pyeri's recent activity

  1. Comment on "twitter.com" is now officially dead in ~tech

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    Think about it this way: If word usage entirely depended on just context, why would these companies fight tooth and nail for trademarks? They may as well think, "My Coke is this huge red can of...

    Words are used in sentences. You have context.

    Think about it this way: If word usage entirely depended on just context, why would these companies fight tooth and nail for trademarks? They may as well think, "My Coke is this huge red can of cola drink, while their Coke is a scooter or motorcycle". Or in case of Elon Musk, "My X is a social media company while their X could be a porn product or whatever". But that's not how it works, try opening a "Coke Automobiles" or "Coke Laptops" and their lawyers will be all over you! Different context doesn't matter here.

    Words are intrinsically and intimately linked to the feelings they evoke in people, and folks know this, especially the folks in PR, Marketing, etc. Adding a different context drastically alters the other original context of that word too. In an alternate world where Steve Jobs wouldn't have happened, the word "Apple" would be evoking totally different feelings in me and you than now!

    3 votes

  2. Comment on "twitter.com" is now officially dead in ~tech

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    For me it's still redirecting which means they haven't reversed. It could be a case of DNS propagation still pending for your country/region. After some time, twitter.com will start redirecting to...

    For me it's still redirecting which means they haven't reversed. It could be a case of DNS propagation still pending for your country/region. After some time, twitter.com will start redirecting to x.com.

    3 votes

  3. Comment on "twitter.com" is now officially dead in ~tech

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    There are probably a handful of exceptions to that rule though. Apple is the classic one which I already mentioned. The first thing that comes to my mind on hearing that word is a MacBook or...

    trademarks do not strip us of our vocabulary in quite the way the previous poster was suggesting.

    There are probably a handful of exceptions to that rule though. Apple is the classic one which I already mentioned. The first thing that comes to my mind on hearing that word is a MacBook or iPhone, not some fruit. And I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one in that category!

    Another popular example is Flask, the famous Python framework. Again willing to bet there will be hardly any Python programmer who will even think of that "water jug thingy" which a flask really is!

    And why did I forgot Amazon! How many folks even know today that there is an amazing deep forest terrain in South America by that very name?

    1 vote

  4. Comment on "twitter.com" is now officially dead in ~tech

    pyeri
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    But trademarks should not be ideally granted for popular words in the dictionary, there is always the danger of the word usage itself changing if that company becomes very famous (and through that...

    But trademarks should not be ideally granted for popular words in the dictionary, there is always the danger of the word usage itself changing if that company becomes very famous (and through that the impact on human communication).

    "Sun" is another example, imagine the situation today if that company had become as famous as Apple! What would you be calling the orb that rises in the East then?

    Edit

    Yep, referring to the once glorious but now defunct Sun Microsystems here.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on "twitter.com" is now officially dead in ~tech

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    I feel similar to the word "Apple". Wonder how Steve Jobs was allowed to register it in the first place! They took that word and then changed the very meaning of it.

    I feel similar to the word "Apple". Wonder how Steve Jobs was allowed to register it in the first place!

    They took that word and then changed the very meaning of it.

    6 votes

  6. "twitter.com" is now officially dead

    ~tech Text 147 words
    For some reason, I had always hoped against hope that at least the old domain name will always be retained by Elon's X team, at least as a reminder of their revolutionary beginnings in the form of...

    For some reason, I had always hoped against hope that at least the old domain name will always be retained by Elon's X team, at least as a reminder of their revolutionary beginnings in the form of "setting the bird free" or "liberating the free speech" as it was often called. But today, even that last vestige called twitter, that domain name on the back of which some of us used to mentally stay in the nostalgia, has also been broken - twitter.com is no more :-(

    As of now, the domain redirects to x.com, the new one.

    However, in our hearts and minds, it will always be "twitter" and we shall call it "twitter"! And there is one more place where the name twitter shall always find a place - the twitter bootstrap open source project which will keep telling the story of where it all began!

