• 6 Posts
  • 129 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • This will sound dumb, but I’m saying it sincerely.

    I’ve had similar issues (without getting into details), but what worked for me was getting outside a couple times a week. By that I mean bringing a tent or hammock + tarp and sleeping outside a couple nights a week on workdays.

    To be specific: I sleep outside Monday-Tuesday and Wednesday-Thursday. On those days I also make my dinner at my campsite. What I’ve found is that my brain goes into a much more “primal” state of “monke outside in cold, monke get shit done”, and that it propagates into my day and week.

    The barrier to this is of course actually going outside, but I’ve been able to get to a place where I have a “deal with myself” about those two nights a week. I always have my pack ready, so it’s just about grabbing it and heading out- I think that’s key.

    I’m not saying this is a solution for everyone, but it’s done wonders for me. As of now, I get restless and feel bad if I’m in a situation where I can’t get outside at least once a week. It brings me a peace of mind and will to get stuff done that nothing else can.







  • *Breaks the law

    *Is convicted

    *Refuses to pay fines

    *Stops receiving funds

    *shockedpikachu.jpg

    At this point I really can’t understand what is driving Orban anymore. He obviously must have known this would happen, and is likely doing it on purpose so that he can point at the EU as the “bad guy” back home, but like… what does he gain from this? Isn’t it better to just get a shitload of free money from the EU that you can funnel to your friends and family than to not do that? If he legitimately dislikes the EU he can just leave.

    Maybe he’s just sticking around as long as he can grab cash? It kind of seems like he’s going for the “see how far you can push it before you’re kicked out” play. Essentially trying to find out how much of an obstructing, law-breaking, corrupt asshole he has to be before the rest of the EU finally has enough and kicks him out, at which point he can peace out to some safe-haven (I’ve heard there are spare rooms in some of Putins palaces).



  • For someone starting out, I would say that a major advantage of Python over any compiled language is that you can just create a file and start writing/running code. With C++ (which I’m also a heavy user of) you need to get over the hurdle of setting up a build system, which is simple enough when you know it, but can quickly be a high bar for an absolute beginner. That’s before you start looking at things like including/linking other libraries, which in Python is done with a simple import, but where you have to set up your build system properly to get things working in C++.

    Honestly, I’m still kind of confused that the beginner course at my old university still insists on giving out a pre-written makefile and vscode config files for everyone instead of spending the first week just showing people how to actually write and compile hello world using cmake. I remember my major hurdle when leaving that course was that I knew how to write basic C++, I just had no idea how to compile and link it when I could no longer use the makefile that we were explicitly told to never touch…




  • Yes, it’s a field. Specifically, a field containing human-readable information about what is going on in adjacent fields, much like a comment. I see no issue with putting such information in a json file.

    As for “you don’t comment by putting information in variables”: In Python, your objects have the __doc__ attribute, which is specifically used for this purpose.





  • In general I agree: ChatGPT sucks at writing code. However, when I want to throw together some simple stuff in a language I rarely write, I find it can save me quite some time. Typical examples would be something like

    “Write a bash script to rename all the files in the current directory according to <pattern>”, “Give me a regex pattern for <…>”, or “write a JavaScript function to do <stupid simple thing, but I never bothered to learn JS>”

    Especially using it as a regex pattern generator is nice. It can also be nice when learning a new language and you just need to check the syntax for something- often quicker than swimming though some Geeks4Geeks blog about why you should know how to do what you’re trying to do.


  • My test suite takes quite a bit of time, not because the code base is huge, but because it consists of a variety of mathematical models that should work under a range of conditions.

    This makes it very quick to write a test that’s basically “check that every pair of models gives the same output for the same conditions” or “check that re-ordering the inputs in a certain way does not change the output”.

    If you have 10 models, with three inputs that can be ordered 6 ways, you now suddenly have 60 tests that take maybe 2-3 sec each.

    Scaling up: It becomes very easy to write automated testing for a lot of stuff, so even if each individual test is relatively quick, they suddenly take 10-15 min to run total.

    The test suite now is ≈2000 unit/integration tests, and I have experienced uncovering an obscure bug because a single one of them failed.





  • This is a very “yes but still no” thing in my experience. Typically, I find that if I write “naive” C++ code, where I make no effort to optimise anything, I’ll outperform python code that I’ve spent time optimising by a factor of 10-30 (given that the code is reasonably complex, this obviously isn’t true for a simple matrix-multiplication where you can use numpy). If I spend some time on optimisation, I’ll typically be outperforming python by a factor of 50+.

    In the end, I’ve found it’s mostly about what kind of data structures you’re working with, and how you’re passing them around. If you’re primarily working with arrays of some sort and doing simple math with them, using some numpy and scipy magic can get you speeds that will beat naive C++ code. On the other hand, when you have custom data structures that you want to avoid unnecessarily copying, just rewriting the exact same code in C++ and passing things by reference can give you massive speedups.

    When I choose C++ over python, it’s not only because of speed. It’s also because I want a more explicitly typed language (which is easier to maintain), overloaded functions, and to actually know the memory layout of what I’m working with to some degree.