tunetardis

Oh yeah right! Mod files. I remember thinking when pdf came into being, it was to postscript like mod was to midi. A pdf is ps with fonts and whatever else embedded in it so that you could render it in a self-contained sort of way. The mod file was midi + samples to make them self-contained as well. I don't know how accurate that is, but that's how I pictured it in my head.

I guess my very first exposure was my brother letting me use his university account over dialup. You really had to know your way around in those days or know someone who did. He showed me how I could go to umich (U. of Michigan) and a few other places that ran public ftp servers full of games!

Then I landed a job at a small company which had accounts on CompuServe. Around this time at home, I was playing MUDs a lot on a free local BBS, and at some point, the people running the BBS decided to have a go at becoming the first commercial ISP in town. (They're still around, in fact!)

So I approached work about opening an Internet account, arguing that it was way cheaper than CompuServe. They reluctantly agreed. I was over the Moon but my superiors were not super impressed at first. They complained that they couldn't find anything while CompuServe was much better organized. I eventually found Yahoo which, at the time, had a sort of CompuServe-ish vibe of providing this directory that categorized most of the more popular sites by topic and that placated them. You have to remember this was long before search engines and even the www itself was still in its infancy.

I was having a blast, discovering something new every week. Usenet was so cool when I learned about that! And I found out about some sort of MIDI file format with embedded instrument samples you could play to get electronic music in a super compact format long before broadband made mp3s the way to go. What were they called again? Soundtrack files? Something like that. I played them all the time while I was coding.

Oh man, a showdown at the border: Tesla-Bot vs Mecha-Gosling!

After watching Yannick Bisson and Hélène Joy film a scene right next to my wife's workplace, we decided to binge Murdoch Mysteries. There are 18 season on CBC Gem! It's going to take awhile.

Yeah I agree. I came across the article as I like to read up on what's going on with BRICS countries as that seems like something worth keeping an eye on. But the lack of confirmation is troublesome. Even something like a giant trade deal with China that would give them some standing to call Trump's bluff would lend some credibility. It could be that this was threatened during negotiations and someone jumped the gun to say it's now policy? If I see any more about it one way or another, I will update the post.

That’s the point, when programming with immutable structures you always pass the mutability onto the enclosing structure.

I guess the point I was trying to make here was if the data type is already mutable, there is no point in sticking it in a list just so you can replace a reference with an identifier. You're just adding an extra level of indirection. But sure yeah, if the type is inherently immutable, you have to do something.

A list is an antipattern here IMO. Just wrap it in some dedicated object (see e.g. Java’s StringBuilder).

Interesting. I'm not aware of anything like StringBuilder in the standard library for either Python or JavaScript. Looks like it wraps a list of characters and tries to behave as string-like as possible? You could presumably write your own class like that or download an implementation from someplace.

I guess in most cases in my own code, where I need a mutable string is usually as part of a larger data structure which is the thing that gets passed around by reference, so it's easy enough to replace a field within that.

For building up a string, I would tend to use an io.StringIO in Python with file-writing calls, but those aren't meant for sharing. What you don't want to do is use the += operator a lot on strings. That gets expensive unless strings are mutable (like they are in say C++'s std::string).

Reddit has said it is working to convince logged-out users to create accounts as logged-in users, which are more lucrative for its business.

wat

Well, but then you're basically just pushing the mutability onto the container, since you need to be able to replace elements within it.

It's a good strategy at times though. Like say you're working in a language where strings are immutable and you want a string you can change. You can wrap it in a list along the lines s=['foo'] and pass references to the list around instead. Then if you go s[0]='bar' at some point, all the references will now see ['bar'] instead.

As others have pointed out, there is the issue of breaking references to objects.

There can also be a lot of memory thrashing if you have to keep reallocating and copying objects all the time. To some extent, that may be mitigated using an internment scheme for common values. In Python, for example, integers are immutable but they intern something like the first 100 or so iirc? But that doesn't work well for everything.

Any container you want to populate dynamically should probably be mutable to avoid O(N²) nastiness.

I think if there's a silver lining to the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs in North America, it is that it will hasten adoption of ebikes, which imo solve more problems than EVs in any case.

His point that ebikes replace cars—not conventional bikes—tracks for me. Mine has basically replaced our second car and I use it, as he indicated most people do, for commutes and short errands.

His point that an ebike has an energy footprint comparable to a 4000 mpg ICEV is an incredible metric. I wonder where he pulled that from? I know that my ebike battery has 1/150th the capacity of what goes into a Tesla. Granted, I wouldn't expect a comparable range so there's a bit of apples to oranges there. But if you then work in that EVs are already much more energy efficient than ICEVs, I guess you could arrive at a number like 4000.

Whatever the case, my experience with ebikes is that they are pretty close to free transportation in terms of operating costs. There may be a few unexpected expenses beyond the initial sticker cost of the bike in terms of accessories (particularly high quality locks) and some winter gear if you're in a colder climate, but those are one-time purchases for the most part.

Yeah pretty much! They were in full dress with the red coats and boots and the wide brimmed hats and all that. No horses though. There was also a fair bit more security that day than usual with swat team-looking guys around the exits and stuff.

I remember attending a trade convention in Toronto where they were showcasing this block of pure gold around the size of a loaf of bread. It was surrounded by Mounties but they welcomed me to come forward and even asked if I wanted to try and lift it. My God that thing was heavy!!

Then as I was about to leave, they said "Hold on sir, show us your hands." I did and they said I was good to go. I asked what that was about and they said some people try to scrape a bit off under their fingernails as a souvenir since gold is one of the softer metals.