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  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 27th, 2023
  • wkk@lemmy.worldtoRust@programming.dev•Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
    41·
    5 months ago

    Antagonizing the borrow checker is wrong. If it screams it does so to prevent you from writing a mistake. Eventually once you have enough experience you should write code in such a way that doesn’t trip the borrow checker because you know how to properly handle your references.

    Is it difficult to learn at first? Yes, but the benefits of learning this outweighs the downsides such as writing code that may use references when it shouldn’t.

    I’m not a Rust aficionado, but the few Rust I’ve written opened my eyes on issues that I have been dealing with in other languages but for which I was blind.

    Lastly I tried following a Godot project tutorial that was using GDScript except I challenged myself to follow it but rewrite the examples given using Rust’s bindings for Godot. It was definitely more cumbersome to work with, but I might also have been doing something wrong (such as blindly transcribing GDscript instead of writing more idiomatic Rust).

    All of that to say 1) borrow checker is your friend and 2) scripting languages will always be more convenient at the cost of being way more dirty (way less safeties)

    In the end you need to pick the right tool for the job. Multiple tools may be used within the same project.

  • wkk@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition.
    1·
    5 months ago

    The message transferred between the particles supposedly FTL does contain information though. What I meant was that we cannot encode our own arbitrary information on top of it. The message has a physical effect on reality, without it the state we find the particles in cannot be respected.

    Just reconsider this: If we agree that the result of a measurement is totally random (no hidden variable predetermining the result of the measurement) but that once we measure and know the state of one particle then we know with certainty the state of the other particle (entanglement): information about the collapse of the first measured particle was shared to the other so that it’s no longer random.

    edit: If your argument is about “sharing information doesn’t imply transmission” then let’s stop here and leave this thread agreeing that “information was shared” :)

    I have no opinions on what shape the information sharing takes. Nor am I interested in guessing.

  • wkk@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•The reason why we never meet time travelers is because our civilization ends before the technology can come to fruition.
    2·
    5 months ago

    I mean you can setup a source of entangled particles and two very far detectors that would do measurements roughly at the same time on each particle in such a way that information traveling at the speed of light wouldn’t have time to travel the distance between both detectors.

    You can then just gather roughly simultaneous measurements and at a later time join the datasets from both detectors to see what one measured vs the other for each pair.

    If I understand correctly the current observations show that collapsing the state of one of the particle influences the other all the way at the other detector. Since there’s no hidden variables that predetermine the result of measurements while the result of the collapse is random, and the fact that particles still respect the correlation over any distance is why there seem to be a FTL communication between the particles.

    Something has to be communicated between the particles for the influence to work FTL, but it also seem we cannot leverage this phenomenon to send “actual information” this way :/

    edit: Important point with that experiment: once the particles have been observed, if you try the experiment a second time using the same particles, then you’ll get different results, this time in line with hidden variables because the particle’s state already collapsed.

  • wkk@lemmy.worldtoTeach Programming@programming.dev•Intro CS: Python, Java, C, Lisp, or Haskell?
    4·
    8 months ago

    I’m not a good comment writer so here’s some text:

    Not a teacher, but Python is great to discover various aspects of programming (algorithmic, flow control, I/O, OOP, metaprogramming). It’s also easy to setup.

    Java is just painful. The environment setup and the various frameworks available there are just way too overwhelming.

    JS is actually close to Python in my opinion, and better suited for getting introduced to functional programming while still using a non-functional language. See anonymous functions/arrow functions. APIs are heavily callback-oriented which is also a great thing to get used to: You can register a bit of computation (a function) to be executed some other time, i.e. when something happens. You are not in control of the execution of that function, someone else is and will call you back. This is something important to learn (imo).

    Finding the optimum algorithm is not important in the beginning (imo). When writing code there’s often two pretty different activities that happen:

    1. Defining and organizing your abstractions and flow.

    2. Identify bottlenecks and search for fast enough/memory efficient solutions.

    In most real world scenarios, having good program flow and abstractions will be enough. Not everyone works on real-time terabyte-sized data processing. See gamemaking: it’s a very performance sensitive domain yet frameworks allow anyone to make a decent game. Why? Because for most problems, someone already wrote a library that’s fast enough. You just need to wire things properly together.

    Teaching something lower-level like C/C++ is great, but you need to spend time deconstructing all the goodies people got used too when dealing with other languages. i.e. Why you can’t create an array with different types/structs inside anymore (not without pointers).

    And then just get them to practice writing different bits of software with increasing complexity, over the year(s). The most exposure to writing code the better. Trial and error is how anything is learned, and while you might try to warn your students about common pitfalls it might only really click once they’ll make the mistake. Push them in situations where they’ll make mistakes.

    The most important mindset to have (imo) is to constantly challenge yourself and your work: find ways to break your own stuff. Maybe you’ll miss cases but the better you get at anticipating breakage, the better you’ll get at writing robust software.

    The second most important thing is to seek to understand every line of code you write and as many implications as possible. A program is supposed to be deterministic, there’s very few surprises to be had when dealing with code (there are some though). What I mean by that is: if someone reports a bug, it can often be enough to read the code with the unexpected result in mind and work your way back to the places that allowed for this bug to occur, just by reading statically.

    Lastly one thing that was motivating for me when learning programming was when our programs would run against one another. Competition fosters innovation.

    I hope these pieces of opinion help with anything…

  • wkk@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•One in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth
    3·
    9 months ago

    You’re completely right that people turned a blind eye to what the Nazis were doing for as long as they could. But once shit hit the fan the Holocaust was no null part of why people kept fighting while protecting the jewish people that were unfortunate enough to live in their region. The main goal was liberating themselves from the occupation, but what the Nazis were trying to do just made it so much more important to gain control back from these monsters.

    Having a european perspective on the way this part of history is told I took the following phases away:

    • Allied nations tried their best to avoid confrontation.
    • Nazis attacked and WW2 began.
    • The Allied lost more and more territory.
    • Inside these occupied territories people did the following things:
      • Fight to liberate themselves.
      • Otherwise fight undercover to hide and protect jewish people living in their region.

    So while the main reason was to gain sovereignty back, the Holocaust heavily contributed to people fighting back at all costs. Witnessing such atrocities marked europeans really hard, and teachings of this story try to emphasis the scale of the horrors that the Nazis were inflicting to occupied places. It’s documented, witnesses are still somewhat around to tell what they’ve seen and if not their testimony was properly shared with later generations.

    All that to say that while WW2 was fought over protecting sovereignty, it became more than that once people ended up as the first witnesses of the ongoing genocide.

    Now I have to say that I have no idea what’s a north-american perspective on that matter.