An open fascist is building one of the bigger sources of funding for open source fully under his individual control and sucks up a lot of money that otherwise might have gone to liberatory projects. Community projects. Antifascist projects.

tante: Power Grab

My position on AI has been extremely boring and is basically, “if something is currently happening, the people who are saying that it’s impossible that it will ever happen are probably wrong”.

danluu.com: How Accurate Have Ed Zitron’s AI Skeptic Predictions Been?

We’ve spent years loading an extraordinary number of responsibilities onto the humble code review: quality gate, security check, architecture review, mentoring mechanism, knowledge-sharing system, ownership model.

Rachel Laycock (rlaycock@thoughtworks.com): Maybe We Shouldn’t Be Reviewing All This Code

And here I am just wanting decently fast secure connections from coffee shop wifi without every website being like “um, your IP is listed in our database as ‘MOONCRIME6’, are you sure you aren’t a crimebot?”

Spotted this in the Rails source today. The trailing comma made me think it was a typo at first glance but it uses the $, global variable for nil instead of nil directly. Anyone know the reason for this?

I left a comment there, but I wanted to preserve it here as well:

There is no “global variable for nil”. $, is the “output field separator”. Known as OFS in AWK, it is known shorthand-mnemonically as $, in both Perl and Ruby – the mnemonic being that “comma” is a very common output field separator (think: comma-separated values). The default value of “nil” simply means “no separator”. But setting it to something else can be quite useful!

For example, to use Ruby from the command-line to convert my /etc/passwd file to CSV, sure you could do this (nowadays; there wasn’t always a stdlib CSV library – thanks, James Edward Gray!)

ruby -retc -rcsv -e 'Etc.passwd { puts CSV.generate_line it.to_a }'

But you don’t need the CSV library when you can do this:

ruby -retc -e '$,=","; $\="\n"; Etc.passwd{ print *it }'

(We are also setting the Output Record Separator, $\, here)

This reflects a bygone UNIX-style of record-processing in which “how to recognize/format a record” was separated from “where to find or write the records”. Modern front-end programmers may recognize this pattern as a kind of rudimentary stylesheet: first define how to display values; then separately produce the semantic values themselves.

So to pop the stack back to the original question, the Rails codebase is not setting sep to nil; it is setting it to “the current global output field separator” in order to comply with programmer expectations.

This mnemonic variable is deprecated in Ruby 4.0; as always, in any non-one-liner context it is preferable to use the English module aliases e.g. $OUTPUT_FIELD_SEPARATOR.

Creation is now near-free. Verification/understanding is not, yet. It’s time to engineer away the slop.

Geoffrey Huntley: Engineer Away the Slop

developers in Learning & Belonging cultures, who endorse a “coding is learnable” set of beliefs, experience this moment very differently. Their identity threat was cut in half.

Mastodon: @grimalkina@mastodon.social