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Ephera

@ Ephera @lemmy.ml

Posts

56
Comments

3476
Joined

6 yr. ago

2h ago

Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog
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Ephera @lemmy.ml 2h ago
It's pretty much just a hook into infodumping about medieval cities...

3h ago

r/Silksong joins lemmy! (And a new lemmy instance)

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 3h ago

Link for those wanting to subscribe from other instances: !Silksong@indie-ver.se

3h ago

Which Countries Are In The World Health Organization

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 3h ago

Yeah, that's a new one, to just cut off the whole timezone...

4h ago

The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 4h ago

Having to make a decision isn't my primary issue here (even though it can also be problematic, when you need to serialize domain-specific data for which you're no expert). My issue is rather in that you have to write this decision down, so that it can be used for deserializing again. This just makes XML serialization code significantly more complex than JSON serialization code. Both in terms of the code becoming harder to understand, but also just lines of code needed.I've somewhat come to expect less than a handful lines of code for serializing an object from memory into a file. If you do that with XML, it will just slap everything into child nodes, which may be fine, but might also not be.

5h ago

The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 5h ago

Ah, well, as far as XML is concerned, yeah, these are very different things, but that's where the problem stems from. In your programming language, you don't have two variants. You just have (person (name "Alice") (age 30)). But then, because XML makes a difference between metadata and data, you have to decide whether "name" and "age" are one or the other.

And the point I wanted to make, which perhaps didn't come across as well, is that you have to write down that decision somewhere, so that when you deserialize in the future, you know whether to read these fields from attributes or from child nodes.And that just makes your XML serialization code so much more complex than it is for JSON, generally speaking. As in, I can slap down JSON serialization in 2 lines of code and it generally does what I expect, in Rust in this case.

Granted, Rust kind of lends itself to being serialized as JSON, but well, I'm just not aware of languages that lend themselves to being serialized as XML. The language with the best XML support that I'm aware of, is Scala, where you can actually get XML literals into the language (these days with a library, but it used to be built-in until Scala 3, I believe): https://javadoc.io/doc/org.scala-lang.modules/scala-xml_2.13/latest/scala/xml/index.htmlBut even in Scala, you don't use a case class for XML, which is what you normally use for data records in the language, but rather you would take the values out of your case class and stick them into such an XML literal. Or I guess, you would use e.g. the Jackson XML serializer from Java. And yeah, the attribute vs. child node divide is the main reason why this intermediate step is necessary. Meanwhile, JSON has comparatively little logic built into the language/libraries and it's still a lot easier to write out: https://docs.scala-lang.org/toolkit/json-serialize.html

10h ago

The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 10h ago

Alright, I haven't really looked into XML specifications so far. But I also have to say that needing a specification to consistently serialize and deserialize data isn't great either.

And yes, JSON not having attributes is what I'm saying is a good thing, at least for most data serialization use-cases, since programming languages do not typically have such attributes on their data type fields either.

11h ago

The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 11h ago

IMHO one of the fundamental problems with XML for data serialization is illustrated in the article:

(person (name "Alice") (age 30))[is serialized as]
 xml
    
<person>
  <name>Alice</name>
  <age>30</age>
</person>


  
Or with attributes:<person name="Alice" age="30" />

The same data can be portrayed in two different ways. Whenever you serialize or deserialize data, you need to decide whether to read/write values from/to child nodes or attributes.

That's because XML is a markup language. It's great for typing up documents, e.g. to describe a user interface. It was not designed for taking programmatic data and serializing that out.

12h ago

The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 12h ago

There is JSONPath, at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONPath

14h ago

Content Recommendation Algorithms

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 14h ago

Right, yeah, I guess on Lemmy, the categorization is already mostly there. I was thinking more generally... 😅

15h ago

Cat toys by Melanie (no last name provided)

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 15h ago

The fish even makes sense as a toy for a cat!

17h ago

Content Recommendation Algorithms

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 17h ago

There should be an open-source recommendation algorithm, though; I’m sure of it.

Problem is that the kind of algorithm you envision is technologically a black-box, not just by choice. It's a machine learning model. At best, you could make the training data and instructions public, but it would still be hard to reason why it makes certain decisions. Corporations traditionally try to eliminate biases by throwing as much data at it as possible, but that makes it even harder to reason about it.

I guess, maybe you could try to split the tasks. So, set up a list of e.g. 50 topics, such as sports, IT, politics etc.. Then use a small language model to decide into which categories each post fits. And then you could let the user decide the weights for the topics + weights for recency and vote count.Or I guess, automatically decide the weights based on what the user upvotes and then make the weights transparent to each user.

