sfoley (u/sfoley) - Readit News

sfoley commented on DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020) crockford.com/dec64.html... · Posted by u/vinhnx

This seems optimized for fast integer operations. Except that if I only cared about integers, I'd use an actual integer type.

sfoley · 2 months ago

Near the end of the article, under Motivation:

> The BASIC language eliminated much of the complexity of FORTRAN by having a single number type. This simplified the programming model and avoided a class of errors caused by selection of the wrong type. The efficiencies that could have gained from having numerous number types proved to be insignificant.

DEC64 was specifically designed to be the only number type a language uses (not saying I agree, just explaining the rationale).

sfoley commented on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26 nngroup.com/articles/liqu... · Posted by u/uxjw

TheOtherHobbes · 3 months ago

All of this is true. The first thing I did was turn down transparency. But there's no way to tone down the new animations, which make the UI feel twitchy and distracting.

And there are some stupidly obvious bugs - like the WEATHER header in the weather app is black on a dark background.

And the way the buttons at the bottom of the page are tight up against the content instead of being centred in the space under it.

It reeks of design-for-resume-padding instead of design-for-user-delight.

sfoley · 2 months ago

> But there's no way to tone down the new animations

Does Reduce Motion (under Accessibility) not work? I haven't updated to 26 yet, and probably won't for a while.

sfoley commented on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26 nngroup.com/articles/liqu... · Posted by u/uxjw

sfoley · 2 months ago

> In iOS 26, controls insist on animating themselves, whether or not the user benefits. Carousel dots quietly morph into the word Search after a few seconds.

This has been the case for several years now (started in iOS 16 IIRC); it is not new in 26.

sfoley commented on Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers reuters.com/world/uk/brit... · Posted by u/alex77456

randerson · 3 months ago

This thread is about illegal immigrants. If your friends paid for visas, that would imply they are in a different immigrant category than what we're discussing.

sfoley · 3 months ago

No it isn't. This line of comments is explicitly in response to your claim:

> Isn't a larger issue the number of immigrants who are NOT contributing to the economy, living at taxpayers' expense

No one has yet mentioned illegal immigrants except you.

In any case it doesn't matter, since GP was specifically replying to:

> In my experience, immigrants have low paying jobs and regularly use cash to avoid paying taxes. Most have no sense whatsoever of cohesion with the country they live in and instead make groups of similar culture that don't really try to fit in.

They were simply giving their own opposite experience on the subject of immigrant wages and taxation, which is equally as valid.

If this thread was actually about illegal immigrants, both comments would be equally off topic. I find it interesting which one you decided to respond to.

sfoley commented on Fixing Ctrl+C in Rust terminal apps: Child process management fiveonefour.com/blog/Fixi... · Posted by u/Callicles

pjerem · 5 months ago

When you use ctrl+c, you are not killing the program, you are sending it a SIGTERM signal which essentially means « could you please stop yourself ? » so the program have a chance to clean things before exiting.

kill -9 is sending a SIGKILL signal which, well, kills the program immediately.

sfoley · 5 months ago

SIGINT, not SIGTERM.

sfoley commented on Fstrings.wtf fstrings.wtf/... · Posted by u/darkamaul

ejiblabahaba · 5 months ago

Learned a few tricks that I'm sure are buried on fstring.help somewhere (^ for centering, # for 0x/0b/0o prefixes, !a for ascii). I missed the nested f-strings question, because I've been stuck with 3.11 rules, where nested f-strings are still allowed but require different quote characters (e.g. print(f"{f'{{}}'}") would work). I guess this got cleaned up (along with a bunch of other restrictions like backslashes and newlines) in 3.12.

F-strings are great, but trying to remember the minute differences between string interpolation, old-style formatting with %, and new-style formatting with .format(), is sort of a headache, and there's cases where it's unavoidable to switch between them with some regularity (custom __format__ methods, templating strings, logging, etc). It's great that there's ergonomic new ways of doing things, which makes it all the more frustrating to regularly have to revert to older, less polished solutions.

sfoley · 5 months ago

Yeah I consider that one to be a trick question. I knew same-quote-style nested f-strings were coming, I just didn't know which version, and I still use the `f'{f"{}"}'` trick because I want my code to support "older" versions of python. One of my servers is still on 3.10. 3.11 won't be EOL until 2027.

sfoley commented on ChatGPT creates phisher's paradise by serving the wrong URLs for major companies theregister.com/2025/07/0... · Posted by u/josephcsible

TZubiri · 6 months ago

I feel a bit icky, but whenever I see people work with such a disregard for quality, I'm actually rooting for their products to break and get hacked.

In 2015 it was copy and pasting code from stackoverflow, in 2020 it was npm install left-pad, in 2025 it's vibecoding.

I refuse to join them, and I patiently await the day of rapture.

sfoley · 6 months ago

leftpad was 2016

sfoley commented on Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor scalewithlee.substack.com... · Posted by u/scalewithlee

aidog · 8 months ago

It's something I ran into quite a few times in my career. It's a weird call to get if the client can't save their cms site, due to typing something harmless. I think worst was when there was a dropdown that I defined which had a value in the mod rules that was not allowed.

sfoley · 8 months ago

I cannot reproduce this.