    34 votes

  8. What is your opinion on Dan Brown novels?

    ~books Ask (survey)
    Brown's Da Vinci Code was one of the first "proper" novel I had started with when I was a kid. I liked it enough at that time to buy his other novel, Angels and Demons soon after that. His books...

    Brown's Da Vinci Code was one of the first "proper" novel I had started with when I was a kid. I liked it enough at that time to buy his other novel, Angels and Demons soon after that. His books are usually categorized as Historical Fiction but you also wouldn't be wrong in calling them Realistic Fiction I think. Needless to say, massive controversy also surrounds Brown just like many other famous authors. At least /r/books is filled with many posts filled with both love and disdain towards this author!

    What do you think about Dan Brown novels, have you read any of them?

    10 votes

  10. Comment on I am a witch. Well, a well witcher... in ~talk

    pyeri
    Link
    Well, Dowsing is an established craft. I'm hesitant to call it "science" since as you said, we don't (yet) know how it works. And that often gets stamped as "pseudo science" by the science guys!...

    Well, Dowsing is an established craft. I'm hesitant to call it "science" since as you said, we don't (yet) know how it works. And that often gets stamped as "pseudo science" by the science guys!

    While working in mundane matters most of the time, we don't pay attention to it but there are still many secrets of the universe still uncovered, many mysteries yet unexplored.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    pyeri
    Link
    Fulfilling my client projects, both PHP web applications and deadline is by coming weekend. I've been meaning to work on an open source idea but not getting enough time for that! Ironically, the...

    Fulfilling my client projects, both PHP web applications and deadline is by coming weekend.

    I've been meaning to work on an open source idea but not getting enough time for that! Ironically, the project idea is about a time management app (facepalm!).

  12. Comment on Honest Question: Why did PHP remove dynamic properties in 8.x? in ~comp

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    You're quite right here. But that only works when you're hosted on a VPS and have direct control of all package installations including PHP. In case of one of my clients, they were running it on a...

    You don't update production services to a major version of your language/framework/runtime without understanding what you need to change in your codebase, and thorough testing.

    You're quite right here. But that only works when you're hosted on a VPS and have direct control of all package installations including PHP. In case of one of my clients, they were running it on a shared PHP hosting and the provider just upgraded to PHP 8 one fine day without informing anyone!

    In this case, the client's application broke along with several others which were using CI3 or CakePHP frameworks. Naturally, the provider soon reverted back to PHP 7 after getting all the distress calls but the impact was done. I guess, the lesson here also comes down to stop using shared PHP hosting?

    1 vote

  13. Comment on Honest Question: Why did PHP remove dynamic properties in 8.x? in ~comp

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    It's an easy fix for developer but in this case, production code comes to a standstill the moment they upgrade to PHP 8. Most small-mid apps are production stable, they don't get frequent updates....

    It's such an easy fix, that codeigniter/cakephp updated their code to work with these changes almost immediately, over a year ago.

    It's an easy fix for developer but in this case, production code comes to a standstill the moment they upgrade to PHP 8. Most small-mid apps are production stable, they don't get frequent updates. Unless they specifically ask the developer for an application rewrite (or developer approaches them after knowing this scenario), the client or user would be left standstill with a broken application. Some of them may well decide to bid PHP goodbye and start looking for other solutions?

    People with commit privileges to PHP's codebase, who have dedicated years of their lives to the ecosystem, are not there to destroy their life's work.

    But life moves on, people leave from one project to another. Do the folks who wrote the original PHP like Rasmus and Zeev Suraski still maintain today's PHP? Perhaps not. And this leaves the door open for corporate interests to put their own agents into high profile projects like these.

    How on earth could this even happen?

    Have you heard that famous quote, Life is sometimes stranger than fiction? Many dastardly events often happen on this planet, we just take them for granted. The acquisition of MySQL project by a corporate entity who's interests directly collided with MySQL should have raised all hell! That was one acquisition which should never have seen the green light, in the interests of society and open source culture. IIRC Europe tried its best to prevent that but USA govt. gave the green lights to Oracle eventually.

