Programming - Blog Posts

Me, sunlight and coding. #coding #programming https://www.instagram.com/p/BuDYwzShTTt/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1imsxu4hpboh9

Workout for the mind 🏋️

help

currently in the middle of trying to re-write and re-code my entire format for my Kurt Cobain lovemail... wish me luck

oh python, never change

rating = 4.5

WRONG

rating = str(4.5)

Okay thats allowed

"So you know how C is procedural, Haskell is functional, and Java is object-oriented? You may ask: 'what about Python?'

Well, Python is bullshit-oriented."

My friend, teaching me Python.

i love auditing coding classes online (edx my beloved)

cant do graded assignments BUT i get all the notes and videos which gives me some free codes to practice also most assignments have a connected video

how do y'all finish programming projects 😭😭😭

this is like the 5th time i've tried to make an incremental game help

Me, trying to learn a new skill at 22: Brain PLEASE you know we want to be able to do this, we'd be so much happier with this ability please we've already wasted our teenage years

My Brain, the moment I start doing said activity: holy shit this is literally the worst experience ever, I'd rather we were ill right now. Abort abort! MAKE IT STOP! Pain receptors, go! Nervous system RED ALERT! Bowel movements? Give him stress-induced diarrhea

as a young afab queer person going into computer/data science, it makes me so sad that the face of the tech industry is a largely misogynistic homophobic transphobic trump-suck-up unethical billionaire bro club like musk, bezos, and zuckerberg. like, computers and the internet have limitless potential, but we’re using it for this????

i cannot wait until all these dipshits get what’s coming to them so a new generation of leaders can rise up and make tech kind.

Hey! Saw your post about community college. Just wondering, what are you studying? Thanks!

I was actually there to get my GED since I had to drop out of high school for a plethora of reasons. (Covid era, Mental health stuff, etc.) I did very well lol and got credit for Math. I was one point off from a Science credit too.

Though I do plan on going to a community college soon for computer science. There’s one near me that has a game dev course type thing i’m looking into right now, but even if I just end up in programming I think I’d be good.

guys am. am I winning at coding yet .

Happy Pi Day!!

Today I've got an obligation to talk about John Carmack's work on 1993's Doom! The Doom game engine utilizes pi to generate its sine, cosine, and tangent lookup tables. It's done this way because generating all those numbers at the start and then keeping them in RAM was more efficient than trying to generate those numbers on the fly, and for what id Software were trying to do at the time, that efficiency was a must. Where things get interesting is that Doom's version of pi is actually a bit off. Instead of the correct 10-digit version of 3.141592654, John Carmack misremembered it as 3.141592657, and so that ended up being the version of pi that Doom uses. Considering it's only wrong at the tenth digit, fixing it results in a change that is pretty much imperceptible, although I think it's a fact that's still worth sharing. Maybe it's a bit silly, but it gives me hope knowing the incorrect version made it into the final game. It exists as a reminder that for how revered the team members of id Software are, it's people who made Doom. And those people are prone to mistakes just like you and I are. But that didn't stop them from making something incredible, and I have no intention of diminishing their accomplishments. If anything, I hope we remember this mistake as a means to bolster our confidence and to have faith in the endeavors we pursue. Anyways, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day!

Update

Since making this post five minutes ago, I e run my program five times thinking “this is the one”

Aibiehfowhskvjevslv

That isn’t a key smash, it’s what I’ve now named it. My forehead did the transcription tho…

Edit: i started the program right after this with a post ready saying “finally got it!” Only after realizing I forgot to implement the fix. Don’t drink and computer, kids.

New drinking game: every time you have to close and then start back up a program while fixing it, take a sipp.

Can confirm get drunk wuick.

New drinking game: every time you have to close and then start back up a program while fixing it, take a sipp.

Can confirm get drunk wuick.

She follow my line til I al gore ithm

.

ended up demotivated for months on a personal project... but we're so back, exciting things are happening. I implemented a functional, fairly readable json parser in 12 lines of code using my new library. more to come. eventually.

