• 24 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 26th, 2024

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  • Haha, sure thing!

    So, today, TurboPascal isn’t a very popular programming language anymore. But that’s okay! We have new programming languages nowadays. Some of the popular languages that we use today include JavaScript, TypeScript and CSS. You don’t need to know much about these languages, except that they’re commonly used for creating websites and apps that run on the web.

    Now, assume you want to create a website or a webapp, and you were to learn these languages for that purpose. In that case you have quite a learning experience ahead of you, which is great! Learning can be fun! But what’s not so great is that these languages have lots of room to make mistakes. Now, everyone makes mistakes, that’s just a fact of life, but when mistakes can be avoided, that’s generally preferred.

    This is where Biome comes in: It is a tool – we call it a linter – that helps you to detect many kinds of common mistakes. It can show you where these mistakes are, and sometimes even fix them for you. It can also show you possible mistakes, things that are not necessarily a mistake, but things that look suspicious.

    And on top of that, Biome offers you another tool: It’s called a formatter. When you write your code, it automatically takes care for you that the code looks consistent. So it fixes things like indentation and other use of whitespace for you, as well as where to place your parentheses and stuff like that.

    Together, hopefully these two things can make your programming experience a little bit more enjoyable. Cheers!








  • I’m making a case for custom codes, not for using a 200 status code with it. My reply said the 200 didn’t make sense.

    Of course once you use custom codes, the actual HTTP status codes do become less important, because there’s some redundancy there. That’s not an argument to do it wrong, but it is an argument that accurate HTTP status codes are less of a priority. So understandably some people will take shortcuts.

    Apparently you find this very frustrating, but in the end it’s just an implementation detail. But it also sounds like you’re more frustrated with the service API as a whole than the fact it uses custom error codes specifically, so I’m just going to leave it at that.



  • I found the title of that section slightly triggering too, but the argument they lay down actually makes sense. Consistency helps you to achieve correctness in large codebases, because it means you don’t have to reinvent what is correct over and over in separate pockets of the codebase. Such pockets also make incremental improvements to the codebase harder and harder, so they do come back to bite you.

    Your example of vendors doesn’t relate to that, because you don’t control your vendor’s code. But you do control your organisation’s.


  • Well, looking at your example, I think a good case can even be made for it.

    “s23” doesn’t look like an HTTP status code, so including it can make total sense. After all, there’s plenty of reasons why you could want custom error codes that don’t really align with HTTP codes, and customised error messages are also a sensible use case for that.

    Of course duplicating the actual HTTP status code in your body is just silly. And if you use custom error codes, it often still makes sense to use the closest matching HTTP status code in addition to it (so yeah, I agree the 200 in your example doesn’t make a lot of sense). But neither of those preclude good reasons for custom codes.








  • Mostly the same reason why democracy worked for quite a while too. As long as people believe in a system and see the benefits to themselves as well, they can go quite a while with it.

    In general I also think most people aren’t out to screw one another, no matter how much it may seem that way sometimes, so as long as that keeps for the monarchs in a majority of districts, the system could balance itself.

    But yeah, I’m not going to say it’s perfect. Sooner or later it would collapse, and when it does my money would be on the same reason as yours.

    So I think the main question is: would it be able to last longer than democracies can, especially in the face of mass media manipulation and other challenges. I can’t prove it, but I suspect it might have a decent shot, mostly because the monarchs would be more agile to respond against unforeseen threats.



  • Your proposal is just an idealistic version of early US.

    Thanks, I guess :)

    You claim that corruption is fundamentally impossible, but assume that magically “the monarchs aren’t allowed to own property” without regard to enforcement.

    I make no such claim, and I don’t make assumptions regarding enforcement either. Constitutional enforcement is discussed in quite some detail.

    You claim to have an alternative to democracy but still propose majority voting on replacing rulers and constitutions.

    There is majority voting on deposal of rulers, to be specific. Their replacement isn’t voted on by a majority of the population.

    Constitutional changes are voted on through majority, but first require a majority of the monarchs to be on board.

    Both these limitations are intentionally designed to mitigate manipulation of the population.

    You simply assume that monarchs will keep each other in check and not devolve into the conspiring, warmongering tyrants that history is full of.

    There is quite some detail about the enforcement mechanisms. The idea is very much not to assume, but to persuade the monarchs to act in a benevolent manner, by enticement through both the carrot (wealth for as long as they rule), but also the stick (deposal if the majority doesn’t vote in favour of their actions, with a threat of assassination if they refuse to be deposed).

    Power can always be abused to get more power and go against all your original ideals. The only way to definitely prevent corruption is to ensure power is never concentrated in the hands of few.

    Ah. So it wasn’t me that claimed that corruption is fundamentally impossible, it’s you that claim to have the definitive answer.

    For what it’s worth, I agree power shouldn’t be concentrated in the few. Which is why I split power across districts, and between citizens and monarchs, and why the group of monarchs for each district cannot be too small either. It’s all there if you could try to be a little less dismissive.