    And don't forget Astrazeneca's recent admission of guilt WRT their famous Covishield vaccine! If the company that now says the vaccine isn't safe, what could have possibly been the motive for it to push them so hard during COVID? Except for corporate greed of the Big Pharma?

    All I'm saying is that we shouldn't take these things lightly, they often have a very real impact on human society and civilization and our future.

  14. Comment on Honest Question: Why did PHP remove dynamic properties in 8.x? in ~comp

    pyeri
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yes. As long as open source languages like PHP (and frameworks like CodeIgniter) exist, folks will avoid purchasing the costlier proprietary solutions from Big Tech companies, this is especially...

    Yes. As long as open source languages like PHP (and frameworks like CodeIgniter) exist, folks will avoid purchasing the costlier proprietary solutions from Big Tech companies, this is especially true for smaller startups and web shops that deal in PHP software like CodeIgniter and Wordpress. The larger aim here might be to cripple the self-sustaining community built frameworks like CodeIgniter as much as possible to make way for Big Tech solutions.

  15. Honest Question: Why did PHP remove dynamic properties in 8.x?

    ~comp Text 230 words
    I understand PHP has had many criticisms in the past but I'm not sure the existence of dynamic properties of instantiated objects was ever one of them. In fact, dynamic properties are pretty much...

    I understand PHP has had many criticisms in the past but I'm not sure the existence of dynamic properties of instantiated objects was ever one of them. In fact, dynamic properties are pretty much the hallmark of most interpreted or dynamic programming languages. Python allows it all the time and so do many others like Ruby, Perl, etc.

    I don't know what PHP developers achieved by removing dynamic properties feature from the language but one thing that resulted out of this is that many applications based on widely used veteran PHP frameworks (such as CodeIgniter and CakePHP) came to a halt all of a sudden due to an error like this after upgrading to PHP 8:

    A PHP Error was encountered
Severity: 8192
Message: Creation of dynamic property CI_URI::$config is deprecated
Filename: core/URI.php
Line Number: 102
Backtrace:
File: C:\xampp\htdocs\inv_perpus\index.php Line: 288 Function: require_once

    The influence of Corporate IT in various open source foundations is pretty well known and also well known is the extent to which corporate greed goes to achieve its interests and objectives across the world. The only way to assuage this uncomfortable thought (at least in this particular case) is to ask if there was any technical merit at all in removing dynamic properties feature from a dynamic programming language?

    I for one couldn't find any such merit here.

    11 votes

  16. Comment on Another Chrome vulnerability - dissection of yesterday's zero day bug in ~tech

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    Relative to how hush hush and silent the other articles are, this one certainly counts as dissection! Though I should have used a different word in retrospect, you're right. From this, at least I...

    Relative to how hush hush and silent the other articles are, this one certainly counts as dissection! Though I should have used a different word in retrospect, you're right.

    From this, at least I came to know it's a C memory overflow bug. Most others are like just "Google says it's urgent, so".

    5 votes

  19. Comment on No love for fiction or literary pursuits on Tildes? in ~tildes

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    I'm not a fan of HP any more, used to be one in my student years as a kid. But even then, I liked Artemis way more, a blend of technology and magic feels way more surreal and realistic than magic...

    I'm not a fan of HP any more, used to be one in my student years as a kid. But even then, I liked Artemis way more, a blend of technology and magic feels way more surreal and realistic than magic alone, at least to me.

    Haven't read any of the other niche authors, thanks for the recommendation.

    4 votes

  20. Comment on No love for fiction or literary pursuits on Tildes? in ~tildes

    pyeri
    Link Parent
    Thank you! The huge list of subscriptions on my right side bar was exhaustive I thought, didn't realize that a whole universe of new groups had emerged! I might subscribe to a lot more I guess.

    Thank you! The huge list of subscriptions on my right side bar was exhaustive I thought, didn't realize that a whole universe of new groups had emerged! I might subscribe to a lot more I guess.

    3 votes