Every Single Thing Involving A Computer Is Designed To Put Something Into Our Senses. Until A Human Looks

every single thing involving a computer is designed to put something into our senses. until a human looks at it, and interprets it, it is nothing. it isn't 'data'. it isn't 'ones and zeroes'. it's just some electrons and photons moving around, as is their wont.

but if we arrange those electrons just so, and let them do their thing, we can create a pattern that someone will experience as bits, registers, numbers, letters, instructions, algorithms, messages, financial transactions, videos, thoughts, worlds, etc etc.

the whole project of computer programming is corraling the electrons into situations where they will obey rules we have in our heads. electrons are surprisingly predictable, so this isn't a fool's errand. but every layer of the stack of abstractions is something we built: arranging one thing to produce a pattern we want to see. the chip arranged so the 'high and low voltages' fit our idea of 'bits' and 'logic gates'. the screen whose lights create a 'field of colour' for an organism that has this level of visual acuity, this frequency response in its cone cells, this capacity to see shapes and edges. these bits and logic organised into an 'algorithm' that takes 'data' that we think of as 'vertices' and 'triangles' and produces the appearance of 'perspective rendering', which approximates our concept of a '3D object', of even a 'virtual world'.

we have gotten so very very good at producing these patterns that it's easy to see them as something natural, and miss all the layers of orchestration behind even the simplest operation. computers are a game played between humans.

Coding/Website Themed Web Graphics!

I've made a bunch of these, so I thought I'd share :3

I wanna make more stuff, but I gotta figure out what 😞💔

f2u, no credit needed :D

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mintie-chip

1 month ago

proud to be learning c++

Tags

coding computer science mintie mouths off php slander

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mintie-chip

1 month ago

hyperfixated on this game so hard i tried to recreate ac syndicate's animus database using html css and js👍

i will make this responsive though, i've only started doing the frontend but i'll also start doing the backend as soon as i finish this

basically this is gonna be a website that will allow you to create a database of your assassin's creed OCs (btw this was inspired by @gwen-the-assassin's idea <33) and help you with worldbuilding and making AUs (i know the ac fanon wiki already exists for that but i wanted to make the experience of keeping a database more immersive u know....)

this might take a while to be completed, but I'll try to post updates on it as much as possible! if there are any programmers/web developers in the ac fandom that want to contribute to this project plsplspls DM me!!

actual pic of the database for comparison:

ik it's not entirely accurate but this is the simplest database in the game that i could recreate lmao

also code snippets just cuz (+ me crashing out)

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mintie-chip

1 month ago

So python is apparently unable to handle if-statement with more than 2996 elif’s, which is fair, however, it’s really limiting my implentation of an is_even function

Any ideas on how I can work around this?

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mintie-chip

1 month ago

115 notes View Post

mintie-chip

1 month ago

Ok. I am going to let you in on a secret about how to make programming projects.

You know how people write really good code? Easy to read, easy to work with, easy to understand and very efficient?

By refactoring.

The idea that you write glorious nice code straight is an insane myth that comes from thinking tutorials is how people actually code.

That is because programming is just writing. Nothing more. Same as all other writing.

The hobbit is ~95000 words.

Do you think Tolkien created the Hobbit by writing 95 thousand words?

Of course not! He wrote many many times that. Storylines that ended up scrapped or integrated in other ways, sections that got rewritten, dialog written again and again as the rest of the story happened. Background details filled in after the story had settled down

Writing. Is. Rewriting.

Coding. Is. Refactoring.

Step 1 in programming is proof of concept. Start with the most dangerous part of your project ( danger = how little experience you have with it * how critical it is for your project to work )

Get it to do... anything.

Make proof of concept code for all the most dangerous parts of the project. Ideally there is only 1 of these. If there is more than 3 then your project is too big. ( yes, this means your projects needs to be TINY )

Then write and refactor code to get a minimum viable pruduct. It should do JUUUUUST the most important critical things.

Now you have a proper codebase. Now everytime you need to expand or fix things, also refactor the code you touch in order to do this. Make it a little bit nicer and better. Write unit tests for it. The works.

After a while, the code that works perfectly and never needs to be touched is hard to read. Which does not matter because you will never read it

And the code that you need to change often is the nicest code in the codebase.

TRYING TO GUESS AHEAD OF TIME WHAT PARTS OF THE CODE WILL BE CHANGED OFTEN IS A FOOLS ERRAND.

( also, use git. Dear god use git and commit no more than 10 lines at once and write telling descriptions for each. GIT shows WHAT you did. YOU write WHY you did it )

Is this how to make your hobby project?

Yes. And also how all good software everywhere is made.

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mintie-chip

1 month ago