Please sign this petition to advocate against apple’s decision to disable Progressive Web Apps on iOS in the EU.

letter.open-web-advocacy.org

Open Letter to Tim Cook: Sabotaging Web Apps Is Indefensible

Open Letter to Tim Cook: Sabotaging Web Apps Is Indefensible

For context, Apple has recently been forced to obey EU regulations and decided to be maliciously compliant in doing so. They argue that they cannot support both multiple browsers and progressive web apps for safety reasons because there is no way to know that those other browsers will treat permissions in the same safe way safari does, breaking the trust and safety of the web. They also mention that in order to have safe PWAs they would have to introduce “an entirely new integration architecture” which they noted their team wouldn’t make the investment into given that so few people use PWAs currently and because apparently Apple doesn’t have enough developers to build the “integration architecture” that would be required.

Most people don’t use PWA’s because Apple hasn’t even supported push notifications on PWAs at up until about a year ago while android supported notifications for almost a decade, since 2015. And still the web push notification support is largely incomplete — not implementing several functions within the Push API specification.

Please take the time to sign the above petition if you appreciate having an open, free, cross platform, and largely unmoderated app distribution channel. You can read more about Apple’s plan for the EU here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-changes-to-ios-safari-and-the-app-store-in-the-european-union/

And here is the direct statement from the Apple article linked above addressing Progressive Web Apps:

The iOS system has traditionally provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit and its security architecture. That integration means Home Screen web apps are managed to align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS, including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis.

Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other web apps and recapture their permissions to gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent. Browsers also could install web apps on the system without a user’s awareness and consent. Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.

All fancy smancy generative ai models know how to do is parrot what they’ve been exposed to.

A parrot can shout words that kind of make sense given context but a parrot doesn’t really understand the gravity of what it’s saying. All the parrot knows is that when it says something in response to certain phrases it usually gets rewarded with attention/food.

What a parrot says is sometimes kinda sorta correct/sometimes fits the conversation of humans around it eerily well but the parrot doesn’t always perfectly read the room and might curse around a child for instance if it usually curses around its adult owners without facing any punishment. Since the parrot doesn’t understand the complexities of how we don’t curse around young people due to societal norms, the parrot might mess that up/handle the situation of being around a child incorrectly.

Similarly AI lacks understanding of what it’s saying/creating. All it knows is that when it arranged pixels or words in a certain way after being given some input it usually gets rewarded/gets to survive and so continues to get the sequence of words/pixels following a prompt correct enough to imitate people convincingly (or that poorly performing version of itself gets replaced with another version of itself which is more convincing).

I argue that a key aspect of consciousness is understanding the gravity and context of what you are saying — having a reason that you’re saying or doing what you are doing more than “I get rewarded when I say/do this.” Yes AI can parrot an explanation of its thought process (eli5 prompting etc) but it’s just mimicking how people explain their thought process. It’s surface level remixing of human expression without understanding the deeper context of what it’s doing.

I do have some untested ideas as to why its understanding is only surface level but this is pure hypothesis on my part. In essence I believe humans are really good at extrapolating across scales of knowledge. We can understand some topics in great depth while understanding others similarly on a surface level and go anywhere in between those extremes. I hypothesize we are good at that because our brains have fractal structure to them that allows us to have different levels of understanding and look at some stuff at a very microscopic level while still considering the bigger picture and while fitting that microscopic knowledge into our larger zoomed out understanding.

I know that neural networks aren’t fractal (self-similar across various scales) and can’t be by design of how they learn/how data is passed through them. I hypothesize that makes them only understand the scale at which they were trained. For LLM’s/GAN’s of today that usually means a high level overview of a lot of various fields without really knowing the finer grain intricacies all that well (see how LLM’s make up believable sounding but completely fabricated quotes for long writing or how GAN’s mess up hands and text once you zoom in a little bit.

There is definitely more research I want to do into understanding AI and more generally how networks which approximate fractals relate to intellegence/other stuff like quantum physics, sociology, astrophysics, psychology, neuroscience, how math breaks sometimes etc.

That fractal stuff aside, this mental model of generative AI being glorified parrots has helped me understand how AI can seem correct on first glance/zoomed out yet completely fumble on the details. My hope is that this can help others understand AI’s limits better and therefore avoid putting too much trust into to where AI starts to have the opportunity to mess up serious stuff.

Think of the parrot cursing around children without understanding what it’s doing or why it’s wrong to say those words around that particular audience.

