@movq@www.uninformativ.de a first edition signed Superman comic book, carefully folded just to fit, but not damaged enough to have lost its value?

Nobody want to be a shitty programmer. The question is: Do you do anything not to not be one?
Reading blogs or social media and watching YouTube videos is fun. After them, your code may be a little better, of course. But you need a lot. You need to study! Read good books and study the code of other programmers, for example. Maybe work with a new language, architectures and paradigms. You need break the routine.

If you know Object-oriented programming, you learn functional programming.
If you know Model-View-Controller, you learn Model-View-ViewModel.
If you don’t know anything about architectures, you learn Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, etc.
If you know Python, you learn Ruby or Go.
If you know Clojure or Lisp… you don’t need to learn anything else. You are already a good programmer. Just kidding. You can learn Elixir or Scala.

Be a good programmer my friend.

happy free comic book day! my store was out of freebies but i got some of my pulls and also a trade of one of my favorite reads last year!

The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de I started with Delphi in school, the book (that we never ever used even once and I also never looked at) taught Pascal. The UI part felt easy at first but prevented me from understanding fundamental stuff like procedures or functions or even begin and end blocks for ifs or loops. For example I always thought that I needed to have a button somewhere, even if hidden. That gave me a handler procedure where I could put code and somehow call it. Two or three years later, a new mate from the parallel class finally told me that this wasn’t necessary and how to do thing better.

You know all too well that back in the day there was not a whole lot of information out there. And the bits that did exist were well hidden. At least from me. Eventually discovering planet-quellcodes.de (I don’t remember if that was the original forum or if that got split off from some other board) via my best schoolmate was like finding the Amber Room. Yeah, reading the ITG book would have been a very good idea for sure. :-)

In hindsight, a console program without the UI overhead might have been better. At least for the very start. Much less things to worry about or get lost.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice, it doesn’t require a lot of surrounding boilerplate like, say Java or Go. It also does exceptionally well in the principle of least surprise.

Amazon Just Happens to Hold Book Sale During Independent Bookstore Day
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These ideas are dr the two books:

• Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker (2011)
  
• Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson (2011)
  

The former I haven’t read. The later I haven’t finished reading 😅

📖 The Future of Normativity: https://academic.oup.com/book/59520

“Careless People” the book that Meta tried to suppress
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‘Bright Circle’ and ‘Margaret Fuller’: The Rise of the Transcendental Woman
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More Everything Forever
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Hands-On Large Language Models: Official Code Repo for the O’Reilly Book
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UML diagram for the DDD example in Evans’ book
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A threat model for opposing authoritarianism
A decade ago, I published a book on privacy “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in – where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use i … ⌘ Read more

css naked day, I missed that this year. css is messy anyway and i got a css book in german to learn the basics

The Dark Side of the Moomins
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I made a bot to spoil every book my girlfriend ever reads
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So, I Wrote a Book: The Story Behind “100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them”
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Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us
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Getting the firmware of a VTech/LeapFrog LeapStart/Magibook
This is a very small blog post about my first reverse engineering project, in which I don’t really reverse engineer anything yet, but I am just getting started! A family member asked me to add additional book data to the LeapStart he bought for his son, this is the starting point here. ↫ leloubil’s blog We’ve all seen toy, child-focused computers like these, and I always find them deeply fascinating. I’m not buyi … ⌘ Read more

Public domain technical books published before 1964
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Yoko: A Biography
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well, there is a whole book about piracy, DRM and selling stuff on the internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Doesn%27t_Want_to_Be_Free

So I won’t add much to the topic, what I can say is that this is about being pragmatic. There is some people who’s gonna spend their money on books but it requires publicity (polemic topic) and subsidizing creativity with our own money (another controversial one).

Otherwise it’s a difficult discipline /profession /industry

@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I want to highlight another social problem: People don’t read. Paper industry is a bad moment because people don’t pay for books; it does not matter if it is a physical or digital platform. I have this information because I have a good friend who left the industry after publishing a magazine, books and working in an editorial. DRM is a try to give some more money.

well, that leads to a long conversation.

Piracy is a difficult topic which is very personal, so I won’t say much about it.

On writing books, I’ve tried along with other digital products such as courses and videogames, and I got to confess that it has been hard for me.

If it helps, I think it all reaches our expectations on the activity and the result. If royalties is the expectation, it’s going to be slow. By 5% of royalties, for a rough example, a huge amount of sales will be required to get a decent “wage”, so I’ve understood of doing it by the side of a normal employment although it has been discouraging and a bit sad.

I have reflected about it in Spanish here: https://sembrandojuegos.substack.com/p/sobre-expectativas-al-crear-juegos

@prologic@twtxt.net Fully agreed. I’m far more likely to buy such mediums when DRM-free. I never go near Amazon eBooks etc because of their lock-in, and I have a Kobo eReader which needs to have the books side loaded unless directly from the Kobo store. I prefer DRM-free files every time.

I have just received the royalties for the last book: 98 euros for the four-month period, about 24 euros a month on average. Not even enough for the gym membership.
If you have to keep some knowledge: don’t write for money, the paper (or ebook) industry is in a very bad way, the margins for the author are very small and piracy is devastating.

‘Catastrophic’: Canadian bookings for U.S. travel drop sharply
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Flight bookings from Canada to the US plummet over 70%
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The Book (2021)
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Architecture Patterns with Python
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NASA Deletes Comic Book About How Women Can Be Astronauts
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@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

@prologic@twtxt.net I created a script for your book. i have only done the first two chapters. have to do some adjustments to the text so it sounds ok and that takes time..

https://git.sour.is/xuu/piper

@xuu@txt.sour.is What books do you have?

I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.

I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.

Just leaving this book here for no reason 🤫

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

Nouveau billet intitulé “La trilogie Mars est solarpunk” https://si3t.ch/log/2025-01-25-mars-KSR.txt #solarpunk #book #sf

Lowkey planning out a book (anthology. Maybe) of just playscripts in my Greek myth yuriverse. Thank u lord

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Reading “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak

Cancelled Mastodon because the time spent on it could have been used for reading books instead and the level of interaction is not enough to keep me interested.

@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net I just found:

Equilibrium problems are solved by method of relaxation numerically.

– Manoj Kumar and Garima Mishra, https://www.scirp.org/html/8798.html

Reminds me of deliberately misattributed quotes from a funny German book series “Die Känguru-Chroniken”, like:

How much is the fish?

– Karl Marx

I’m positively surprised there is even an English wikipedia page about The Kangaroo Chronicles. Somebody gathered a list with all of them.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, the Python docs are more like a book. They absolutely shine if you have no idea and read them from top to bottom. The tutorial is baked right in. But they don’t work all that perfect as cheat sheets. I also remember looking for the return types way too long in the past.

I would have thought that this could be easily improved when type hints are in place. And it sure does: https://www.tornadoweb.org/en/stable/httpclient.html#tornado.httpclient.HTTPClient.fetch

Way to go F*** Book! With another $263M going down the drains … And people’s lives/data with it.

Brilliant, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, I didn’t think of the keystore! :-D

Me too, @aelaraji@aelaraji.com, I don’t know how many entire books I had to rewrite because of Ctrl+W irreversibly deleting the entire chapter.

An inspiring book on making a life around IT security

Troy Hunt: “Pwned”, The Book, Is Now Available for Free
https://www.troyhunt.com/pwned-the-book-is-now-available-for-free/

The web server in Calibre is pretty cool. Love how the UI was designed and made. Feels intuitive, yet powerful. Now i do need to organise the book collection a bit better.