Spider

Learning to code isn’t it. Spending so many hours practicing Dijkstra’s algorithm and object oriented programming is relevant to building software for other people to use, not controlling it or maintaining your own things.

If you want control of your own machines, learn the terminal, learn operating systems and how to understand network APIs. Learn how to use WireShark to examine how your own devices talk to the internet so that you understand how they work. A generic programming course will not take you in this direction.

You can write comments, but you can’t make your colleagues read them. They don’t necessarily have to visit the originating file to read the docs.

Short variable names tend to lead different people to make different kinds of assumptions about the purpose and use of the variable. Those differences in understanding is where a lot of subtle bugs come from, or causes people to hit a dead end.

Just be clear and explicit. Its not gaming; you dont have to care about losing a couple extra frames to type out a few extra characters. Most IDEs have sufficient autocompletes so it’s literally not even a problem in many cases.

Responding as a java/kotlin maintainer of one single large system with frequent requirement changes. what i call “high entropy” programs. Other developers have different priorities and may answer differently based on what kind of system they work in, and their answers are also valid, but you do need to care about what kind of systems they work on when you decide whether or not to follow their advice.

In my experience, if the builder of the original system didn’t care about maintainability, then it’s probably faster to rewrite it.

Of course, then you’d have to be able to tell what maintainable code looks like, which is the tricky part, but includes things like,

• Interfaces
• Dependency injection
• Avoidance of static or const functions
• Avoidance of “indirect recursion” or what I call spaghetti jank that makes class internals really hard to understand.
• Class names indicate design patterns being used. Such as “Facade”. This indicates that the original builder was doing some top-down software design in an effort to write maintainable code.
• Data has one, and only one, source of truth. A lot of refactoring pain comes from trying to align multiple sources of truth, since disgreements cause mayhem to the program state.

Bad signs:

• Oops, all concrete classes.
• Inheritance. You get one Base Class, and only one, before you should give the code the death glare. Its extremely difficult for a programmer to be able to tell a true “is a” relationship from a false one. For starters you have to have rock solid class definitions to start with. If the presence of Inheritance smells like the original builder was only using it to save time building the feature, burn it with fire! Its anti-maintainable.
• Too much organizing - you have to open 20 files to find out what one algorithm does. That’s a sign that the original builder didn’t know the difference between organizing for organizing sake and keeping code together that changes together.
• Too little organizing - the original builder shoved eveything into one God class so they could use a bunch of global variables. You’d probably have a hard time replacing a component so big. Also, it probably won’t let you replace parts of itself - this style forces you to burn down the whole thing to make a change.
• Multiple sources of truth for data: classes that keep their own copies of data as member variables are a prime example of this kind of mistake.

The three-page, handwritten document found on him suggested a motive, according to investigators. The pages expressed “ill will” towards corporate America, they said.

Why does he have a random handwritten note “found” on him? What was he planning on doing with it?

Ah, so that’s what the pro gamers are doing.

It’s one of those pads you put on top to keep dirt from getting in between the keys

Self-reporting survey of subjective symptoms is the lowest possible standard to have. This is some wakefield-tier garbage. Thanks, now I’ll know to avoid the LA Times.

Apple and Google’s 30% not only hits the base price, but every single transaction that happens inside apps as well. Imagine a toll bridge in front of your nearest supermarket where the people working the toll booth inspect every bag of grocery you bought and then charged you toll based on what you bought there.

Apps arent entirely like video games. If you wanted to open a non-subscription based music store or book store or whatever, you’d find it economically impossible to pay the publishers their cut, apple their cut, your server host their cut, and have anything left over for yourself without charging your customers their arms and legs. This is why all those kinds of apps are subscription based. You can cleverly batch and bundle stuff in a monthly subscription fee which gives you room to dance around google and apples high fees and have enough money to keep your lights on.

Stack Overflow isn’t a tutor site. It’s a wiki. Its usefulness would plummet if duplicate questions are allowed, since that would scatter all the answers.

I bet it’s more to do with how little Americans own their own culture. Copyrights in the USA used to expire after 30 years, after which it became public domain. Or in other words, culture was returned to the people as a whole.

Nowdays the copyrights last beyond a lifetime, and Americans grow up in a world where they almost never experience relevant pop culture outside of being owned or controlled by someone. When you find American content, you don’t think of “American culture” you think of “This is owned by Disney” or “This is owned by Paramount” and so on and so forth. You have original authors and content creators, being the gods of the world they created, and everyone else are “fan artists” or “fanfic writers,” being implied to be lesser. Those fan artists will be fan artists their entire lives, and their works will never be ‘canon’ in the eyes of the Owners. If you like Harry Potter but not Rowling, too bad. The public cant reclaim it.

That’s not how culture works though. Culture remixes, reinspires, deconstructs, rebuilds, and memes on. That’s how everyone did stuff before the advent of recorded media. The good stuff is repeated and boosted. In a way, the Internet culture that emerged in the 90s sought out to rebuild what was lost after the 1890s.

You asked

How should tags be integrated into Lemmy?

Which is a generic question that goes beyond the scope of one change, so I assume you also wanted to shore up probable future changes, all of which built on top of the first change. Forseeing problems in advance can prevent problems from propagating down the chain like this, so my contribution here is to reiterate the mistakes Ive seen other failed social networks make. That is, if spam bots have a way to output sludge faster than genuine content can be created, people will leave. I dont know lemmys specifics and its not my job to learn that, and this is not a code review. I do expect defederation to add some unknown complexity, so literally all i am asking is to just have a strategy for the final implementation and not handwave stuff as someone elses problem or take moderators for granted like reddit did.

I’m less concerned about the client side ui layout, so much as for enabling spamvertisements. So for example if a feature is added to be able to search by tag someday, then theres a potential for people to try and abuse that by labeling irrevelant things under tags in order to get attention.

I’ve experimented with other platforms before, and whenever a search feature gets added in any system that supports multiple tags, you start seeing posts with literally two dozen or more trending tags, and its irrevelant spam. I think the big proprietary platforms like tumblr have tools to moderate these, but I am aware that a community-led version of fighting spam has different needs and tools

Theres likely a way to incorporate downvotes into the server search algo, so it isnt surfacing junk for example. All of that is just one idea of a complete plan for helping the community to moderate spam. I’m not proposing any complete strategy here.

All I’m trying to get across: don’t forget to anticipate spam, and give the platform and users tools to defeat it.

If there’s tags, there needs to be a way to prevent spam abuse where someone adds like 100 popular and trending tags on their post to boost visibility for their advertisement, even though those tags do not fit the post. The simplest solution to that is limiting tags to like a maximum 1-3 per post, though other more complex solutions exist.