Alberat

yeah thinking of some of the ppl ive met on the internet, id rather be talking to a bot lol... jkjk

but i think finding out after the fact that i was interacting with a bot somehow seems soulless... like, something i like about the internet is the (small) feeling of still being connected to the world. and that'd be lost if i knew i was interacting with a bot. i imagine there's people who feel differently, but i think that's nuts. if im interacting with a bot, i want to know it.

also like, in responding to you, i hope to further some intelligent discussion and positively affect the world. if you're a bot, then that's hopeless. or maybe im just affecting the ai model positively, idk.

have you met an engineer who doesnt copy code from stackexchange? I'm not saying they blindly paste it in and forget about it, but copying a line or two that you (now) understand is fine.

i did this a month ago, ate a pear and was like wow i havent eaten a pear in decades... just strange that you just dont come across pears that often.

i always do "read;rm ./file" which gives me a second to confirm and also makes it so i don't accidentally execute it out of my bash history with control-r

how do you know it's not bots?

just for the number of participants. and there's a construction (a pseudorandom generator) thatll let you do it with one block

that could be it... I've just thought about it a lot and came up with a new theory.

it seems to me that the limitations of screen real estate seem surmountable. eg: a settings menu could have a search bar like in android, meaning your options can be accessible even though they're buried in the gui. then, your settings could be "stable" and repeatable by adding flags like in google chrome (another gui program).

you can actually use chrome from a cli with selenium or the headless command (--headless) and I've used this to scrape websites locked behind Javascript. but average chrome users don't demand the further development of these features.

you base the random dice roll on the proof of work of the block chain. proofs of work generate randomness because (proof by contradiction) if they didn't it would be easy to find the next block and make a bunch of money.

EDIT: more concretely, in a blockchain, "miners" compute a "hash" of the chain up to the latest block, with an extra random "nonce". they then check if this hash has a certain distinguishing feature (eg 5 leading zeros). if it doesn't have this feature, the recompute the hash with a new nonce. the rest of the bits in the hash thus become random. thus, if you commit to using a future hash to determine your lottery, it can be guaranteed to be random (or prove you have enough money to manipulate the block chain which is very difficult)

yes, great example. also: when the creators of that program decide the want to redesign the ui, all of your tutorials on how to do things break.

my theory is that its not something inherent about using text instead of graphics: a maintainer of a cli program could also decide that they want to redesign the command line options. but its more that users of guis don't demand stability or repeatability. they are impressed by a ui redesign and so that's what they get.

you can still be a good engineer and still copy code from stack exchange. i wasn't saying windows engineers are bad

i think one difference between guis and clis that people don't think about is composability. you cant do something like "pipe the contents of a folder into vscode and do a regex find and replace" but that's what pipes let you do on the command line. with gui programs, you always have to do these things manually... which is nice the first time but then time consuming each subsequent time.

solar isn't renewable bc eventually the sun will explode