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What is the deal with API documentation that can seem so terse to a hobbyist?
  • Because usually if you end up at the API reference in that situation it's a code / project smell that other stuff is going wrong.

    If I want to use a library to do something, you should be able to search for what you want to do + language / framework, find the library's docs, follow the install instructions and then look through the highest level API / instructions and then just go from there.

    If you find yourself confused at unhelpful API references that just means that they have badly written top level API docs, badly written intros, or quite probably just badly written APIs.

  • Conservatives win longtime Liberal stronghold Toronto-St. Paul's in shock byelection result
  • The fact that the Liberals are losing isn't that surprising, but the fact that a no-plan, know-nothing dipshit like PP seems to be winning is.

    Not paying attention to housing costs is really really going to have fucked this country over if he gets into power.

  • Balanced lethal systems
  • It goes against the simplified idea of evolution, in that, having a huge amount of off-spring die for no reason should generally be selected against since it's wasteful.

    But evolution isn't a straight march to a finish line, it can only use what it has to work with and it's entirely possible for a branch of it to get stuck in weird specific ways that aren't helpful.

  • A cool guide on emailing like a boss
  • Not saying "sorry", and instead saying "thank you for your patience", will make me internally think "no, I wasn't feeling patient at all", and I'll think you're a condescending asshole and undermine you at every turn.

    People need to learn how to apologize gracefully and keep moving.

  • Science is more like a conversation.
  • I mean, research funding is a huge problem, but half the problem is that journalists and reporters are largely people who went into English or Communications and stopped taking or learning any science past the high school level and thus don't actually know how to read papers or report on them. Not to mention that critically reading a scientific paper and evaluating in the context of other research takes a significant amount of time, more time than is given to write a normal newspaper article.

    And they're reporting that science to people who on average know the same or less than them, so their mistakes and misreporting is never caught or corrected.

  • $843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players
  • According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is "shutting out" all competition in the PC gaming market as it "forces" game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.

  • DJI drone ban passes in U.S. House — 'Countering CCP Drones Act' would ban all DJI sales in U.S. if passed in Senate
  • No, in this case it's the same problem.

    We're talking about banning DJI because the Chinese government subsidizes manufacturing useful things, whereas the US' approach to corporate policy is to ban anything that prevents a billionaire from getting richer, and now the US is mad that China mysteriously got a better drone industry.

    Either the US should reform itself until it prioritizes building useful shit cheaply instead of enriching finance industry assholes or it should shut. the. fuck. up.

  • ELI5: What is RISC-V?
  • For software to run on a computer, it needs to tell the computer what to do, "display this picture of a flower", "move my character to the left", "save this poem to a file".

    And for a bunch of different software to all run on the same machine, they all need to use the same basic set of instructions, this is called the machine's Instruction Set.

    Because the instruction set has to work for any software, these instructions don't look that readable to us, instead of "show this flower" they might be "move this bit of memory into the processor", but software builds up millions of those instructions to eventually display a flower.

    Intel processors used a set of instructions that were called x86, and then when AMD made a rival processor, they made theirs use the same instruction set so that their processors would be compatible with all the software written for Intel processors (and when they needed to move from 32bit instructions to 64bit instructions, they made a new set called x64).

    Meanwhile Apple computers for a long time used processors built by IBM that used IBMs PowerPC instruction set.

    Now many companies are using the ARM instruction set, but ARM is still a private company you have to pay licensing fees to, so RISC-V is rising as a new, truly open source and free to use instruction set.

  • A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water
  • Eh, that's not the joy you think it is.

    That's how software used to be distributed and that's where the terms DLL / Dependency Hell come from and why programs used to not uninstall cleanly and break other programs, etc.

    It's more efficient, but it's also brittler and a lot more complex to manage. Conversely, bundling everything together with all its dependencies is a lot easier to manage, and a lot more robust overall, but comes at the expense of storage capacity and network bandwidth.

  • After a worryingly dated hands-on with Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's galactic open world feels less exciting than expected
  • I heard the latest preview was on Tatooine and immediately soured to the point of curdling.

    I cannot express this clearly enough: Fuck Tattooine.

    We've seen it. It has been done. Its a desert planet with less character than Dune. We get it. Enough. Stop with the Tatooine already, we don't need anymore tattooine. I hate Tatooine so fucking much, I don't care how easy sandy rock is to render, tattooine can burn in a pit until you're ready to make another pod racing game.

  • Anon discovers .NET
  • In .NET to make a controller you just make a class that extends controller and then a public function that returns a ViewResult, JsonResult, etc.

    No black box dependency injection required.

  • NDP backs Tory motion, saying carbon price not 'be-all, end-all' of climate policy

    The federal New Democrats backed Conservative demands Wednesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take part in a televised "emergency meeting" on carbon pricing with Canada's premiers.

    The federal carbon price is not the "be-all, end-all" of climate policy, and New Democrats are open to alternative plans presented by premiers, NDP environment critic Laurel Collins said Wednesday.

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    Toronto's new Love Park puts up sign begging you to be patient about gross pond
    www.blogto.com Toronto's new Love Park puts up sign begging you to be patient about gross pond

    The centrepiece of Toronto's new gem of a park has been looking more like a murky emerald than a crystal-clear diamond over the past week. Love Par...

    Toronto's new Love Park puts up sign begging you to be patient about gross pond
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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MA
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