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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • There are two facts old space game fans could tell you about Chris Roberts: that he will never meet a deadline (one of the Wing Commander games, his claim to fame, only came out because the publisher got sick of his delays and forced a release), and that he desperately wants to be a Hollywood writer/director. Both explain Squadron 42.




  • The main problem with Java (or garbage collected languages in general) as a first language is needing to unlearn the bad habits it ingrains when you move to a systems programming language with manual memory management. Other than that it’s a pretty good first language, though I’d suggest learning a bit of C at the same time just to get a basic grip on things like pointers and stack vs heap.

    Edit: it occurs to me that C# would be the perfect learning language. It’s very similar to Java and an easy first language, but you’d also learn about stack allocation through structs, and can teach pointers using unsafe (though I think unsafe code is still GCed, so this wouldn’t help with the memory management side of things. Haven’t touched C# in fifteen years so I’m not sure how it works anymore).












  • We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

    It’s strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.

    I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That’d help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.

    Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.

    (But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)