Beta Ziliani @beta@types.pl

The ever-present danger of global variables.

This graph shows data from five successive satellites, beginning in 1993. The solid red line shows the trajectory of rise from 1993 to 2022, illustrating that the rate of rise has more than doubled. By 2040, sea levels could be 3.66 inches (9.3 cm) higher than today.
#NASAEarth

Learning Crystal with Battlesnake

One of our Crystal enthusiasts, Fernando writes about his initial experience working with Crystal. His interest in the language took him to build a Battlesnake implementation to explore the language, standard library and tooling. Checkout his overview in the following post.

https://dev.to/fdocr/learning-crystal-with-battlesnake-3chj
#CrystalLanguage #programming

Related to my recent dive into #rust, I realized the key difference in systems between good, excellent and the (stupid concept of) 10x programmers (plus a way to interview that distinguishes them). The key factor is an ability to grasp complex concepts, given a fixed amount of time.

Good systems programmers can grasp most basic, abstract concepts (like OOP, sockets, etc.) quickly or more complex concepts, given enough time. Excellent programmers can grasp difficult, abstract concepts (like nested page tables), given enough time and 10x programmers can grasp difficult concepts very quickly.

So it’s a two dimensional axis of how much complexity one can grasp in what period of time. Some people will never grasp some concepts but many programmers can grasp almost all concepts, given enough time. The time metric is the defining difference in systems where we work with large complex code bases and do not have infinite time to build them. However, some people might take slightly longer to grasp a concept but are very good at it once they do, so sometimes a trade off is worthwhile.

censorship is neutral. it can be used to eliminate dissent or to discriminate, but it can also be used to eliminate harassment and to protect a community from malicious actors.

in a completely open community there will always be malicious actors who drive away good people, until the community becomes completely dominated by those clowns.

this is how "censorship-free zones" end up censoring good people -- not through top-down policy but through unmitigated harassment.

ultimately though, not everyone will agree on what kinds of speech should be censored, so self-selection into communities based on different policies seems like a good approach. i.e. mastodon's approach.

plus, nobody is ever truly censored online, they just have to take their ideas elsewhere. this is in not an authoritarian regime.

now if only we could get all the tech people to understand that moderation is essential, and that there is no "technological solution" to censorship...

In response to Crystal's most recent Regex engine upgrade, here is the experience with detailed instructions to migrate to PCRE2 from one of our crystal enthusiasts, Seth. We are thankful to Seth for creating the user guide based on his own experience performing the migration. We believe the guide will be helpful for the community.

For an interesting read, please catch Seth's entire article here, https://dev.to/seesethcode/crystal-pcre2-upgrade-guide-58eo.

#community #CrystalLanguage #programming

I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support.

I would much rather you pirate anything I have made or worked on vs listening on streaming services, which are an objective nightmare for musicians. Even if you never intend to spend a penny, normalizing piracy is better for us than normalizing the current capitalist-realism nightmare where you get whatever you want and also get to relax into the fiction that you aren't exploiting musicians because you pay the price of one album per month to a giant corporation so you can feel ok about it.

5,300!
That's how many planets we've confirmed beyond our solar system -- so far! One of the newly-discovered worlds is more than 1,000 light-years from Earth. TOI 2525 b, a ''warm Neptune,'' orbits its star with a larger companion planet. http://exoplanets.nasa.gov/discovery/
#NASAExoplanets

Want to learn about a handy way to reveal the type of an expression? Catch Brian Cardiff's brilliant article, "Reveal type in Crystal" where you not only learn a neat tool, but also a bit of macro magic!

https://crystal-lang.org/2023/03/06/reveal-type-in-crystal/

#crystalLanguage #programming #community

Really pleased to have pushed watch.ocaml.org out of beta. 130+ videos about #ocaml dating back to 2010 (and would like to get more historical ones) all available via PeerTube/ActivityPub. https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/watch-ocaml-org-out-of-beta-and-a-call-for-new-videos/11561

Not mine. 🙂

#StarTrek #Wisdom

Important Update from the Crystal world!

Crystal is upgrading its Regex engine. The new library version (PCRE2), although stricter than its predecessor PCRE for some edge cases, comes with extended support for important features which is definitely something to look forward to.

Please read all about the upgrade and the features of the new library in our blog, https://crystal-lang.org/2023/03/02/crystal-is-upgrading-its-regex-engine/

We're super excited about the upgrade and awaiting to hear what the community has to say.
#crystalLanguage

Welcome to the world of Crystal!

Crystal is an open-source object-oriented programming language, with a unique combination of features that make it blazingly fast, safe and programmer-friendly, granting high levels of productivity to development teams, with a very low memory footprint. To know more about this amazing language, dive into
https://crystal-lang.org/

#programming #crystalLanguage #crystal

What nonsense! I find the students sleep perfectly well during my early-morning lectures.

If you drag an emoji family with a string size of 11 into an input with maxlength=10, one of the children will disappear.

Here we go! Fast VGM/VGZ playback in 100% native #CrystalLang :D Chip emulators that are currently implemented are the Hudson HuC6280 (PC Engine), Konami K051649 (MSX2), General Instruments AY-1-8910, and the Namco C352 (various arcade boards). More chips will be added soon ^_^

This is why I was working on that prototype recently ^_~

Note: The second song in the example video is a bit louder than the others. You've been warned.

Very early WIP source code is here: https://chiselapp.com/user/MistressRemilia/repository/yunosynth

1/ We're delighted to announce the next release of DCIC. This is a major revision that's been a long time in the making.

The quoted tweet thread summarizes the book; the rest of this thread outlines what's new:

https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1429181263487844354

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