Mark Damon Hughes blogs about tech and everything else
Happily, the version my installed eslint contains is later:
% npm info eslint|grep scope
eslint-scope: ^4.0.0
Interesting attack: Collect one bad password, use that to get someone's npm credentials, push a virus that uploads more peoples' npm credentials. Soon they could have had every package infected. Only being watchful prevented catastrophe.
Repeating my Password lesson: Use strong passwords. Do not ever reuse passwords.
Star Wars, in descending order of quality/interest:
I can't tell you how important hundreds of viewings (some in theatre, rest on laserdisc) of Star Wars and Empire were to my young brain. And duels between little Luke and Vader action figures in cardboard and styrofoam sets I made. And weird and annoying rogues and freaks smuggling drugs and blowing things up for the Rebellion in SWRPG.
But I don't think it can ever be captured and repackaged again. The kids today are too whiny to be competent heroes or sympathetic villains, so it doesn't work. The original movies must look incredibly derivative because everyone's been ripping Star Wars off for 40 years.
It's OK to let old properties die out. Let it die with a whimper.
The same thing's happened with Dr Who. The original series (for me, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison) was low-budget, and you had to pay attention for a half-hour a day for a week (500% longer than modern attention spans), but it was actual science fiction with ideas; everything since the awful American TV movie and the reboot's been a dumb Hollywood action show with a magic wand and a lot of screaming and running around nice sets. They would have been better off making a new franchise, and sort of tried with Torchwood, but any pretense that NewWho has anything to do with an old man and granddaughter quietly investigating the past is nonsense.
Apple Music hasn't updated the New Releases list since Jun 22, which is infuriating. Can someone at Apple go kick them out of their heroin stupor to fix this feed?
Picked up Life is Strange freebie episode on Steam. Super aggravating controls: Almost no control over the camera, even less over the cursor: Find the off-target mouse circle, drag slowly to a command. Running is not always available, let alone default as it should be for playability. Most cutscenes can't be skipped. I don't know if I'd like the story or the game, because the first few areas drove me insane.
I've played and enjoyed a lot of walking simulators, like Proteus, Dear Esther, Gone Home (had to massively increase mouse sensitivity), and Connor Sherlock's games. These mostly use standard FPS WASD controls, mouse crosshair, and E to use.
And a lot of story games, like David Cage's Heavy Rain & Beyond Two Souls. Cage's games make heavy use of dual-stick controllers and "mash X now!" quick-time events, have minimal free will to go off the rails, but they aren't frustrating to play.
And physics toys, like Garry's Mod and Goat Simulator. These have dead standard FPS controls and total player freedom.
LiS is the first game in a long time I can't progress in.
By the way, about void-safety: for a decade now, Eiffel has been void-safe, meaning a compile-time guarantee of no run-time null pointer dereferencing. It is beyond my understanding how the rest of the world can still live with programs that run under myriad swords of Damocles: x.op (…) calls that might any minute, without any warning or precedent, hit a null x and crash.
—Bertrand Meyer, Why not program right?
I knew this would be exasperating, but really now. At this point, my eyes rolled completely out of my head and I no longer have eyes. ?
References don't just randomly become null without warning. You chose to call a function that might return null, and didn't bother to put in an if or assert when that's a possibility. Typically the exception system catches it if you do miss it.
The Objective-C model of nil messaging just returning nil or 0 was theoretically dangerous, but in practice incredibly useful. Crashing out in Javascript means I have to wrap everything with (x ? x.op() : null) to get the same effect, which might require a lot of temp vars.
Do type devotees actually believe in randomly-appearing errors, or that dynamic programmers just flail our limbs on a keyboard until something manages to pass tests, or do they just exaggerate a rare edge case they saw once, or are they completely fabricating this stuff to justify their waste of time/perversion?
Type systems are self-inflicted BDSM, and it is not self-evident that everyone wants to wear a gimp suit.
Or—more likely—a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy’s system into Hiro’s computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn’t touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.
And it doesn’t make sense anyway. “That’s a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug,” Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.
“It is,” the guy says. “Try it.”
“Does it fuck up your brain?” Hiro says. “Or your computer?”
“Both. Neither. What’s the difference?”
Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun.
—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, ch. 5
Not always, but sometimes.
Yesterday's question and the Linux user response bugs me:
"because they are writing actually useful software, and not bells-and-frippery bullshit."
@dgold
That's just a horrific anti-user attitude. I want nothing but suffering for the developers & maintainers of Linux, but the poor bastards using it are still people, and people deserve software that doesn't suck.
So I duckduckwent for some clickbait and picked out some non-system apps.
Sources:
I'm going to mark these X for Cross-Platform, L for Linux-only, or NL for Not on Linux, and a completely biased first impression (unless I've used it) star rating:
So that was a parade of mostly the shittiest cross-platform apps ever, that I wouldn't allow on my computer. A couple are respectable. It looks like Cumulus and maybe some GNOME people are the only decent desktop devs on Linux? There are good cross-platform apps not listed, so I suspect "Linux users have no aesthetic sense" is a big part of this, no recognition for even trying.
I'm not going to attempt this for Windows, ain't enough whiskey in the world for that.