asciilifeform: theoretically one could distinguish the cases of this caused by organic stupidity of the one doing it, from when it is done with cold calculation, to bamboozle investor/customer/misc. idiot
asciilifeform: but familiar to anyone who ever met 'web d00d' who spent a year on colours and 'styleshit' and 0 on mechanics
asciilifeform: (or fast forward to modern ameristan and antiterrorist talismans)
asciilifeform: how much this even changes when it ~is~ put to test ? e.g. the folx during the plague who carried around paper talisman, word 'arsenicum' (because obtaining actual arsenic for talisman costs a little more..)
asciilifeform: afaik they could be earnest believers in the postapocalyptic value of the harley.
asciilifeform: i have nfi whether this applies to the bunker aficionados
asciilifeform: now if somebody coughed up a doctored ~efficient~ mod of RuBisCO...
asciilifeform: ( this re the indoor gardening bit. it is not difficult to try it, the surest cure for 'bunker garden' notion is to try the indoor tomato thing )
asciilifeform: well, d00dz who don't bother to figure out, how many joules of light even hit the 'garden', even supposing more than a few % ended up in food...☟︎
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: you can drill ~anything if slowly enough
asciilifeform: but i suspect that it is already written, somewhere, i will not attempt to reinvent bicycle.
asciilifeform: mod6: it is probably possible to write a treatise re how proper programming is the art of the 'unsexy', of necessary but unexciting work , like well-mopped floor or well-peeled potato
asciilifeform: dun worry mod6 , soon you too will be jaded and not ever again impressed with ~anything ..!
asciilifeform: at some point i intend to try to convince mircea_popescu to read it and it'll be ultimate test
asciilifeform: mod6: possibly it needs to be simpler, then, intent is that no 'awe' should result from reading it, it oughta be screamingly obvious
asciilifeform: mod6: morale improves, at least in my experience, once you begin to write working proggy from 1st try, after period of banging head against compiler
asciilifeform: took asciilifeform year+ to 'get used to'
asciilifeform: mod6: whole thing is a quite painful experience until it begins to dawn on you why the various 'fascisms' are there.
asciilifeform: for instance, the almost ubiquitous c-ism, of creating a pointer (ada 'access') variable on a procedure's local (stack) and passing it to something -- anything -- is illegal☟︎
asciilifeform: ( gotta prove to the compiler that pointer under NO circumstances can wander 'off the reservation', and it will reject certain obviously 'to naked eye' valid uses, and you will tear hair out )
asciilifeform: you will run against the 'access' (pointer) visibility rules, which are downright 'fascist'
asciilifeform: i get this. but using heap is even more of 'adventure' in ada.
asciilifeform: ^ put at the head of your main body, and see what ends up barfing
asciilifeform: i recommend to avoid unboundedstring and other runtime-heaptronic types, esp for n00bz
asciilifeform: ( because it can in fact be invoked in ~arbitrary places, and with params not predetermined at compile time, unlike cpp template )
asciilifeform: ada generics are interesting, they are not like cpp templates, not mere string substitution -- the thing actually has to prove correct for any legal invocation, anywhere
asciilifeform: mod6: idea is to prevent runtime surprises at any cost.
asciilifeform: it's a classical 'my proggy doesn't work, because ada is harsh mistress' followed by week with book and bare hands/teeth and finally 'oh huh, i broke rule'
asciilifeform: 'bug' is not even right word here, mod6 ,
asciilifeform: to asciilifeform's shame , he instrumented the proggy in gdb, found nothing useful, in the end found with strace.
asciilifeform: (given as inside we have Z : Words(0 .. Optional) ! )
asciilifeform: because such is the rule, it has to have room for max possible size...
asciilifeform: and the proggy will try to ALLOCATE THAT PER FZ
asciilifeform: than you're fucked because SomeMachineType is , say, 2**64
asciilifeform: mod6: but i forgot the rule that if you type Blah(Optional : SomeMachineType := itsdefaultvalue) is record ....
asciilifeform: mod6: somewhat relatedly, chased bug in ffa for a ~week : wanted to make FZ.Z a trimmable ( e.g. length set as optional param ) so as to enable karatsubaization (which does 0 useful without being able to, for it and nothing else, constrain the lenght of FZ)
asciilifeform: ( the apotheosis moment of segway was when the chump who bought the co from the original sc4mz0r, finally drove his personal unit off a tall cliff ! )
asciilifeform: why folx so eager to make new, and new
asciilifeform: and it isn't as if the original golden toilet of this genre, 'segway', had not bombed