But yeah, I don't think there's prior art in this respect, so would probably need lots of experimenting still.

21h ago

I made my home lab immutable with Terraform | XDA

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 21h ago

Terraform is proprietary. You want to the use the OpenTofu fork instead: https://opentofu.org/

21h ago

It do be like that

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 21h ago

Yeah, to be honest, I've given up on that one. "Language Server Protocol" is a classic case of Microsoft naming things.The two differentiating words are "language" and "server". It does not specify what kind of language is being served or what it even means to serve a language. And "server" is entirely redundant with it being a protocol. Not to mention, that "server" is the most overused word in IT and therefore virtually meaningless.For all we know, it could be a protocol for butlers carrying French dictionaries.

So yeah, I use the acronym as its name, because it is similarly meaningful while being actually recognizable. And when I need to specify whether I'm talking about the "protocol named Language Server Protocol" or a "Language Server Protocol server" or even a "Language Server Protocol client", I will just slap that behind the acronym and be done with it.

🫠

1d ago

An alternative decentralized internet for sharing text and media: The Gemini Protocol

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 1d ago

There's varying takes on why folks prefer Gemini:

HTML browsers are too complex. It is virtually impossible to implement a new one. We've got 2½ implementations, i.e. Blink/WebKit and Gecko, and that's it. Yes, you can use Dillo or w3m, links and lynx to view simplistic webpages, but anyone, who actually wants to use the web with these, will quickly run into webpages they cannot view.With Gemini, you can use tons of clients, some of them even written in Bash, because it's so simple, and you will not run into pages you cannot view.
Burn the web. Some folks hold the opinion that the modern web is beyond saving, because advertisers control many central parts of it. Presumably, these days folks are also glad to be spared from AI-generated garbage. And again, you can create your own webpage that's all smallweb with pure HTML and whatnot, but anyone who actually wants to browse these pages has an easier time finding them on Gemini.
An own community. Of course, using a different communication protocol cuts off communication with most of humanity. But as a result, many folks on Gemini know each other and bother reading blogs that they might not have read on the HTTP side of things.Well, and through survivorship bias, folks on Gemini tend to be nerds who care about permacomputing and the like, so that also helps with finding folks that have similar interests, even if you might end up reading their gardening blog, due to the aforementioned point.

1d ago

Curl ending bug bounty program after flood of AI slop reports

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 1d ago

Yeah, expected this to happen sooner or later. If it takes close to 0 effort to generate something that people believe might earn them some money, then of course, they're going to do it in droves.

1d ago

It do be like that

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 1d ago

Lots of simpler editors gained tab completion support over the last few years, thanks to the LSP protocol. I have it in Kate, for example.

2d ago

Immortals can have allergies too

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 2d ago

Alright, yeah, I guess, I should've formulated that differently. Basically, this map, which is also in the linked Wikipedia article:

2d ago

Immortals can have allergies too

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 2d ago

Lactose intolerance isn't an allergy. The body just lacks lactase in the small intestine for breaking down the lactose. Which means the lactose goes off into the colon unprocessed, where bacteria will gladly ferment it, which causes tons of gas to be released, which is what causes bloating and pain.

Additionally, to quote Wikipedia:

The unabsorbed sugars and fermentation products also raise the osmotic pressure of the colon, causing an increased flow of water into the bowels (diarrhea).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#Causes

And really, lactose intolerance during adulthood is kind of the default. It's ~~only~~ mostly just humans in Europe that started evolving towards adult lactose tolerance.

2d ago

Why I don't contribute to open source rules very often

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 2d ago

I 100% understand the frustration. It can easily feel like you're doing the maintainers a favor and they're making this harder than it needs to be.The thing is, though, from the maintainer side, it very often feels like you're asked to do those contributors favors. You may not care for whatever feature they want to contribute, but then are supposed to put in work reviewing their contributions and possibly having to patch up their work, if it doesn't meet quality standards.

And then, yeah, you start requiring quality gates to ensure you don't have to put in extra work for something you don't care about. But then may also end up putting hurdles in place, so that effectively fewer contributions show up asking for reviews. It's an ugly solution, but frankly, it's better than having contributors put in actual work creating a pull request and then you not having time to review it.

2d ago

Permanently Deleted

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Ephera @lemmy.ml 2d ago

!dcss@lemmy.ml

The devs keep updating it with cool stuff. In the next update, there's gonna be an orb, which you can hold in place of a shield and which auto-flashbangs your enemies when you get hit.There's also gonna be an orb which sets off explosions around you when you kill an enemy without attacking them...? Have not worked that one out yet, but it sounds rad as hell.