Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 06, 2022

• Day 5 (Advent of Code 2022)

  Which is a visual representation of stacks, and so, for once, we have some serious parsing to do, and that means I finally have a good reason to bust out the nom crate.

• Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting

  All over the web, we are witnessing very spectacular results from statistic algorithms that have been in the work for the last forty years. We gave those algorithms an incredibly catchy name: "Artificial Intelligence". We now have very popular and direct applications for them: give the algorithm a simple text prompt (don’t get me started on the importance of text) and it generates a beautiful original picture or a very serious-sounding text. It could also generate sounds or videos (we call them "deep fakes"). After all, it generates only a stream of bits, a bunch of 1 and 0 open to interpretation.

• OpenAI and the limits of mechanical poetry

  The Zietgiest's newest toy is OpenAI's Chat Platform. So I asked it "Could you write a limerick about a man from Woking?"

• A reader asks how to avoid working for evil

  When the legalities of the merger were finished in 2008, I too worked for that evil company by extension. By absorbing it instead of killing it, we became them (see also: Collabra). The name was different, but the internal damage was done. This lead to all kinds of other crazy shit that came down the line, all in the name of fellating the advertisers, like Emerald Sea, aka Google Plus. That whole thing.

• The Frontend Ouroboros

  Very roughly, there’s “frontend” engineering (building the parts of a website or application that users interact with directly) and “backend” engineering (building the parts that store data and power the frontend). In practice, there’s a large gray area in between.

  Any handoff creates friction. Frontend engineers might be waiting for an API route to be developed, a database schema to be migrated, or even just for their code to be deployed. Developer tools that empower engineers to do more by themselves are always in high demand.

  What if the frontend is eating the backend?

• Day 4 (Advent of Code 2022)

  Each line has two ranges: the first line has ranges containing 2, 3, 4, and 6, 7, 8. We must count how many pairs have ranges where one fully contains the other.

• 6 ways you can contribute to open knowledge right now

  I wrote the initial draft for this post a few months ago, traveling through Norway in a rented campervan. While roaming the beautiful landscapes, I spent a lot of time thinking. Reading books while traveling really is the best way to find new inspiration.

  On our trip, we wanted to try out an alternative to Google Maps. Most of the OpenStreetMap-based apps lack important features, but we recently stumbled upon MagicEarth, which perfectly fills the void. OpenStreetMap has been 95% accurate for us. Those last 5% are mostly less famous hiking trails and attractions that could easily be filled in by people like you and me. This inspired me to write this blog post, where I share six ways that you can contribute to open source knowledge right now.

• Epic Guide To Bare-Metal STM32 Programming

  [Sergey Lyubka] put together this epic guide for bare-metal microcontroller programming.� While the general concepts should be applicable to most any microcontroller, Sergey’s examples specifically relate to the Nucleo-F429ZI development board featuring the ARM-based STM32F429 microcontroller.

• Perl Weekly: Issue #593 - 2022-12-05 - Perl on DEV.to

  I registered to DEV.to ( https://dev.to/ ) in 2017, more than 5 years ago. Posted a few articles with rather limited success: less than 10 people looked at the articles. Then in 2020 I posted a few more articles. On one of them Tests are awesome! ( https://dev.to/szabgab/tests-are-awesome-3i63 ) I got as many as 300 readers, but the others have not received much love so I did not continue publishing. In 2021 I had another experiment when I published Perl modules with their own web site (https://dev.to/szabgab/perl-modules-with-their-own-web-site-2gmo ) on which there were some 600 visitors. Primarily the readers of the Perl Weekly newsletter. I published a few more articles with readers in the low 10s. A few weeks ago I started to publish again. This time several of my articles got above 100 viewers and one, Open Source Development Courses (https://dev.to/szabgab/open-source-development-courses-5d4b ) is already above 1100 viewers. I started to get around 600 readers a day. That's already really valuable!

  So what happened? There were a couple of changes: 1. There are more people on DEV. 2. I publish a lot more articles that appeal to a wider range of people. 3. There is a sort-of network effect. The more people up-vote and bookmark (the two kinds of reactions on DEV) my articles the more people will see it.

• The odd binary string

  With that out of the way, we know that all binary numbers can be converted from the integers between 0 and 2n-1 (inclusive).