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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Writing good comments is an art form, and beginner programmers often struggle with it. They know comments mostly from their text books, where the comments explain what is happening to someone who doesn’t yet know programming, and nobody has told them yet that that is not at all a useful commenting style outside of education. So that’s how they use them. It usually ends up making the code harder to read, not easier.

    Later on, programmers will need to learn a few rules about comments, like:

    • Assume that whoever reads your code knows the programming language, the platform and the problem domain at least in general terms. You are not writing a teaching aid, you are writing presumably useful software.
    • Don’t comment the obvious. (Aside from documentation comments for function/method/class signatures)
    • Don’t comment what a line is doing. Instead, write your code, especially names for variables, constants, classes, functions, methods and so on, so that they produce talking code that needs no comments. Reserve the “what” style comments for where that just isn’t possible.
    • Do comment the why. Tell the reader about your intentions and about big-picture issues. If an if-statement is hard to parse, write a corresponding if clause in plain English on top of it.
    • In some cases, comment the “why not”, to keep maintenance programmers from falling in the same trap you already found.



  • Floating Point Unit. The thing that does mathematical operations on floating point numbers. It used come separately from the CPU as an add-on chip, but around the 486 era, manufacturers started integrating it on the same die as the CPU. Of course, as these things go, from the system programmers point of view, there is still no difference between an add-on FPU and an integrated one.

    The one pictured here is an add-on FPU for an Intel 80386 CPU.









  • waigl@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlInvest in hwat?
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    4 months ago

    Top Left – More or less the default position, sensible enough, if a bit naive. Nothing wrong with this.

    Top Right – Having knowledge is a good thing, and so is making decisions based on sound risk-benefit analysis.

    Bottom Right – Well, at least it’s an informed decision. Just don’t try to pass off the risk on someone else if it backfires.

    Bottom Left – Oooouuuuh, you don’t want to be in this quadrant, trust me…




  • Several years ago now. On at least two of those tries, after maybe a month or some of daily driving, suddenly the fs goes totally unresponsive and because it’s the entire system, could only reboot. FS is corrupted and won’t recover. There is no fsck. There is no recovery. Total data loss.

    Could you narrow it down to just how long ago? BTRFS took a very long time to stabilise, so that could possibly make a difference here. Also, do you remember if you were using any special features, especially RAID, and if RAID, which level?


  • Out of interest, since I’ve not used the “recommended partion setup” for any install for a while now, is ext4 still the default on most distros?

    I recently installed Nobara Linux on an additional drive, because after 20 years, I wanted to give Linux gaming another shot (works a lot better than I had hopes for, btw), and it defaulted to btrfs. I’ll assume so does Fedora, because I cannot imagine Nobara changed that part over the Fedora base for gaming purposes.