In conclusion, I want us to awkwardly and endearingly laugh at the AIs which mimic the squaks of humans rather than take what it says as gospel or as truth.

Eh all programming languages are good for certain use cases (aside from Java - Kotlin is better for android and Go is better for anything else).

Python is good at quick and dirty automation that just needs to get done. It’s very friendly to use and won’t pout at you when you ask it do something. Also once you learn to navigate pandas+numpy combined with Jupyter Notebooks it gets wayyyy faster and easier to use for data wrangling.

For example, I recently used Python to scrape hundreds of thousands of tweets via snscrape without having to use twitter’s API. Once I downloaded all the tweets it took me about 30 minutes to then do some basic analysis/labeling/sorting on said tweets.

Yes pip is terrible. Yes Python has only a hint of types (typescript style type hinting arrived in 3.something). Yes pickle creates so many vulnerabilities. Yes performant Python is basically C in a trench coat.

All that said, there’s a reason Python is many people’s first typed programming language and why I continue to use it whenever I have some data I have to fetch, transform, and analyze or whenever I’m just starting to explore a new field of computer science.

Writing Python is basically like writing pseudo code so I love it for anything that I just need to code up and run once or twice for either a proof of concept before moving to a more “serious” language or just discard the program is for my one-time personal use only.

No one should ever have to maintain more than 1k lines of Python but I will still occasionally write that much Python simply because it lets me explore high level techniques without worrying about being perfectly precise.

Python is not for production but instead for messing around. Python is that goofy ahh language that everyone likes because it doesn’t mind when you affectionately mess with it. Python is the adorable sidekick that makes programming fun again and for that I adore it

Java is a trash language that should burn in the parts of hell where hitler is

Rust on the other hand is a bratty lil language that should burn in the parts of hell where queers party

Java is a trash language that should burn in the parts of hell where hitler is

Rust on the other hand is a bratty lil language that should burn in the parts of hell where queers party

Customize Tray Icon and Tray Menu [AutoHotkey Tutorial #16 Part 3]

In this video, we're going to customize our AHK script's tray icon and its menu.Where to Find the Script(s) in this video:• Visit juho-lee.com ❯ Archive ❯ Au...

In this video, we're going to customize our AHK script's tray icon and its menu.

Add Shortkeys and Icons to Menu Items [AutoHotkey Tutorial #16 Part 2]

In this video, we go through how to add shortkeys and icons to menu items.Where to Find the Script(s) in this video:• Visit juho-lee.com ❯ Archive ❯ AutoHotk...

In this video, we go through how to add shortkeys and icons to menu items.

How to Create Grand Child Menu [AutoHotkey Tutorial #16 Part 1]

This is how a Grand Child Menu for the Menu command can be created.Where to Find the Script(s) in this video:• Visit juho-lee.com ❯ Archive ❯ AutoHotkey icon...

This is how a Grand Child Menu for the Menu command can be created in AutoHotkey.

Spotlight and WinHole Script [Script Demo #27]

This video will demo the AutoHotkey Spotlight and WinHole scripts which creates a spotlight around your mouse cursors or creates a hole in your active window...

This video will demo the AutoHotkey Spotlight and WinHole scripts which creates a spotlight around your mouse cursors or creates a hole in your active window to see what's behind the window.

Snap Four Windows in to the Corners of the Screen [Script Demo #26]

This AutoHotkey script sends four selected windows into the corners of your screen with a Hotkey so you don't have to manually position them in the corners o...

This AutoHotkey script sends four selected windows into the corners of your screen with a Hotkey so you don't have to manually position them in the corners one by one.

Activate Specific Google Chrome Tab [Script Demo #25]

This AutoHotkey script will search and activate a specific tab on your Google Chrome Window.Where to Find the Script(s) in this video:• Visit juho-lee.com ❯ ...

This AutoHotkey script will search and activate a specific tab on your Google Chrome Window.

Window Iconizer [Script Demo #24]

This script converts a target window an icon (GUI with image) that you can keep on your screen. You can restore the window back to full size upon double clic...

This script converts a target window an icon (GUI with image) that you can keep on your screen. You can restore the window back to full size upon double clicking on the icon.