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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Not when taken to such an extreme so as to obfuscate the meaning and behavior of code, and make it difficult to understand how you would arrive at that code.

    Sane defaults serve to reduce verbosity without obfuscating meaning, simpler syntax with different ordering and fewer tokens reduce verbosity to make the code easier to read by reducing the amount of text you have to pay attention to to understand what the result is.

    I imagine there’s also a distinction to be made between verbosity and redundancy - sometimes extra text might fail to carry information, or carry information that’s already carried elsewhere. I’m not sure where the line should be drawn, because sometimes duplicate information can be helpful, and spacing out information with technically meaningless text has value for readability, but I feel like it’s there.






  • Doesn’t change the voting situation. Since your votes need to be seen by other instances, Lemmy needs a mechanism for federating votes. Since instances are untrusted, there needs to be some way of preventing manipulation. Thus, AFAIK, Lemmy simply shares your votes across instances, letting each one tally them up. As a side effect, any server admin of an instance you can interact with can also get a list of all your votes.


  • Dual booting is problematic, as mentioned you’re messing with your partitions and could mess up your windows partition, but also windows can, unprompted, mess up your Linux bootloader. As long as you’re careful with partitions and know how to fix your bootloader from a live image, there’s no real issue, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

    By the way, I recommend rEFInd for the bootloader when dual booting, it doesn’t require configuration and will detect bootable systems automatically.

    A VM sounds like a good idea to try a few things out, but do keep in mind performance can suffer, and you might especially run into issues with things like GPU virtualization. If you want to properly verify if things work and work well enough, you’ll want to test them from a live system.

    As a final note, you can give your VM access to your SSD/HDD - if you set that up properly, you can install and boot your Linux install inside a VM, and later switch to booting it natively. You still have the risk of messing up your partitions in that case, but it can be nice so you can look things up on your host system while setting up Linux in a VM.








  • Magic in general is just a plot device that can do whatever the author needs it to do.

    Sounds like that’s just where we disagree. I would instead say that magic is part of the world being shown in the story, and it should have an explanation, just like laws of physics. The hints come not from the narrator knowing things and dropping clues, but from the underlying logic of how magic works and the behaviors of people shaped by the magic of the world. And of course the reader can’t anticipate everything - but I also want there to be a sense of what’s possible and what’s not, and for the cases where the reader’s understanding is broken to be impactful and bring new understanding.

    So yeah, in the end it’s just a matter of preference. I can look at HP and think “man, the magic just does whatever the fuck the author needs”, and other people can look at it and enjoy the whimsical adventure for what it is. Or, in a way, I guess it’s both - I can still appreciate the story, but it’s underlined with a sense of shallowness.


  • The issue is that the wands being made from the same core doesn’t have any explained effect before this event, when an explanation conveniently appears, now being a known event that has happened before. The issue is that, to my knowledge, things just happen that have no prior explanation, which sugests they’re just being made up on the fly to fit the narrative, which in turn means the reader/viewer has no way to anticipate them.

    In what I’d consider a “good” magic system, things fit together. They don’t have to be revealed immediately, but often there will be hints, and when the reveal is made it’s gonna at least fit into the void in prior knowledge. This is, of course, my subjective preference, but I think HP goes so far into the opposite that it’s just random stuff made up to justify whatever the author wanted to happen with no reasonable explanation.