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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • Nulls are useful, but you can’t work with them in Java. Anything can be null at any time without warning, even when you have absolutely no reason to ever allow a null. Null safety as a language feature gives you the choice to allow nulls when they make sense or guarantee a value when needed. It saves you checking for nulls in the core of your logic when you already ruled them out at the boundary and enforced it at compile time.



  • I think this is completely missing the point when it’s talking about “the minutiae of art”. It’s making two claims at the same time: art is better when you suffer for it and the art is good whether or not you suffered. But none of that is relevant.

    When Wyeth made Christina’s World, I don’t know if he suffered or not when painting that grass. What I do know is that he was a human with limited time and the fact that he spent so much of his time detailing every blade of grass means that he’s saying something. That The Oatmeal doesn’t draw backgrounds might be because he’s lazy, but he also doesn’t need them. These are choices we make to put effort in one part and ignore some other part.

    AI doesn’t make choices. It doesn’t need to. A detailed background is exactly the same amount of work as a plain one. And so a generated picture has this evenly distributed level of detail, no focus at all. You don’t really know where to look, what’s important, what the picture is trying to say. Because it’s not saying anything. It isn’t a rat with a big butt, it’s just a cloud of noise that happens to resemble a rat with a big butt.



  • I don’t see that picture in the linked article. A similar picture, but it doesn’t have the numbers and shades of green.

    I know how to use search engines, by the way. But I also think that it’s the responsibility of the person sharing graphs/maps to provide context for those graphs to enable readers to understand the data without having to go and do their own research. There’s no guarantee anyone finds the original source or that the source even provides the necessary context, if the sharer just grabbed a picture from Google Images without regard for the source.

    So no, I won’t even attempt to find context and happily push that burden back on the person who lazily shared a graph without explanation.




  • Agreed, not just because someone is being an asshole. Everyone should feel the need to protect their personal information, because the world is full of assholes of different levels and your personal information being publicly available can only cause harm to you. It really is as simple as setting your profile to “friends only” to counter the lowest level of assholes.




  • Just watched it, can confirm that it’s reallyreally good.

    I love coming-of-age movies and… what’s the genre called where the main is a bit of a fuckup who can’t really find their place in the world? Because my collection is filled with those.

    So I liked our main floaters of course, but one character who isn’t as obviously “lost” is Allison. She’s just as insecure as Megan about her place in the world, but she solves it by clinging to her old friend group and aggressively asserting that her way is the normal way actually. That’s a side I hadn’t thought about before.