hanbot_abroad: ahahaha mircea_popescu i love that thing. and it's still in vivre sa vie, you just found its hometown ;)
ossabot: Logged on 2020-01-31 12:50:54 mircea_popescu: spyked, thetarpit not having footnote tooltips kinda blows!
hanbot_abroad proposes mula for inclusion in republican thesaurus, having no useful source to link to while writing current article and deeming it frequent&occult enough to warrant defining with the other terms.
mircea_popescu: one of those "perfectly stated in its original setting and darn impossible to translate" items. what can you do.
mircea_popescu: i suppose one thing i could do is take the pre-footnotes starnote, "Mula este femeia medie cu preocupari medii, cu credinte medii, decenta mediu si-n general urmaritoarea de turma. Aia care se imbraca cum se imbraca fetele, crede ce cred fetele, spera sa se marite ca asa vrea mami si crede pe de-o parte ca va fi fericita-n virtutea inertiei si pe de cealalta ca oricine ar trebui sa procedeze exact la fel, pentru ca asa-i B
hanbot_abroad: mircea_popescu i'd say it's better than what i ended up using, from the woman's fault, "The term of art for this would be stramula. It comes from a seminal Romanian-language piece on the topic (in which language mula is yet another derogatory term for a stupid woman, not that there's any shortage of these ; whereas stra- is a prefix indicating primacy on the decendency line, sort of like grand in grandfather)."
jfw:
http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2020-01-05#1956632 - "if ($a = 1) ..." worked for me, though in the stupid C sense that the operator has elsewhere, yes. Tried Python and apparently it syntactically forbids single-= in an "if" statement, probably because it has this strict statement vs. expression distinction
ossabot: Logged on 2020-01-05 08:05:45 mircea_popescu: so apparently in php, != is a legitimate op in if expressions. = however, IS NOT. == MUST be used.
mircea_popescu: it's just fundamentally incorrect to asign values within if evaluations.
mircea_popescu: the sort of morons who think god will download sexual ability into their heads immediately after marriage tend to naturally think otherwise, of course. but god hates them.
jfw: mircea_popescu: I get the sense this is more about the user than the tool then. I'd reckon it's equally dumb to call a function with global side-effects from an "if" test, since it's supposed to be just asking a question, not "doing things"
jfw: I like the convention in Scheme where such functions are named ending in !, following the builtin assignment operator "set!"
mircea_popescu: if (a(x) > b(y) ) z is not "more compact" or any "cleverer" than ax = a(x) ; by = b(y) ; if (ax > by ) z. it's not "more conservative", it's not anything but fucking stupid.
mircea_popescu: jfw, i honestly don't like evaluating ifs. there's really nothing gained, besides compiler weight.
mircea_popescu: it doesn't even fucking save memory, the five bytes this'll save over a lifetime is dwarved by the five megabytes in extra libc needed to support the insanity
jfw: ah, back to assembly language then, branches only operating on registers? heh
mircea_popescu: you know, not every thing that seems clever actually delivers what it promised.
mircea_popescu: the average family's not any happier since women are permitted to seek divorce than they were before ; and code gained nothing from this particular "improvement" that seemed but never delivered.
mircea_popescu: this doesn't automatically mean EVERYTHING has now to be unwound, and so branches only on registers for computers and women kept in the gyneceum like ye olde greeks.
mircea_popescu: on the contrary : the "terseness" supposedly achieved by if (a(x) > b(y) ) z sorta constructions is not merely standing on its own ; but it creates personal investments. now you can't comment your code, either, because you're so clever you saved five bytes of text at the cost of five megabytes of object code. so if you then write a sentence explaining wtf you did, well... you're a sucker now, aren't you!
mircea_popescu: perversely, this "superior" code's even more inscrutable than ye olde asm. which civilised people could in fact read, unlike the
current shit jfw: I don't see the 5mb of code fwiw; if you can have nested expressions anywhere, then you get hidden temporary variables, so in principle costs no more to allow them anywhere. That gets to the essential vs accidental complexity though, totally wouldn't surprise me to find 10k LoC in gcc dedicated to compound expressions in if-statements specifically.
jfw: ah right, I forgot, in soviet russia if-statement sorts the other way so they had to copy+paste+tweak it for that locale.
ossabot: Logged on 2019-02-17 10:06:03 mircea_popescu: anyway. seems gcc has a baked-in "max 2097152 symbols"
ossabot: Logged on 2019-02-17 10:03:36 mircea_popescu: "/* The count field we have in the main struct object is somewhat limited, but should suffice for virtually all cases. If the counted value doesn't fit, re-write a zero. The worst that happens is that we re-count next time -- admittedly non-trivial in that this implies some 2M fdes, but at least we function. */"
jfw: This while pulling in not just a bignum lib as dependency (gmp) but also arbitrary-precision float & complex math libs (mpfr, mpc)
jfw: Not that I seriously think they *should* use those for all numbers, I can't see that being anything short of hideous given that it's C, manual memory management and all, "what do you mean you don't know how big the struct will be"