bitcrafter

joined 2 years ago

Okay, fair enough, you got me: I wrote his name on a piece of paper and was standing on it when I wrote that comment in order to absorb his authority. You win this Internet argument.

Nonetheless, being able to produce tritium, which is the claim that appears in the headline and the article, is very useful, in part because many reactors use it as a fuel source.

There is only one place where I see "more fuel" show up, which is this single sentence:

The ability to generate tritium within the reactor is crucial. A sustainable fusion energy system needs to produce more fuel than it consumes. This development shows a path toward solving that engineering challenge.

I agree that this single sentence could have been better worded.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Any element below iron is technically fuel for fusion.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I was definitely not standing on the authority of Elliott, merely making use of his words and crediting him for it, so you are simply wrong.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (12 children)

On the contrary, quoting is exactly the act of borrowing another's idea, but doing the courtesy of giving credit to the person from whom you borrowed it.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (14 children)

Good writers borrow, great writers steal. -T.S. Elliot

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

I'm confused... was that wall of text supposed to have sold me on something?

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You want to turn my 300 lines of clear, readable and concise logic into 1,000 lines of English paragraphs that break up the functions of my code into yet smaller pieces of code devoid of context?

If a function has 300 lines without a lot of supporting documentation then I doubt that it is "clear, readable and concise" anyway.

Now I have to dig through that book, ignoring all the shit I’ve read hundreds of times because it doesn’t compile into anything, just to debug an off-by-1 error in a loop buried in a paragraph explaining the original developers diatribe on why we’re looping over that range?

I have never found it hard at all to skip past comments that are not relevant because my code editor helpfully colors them differently from the rest of the code, making it easy. Does your editor not do the same?

(Also, by now you should be especially good at skipping past it, given that you have apparently "read [it] hundreds of times" instead of skipping past it, for some reason.)

This is the sort of academic crap that sounds good but in practice is just terrible for anything other than small projects that are intended specifically to teach.

It depends on what you are doing. If you are implementing relatively simple logic like a REST API handler, then it is probably overkill. If you are implementing a relatively advanced algorithm, then having a running narrative of what is going can be extremely helpful.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

It's not immediately obvious to me where the examples are.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago

If you have not already read through it, there is a ton of useful information about Python's data model in the user manual; it is my go-to resource when I want to do weird stuff with metaclasses and the like.

Furthermore, you might find it interesting to peruse the C code that is generated by Cython, because it gives you a concrete view of the kinds of steps that Python has to go through from a C perspective to work within its data model. (Cython is a bit faster than Python because it does not have to interpret bytecode, but unless you use special directives it still has to e.g. do general attribute lookups whenever you interact with a Python value, even if the value is an integer, and maintain reference counts.)

Finally, you might also get a lot out of skimming through the CPython bytecode instructions, as this has a lot of interesting details about how the bytecode interpreter works in practice.

[–] bitcrafter@programming.dev 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

One should be wary about voting for the Alligators Eating Peoples' Faces party...

 

I realized that I haven't spent time on Pixelfed in a while, and that it would be great to find more content to add to my feed! So I logged in to my instance (social.photo) and then... hit a wall.

With Lemmy and Mastadon, it is super easy to peek at what is going on at other instances and find communities to subscribe to, but it looks like Pixelfed does not make this easy. The biggest issue I have run into is that many of the largest servers do not seem to let you explore what is on them unless you first create an account, and the main Pixelfed Server Directory at https://pixelfed.org/servers does not indicate which servers can be explored or not, so you have to click a few times (since the link takes you to the registration page) to even find this out for a given server. It also does not help that navigating to an instance does not show you the content for that instance, like it does for Lemmy or Mastadon, but for a login page that may or may not have an "Explore" tab at the top.

Am I missing something here? I just logged into Tumblr for the first time in years and my immediate next thought was, "Gee, I should be using Pixelfed instead!" But if in practice it is simply not possible to find content I am interested in without a great deal of hassle then it is not a realistic replacement. In particular, it seems like the way Pixelfed is set up requires me to register on particular instances to get a better view of what content is available (not just locally, but pulled in from other instances). This seems contrary to me to one of the biggest advantages of the Fediverse, which is that you are able and encouraged to pick an instance that best suits you rather than the one where all of the content lives; in particular I could not imagine self-hosting a Pixelfed instance without being left out of most of the content available.

And just to be clear, I am willing to put up with some degree of hassle resulting from the inherently decentralized model of the Fediverse, since I switched completely over to Lemmy from Reddit about a year and a half ago after the API fiasco (and the only reason why I do not use Mastadon more is because I was never that into Twitter-style content to begin with). But having to go out of my way to get through artificially constructed walls to even find content to subscribe is a bit much.

However, again, maybe I am missing here. If someone is willing to point me to a resource that solves this problem problem and makes this entire rant sound completely ignorant then that would be great! 😀


Edit: Fixed silly typo.

 

Someone had to do this before the riots started.

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