when was the last time you wrote a cheque, aside from rent? I feel like we’re the only ones still using them.

“I’m drunk”

As I said,

C/++ with renewed appreciation

No such thing as eval in non-interpreted languages. Unless you’re crazy enough to invoke the compiler and exec() the result.

I used eval too in my Perl days which is why I specifically called it out. IMO any time you see eval used there should be another, more proper way to do it.

I love the term “write-only code”, it’s perfect. I used to love Perl as it felt like it flowed straight from my brain into the keyboard. What a free and magical language.

So it turned out I had ADHD. Took meds, went back to C/++ with renewed appreciation, haven’t touched Perl since as it horrifies me to look at it. What a nightmare of dangling references and questionable typing. Any language that allows you to cast a string to a function and call it really needs to sit down and think about what it’s doing.

Aspartame itself is completely safe, but recent studies have found all artificial sweeteners have metabolic effects. It’s not that the chemicals themselves are hazardous, as you say aspartame in particular has been very rigorously studied, but that it appears the body uses the sweet taste as a signal to change insulin production.

Is it better to have a diet pop than sugar pop? Definitely and I prefer Diet Coke these days, Classic feels like drinking syrup.

However it’s even healthier just to drink water, or non-caloric, unsweetened drinks like coffee or tea. Soft drinks are supposed to be a treat and not a food group, I drink maybe one a week.

If you don’t want memory-safe buffer overruns, don’t write C/C++.

Fixed further?

It’s perfectly possible to write C++ code that won’t fall prey to buffer overruns. C is a lot harder. However yes it’s far from memory safe, you can still do stupid things with pointers and freed memory if you want to.

I’ll admit as I grew up with C I still have a love for some of its oh so simple features like structs. For embedded work, give me a packed struct over complex serialization libraries any day.

I tend to write a hybrid of the two languages for my own projects, and I’ll be honest I’ve forgotten where exactly the line lies between them.

Unlike the Taliban, nobody cares about “defeating” the Houthis, though. Taking away their ability to harass shipping is all that matters, and that can be done by monitoring and bombing launch sites.

If the USA didn’t care about the optics, they could just flatten the Houthi launch infrastructure tomorrow, then smack down anything that they tried to rebuild. Ballistic and cruise missiles are large and hard to hide, and they have to be imported from Iran.

It’s not like Hamas with their homemade unguided rocket barrages into a populated area, ships are small and the ocean is huge. You need a decent missile to actually hit anything.

My Chevy is like a rock, I have to farm around it

Which civilians? The retaliatory strike targeted military targets only, and was intentionally telegraphed to destroy weapons with minimal loss of life.

If you’re talking about previous conflicts in Yemen, those are completely irrelevant to the recent attacks on commercial shipping.

How did they not? Surely you can’t be arguing that the civilian shipping vessels did something to deserve being fired upon?

Neat. That’s something I never even thought of. When typing in Arabic, does the cursor proceed from right to left, then?

Is this somehow handled with locales, are custom operating systems required, or is it really only handled by specific editors like word processors?

I’m trying to imagine how this would work at, say, a console bash prompt.

It is possible to read the text, you know. You might learn something about how the world works.

Boo hoo, clearly you didn’t read about how shipping is the lifeblood of the world, and it’s not about some “stuff” not arriving. It’s about not setting a precedent that anyone with a rocket launcher is allowed to take potshots at civilian vessels.

Without nuts and bolts and cultivator shovels and sickle knife sections Canada won’t have grain to export to the rest of the world. Oh no, we don’t make any of those ourselves? The world is extremely co-dependent now, which is part of the reason that we don’t have any major wars going on.

You know who can stop this right now? Hamas can stop this right now. They are clearly not going to “win”. Their prolonged actions are only causing suffering to their own people. They could do the honourable thing and SURRENDER which would end the war right now. But they aren’t going to do that, because they aren’t fighting for benefit of the Gazan people. They’re fighting because they hate the Jews.

Israel walked away from Gaza many years ago, left it entirely under its own governance. If its people had put the past aside and chosen a path that led to alliances and peaceful cooperation with the world, it could be a bustling trade hub and a beautiful little vacation destination on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Instead they chose their hatred of the Jews and spent decades launching rockets into Israel.

The same applies to the Houthis. Yemen could be a prosperous nation like its neighbours. Instead it’s a war-torn dump in abject poverty. Ever wonder why we sell weapons to our questionable “ally” of Saudi Arabia to fight them? Because for all that SA is terrible, the Houthis are worse.

Do you think their Iranian backers will tell them to back down once they learn that they have full control over a major shipping lane, and the ability to blackmail the world with it? That’s the true path that leads to WW3.

As ugly as it sounds? Yes. There are nearly 8 billion humans on a planet with finite resources, globally distributed. The resources, unfortunately, are more valuable than any specific subset of humans at this point.

Without trade, billions would die. And they won’t be Westerners, they’ll be people who live in places where population exceeds carrying capacity. Namely, the ME and Asia.

Yemen in particular is highly dependent on foreign aid. By blocking trade the Houthis are not looking out for the people of their country any more than Hamas is looking out for the people of Palestine. In fact they are the reason Yemen is starving. I’m not sure why so many people on Lemmy are professing support for an illegitimate, theocratic revolutionary force.

“Arab countries and all Islamic countries will not be safe from Jews except through their eradication and the elimination of their entity.” - Al-Houthi

Yes, the Houthi are real opponents of genocide.

If the Houthis really feel like they have a dog in the fight, they could declare war on Israel and deploy and fight rather than harassing non-combatants. They’re nothing but terrorists, not combatants - and if the world agrees on one thing it’s that we do not negotiate with terrorists.

The crew members are there for a wage, and the ships themselves mostly have nothing to do with Israel.

A huge portion of global trade runs through the area, and it’s not just “trinkets from China” as some like to say. It’s grain, fuel, steel, all of the things that keep the world running in a globalized economy.

You can’t blockade the entire world and not expect retaliation. If anything, I’m surprised it took this long.

And this is relevant to indiscriminately firing into international shipping lanes how?

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