This is genius

If you do that, you lose formatting and comments every time you load the source from disk

As much as this hurts, yeet; as an alias throw; is hilarious

Sanity checks

Always, always check if your assumptions are true

• am i even running the function?
• is this value what i think it is?
• what is responsible for loading this data, and does it work as expected?
• am i pointed at the right database?
• is my configuration set and loaded in correctly?

I mean, you just need to look at the conflicting files, fix up the code, then stage those changes and pop a new commit

There’s no “special” merge conflict resolution commit “type”

As for fixing the code itself, I usually look at what changed between both versions, and then re-author the code such that both changes make “sense”

Only eggs can sustain me

I’m more talking about theory than practical.

I’ve not developed anything in C/C++, so I don’t know practical uses for a double pointer, aside from multidimensional arrays, or arrays of pointers

My point was that, conceptually, pointers to pointers is how most complex data structures work. Even if the C representation of said code doesn’t have a int** somewhere

The distinction is meaningless in the land of Opcode’s and memory addresses

For example, a struct is just an imaginary “overlay” on top of a contiguous section of memory

Say you have a struct

struct Thing {
  int a;
  int b;
  Thing* child;
}

Thing foo {}

You could easily get a reference to foo->child->b by doing pointer arithmetic

*((*((*foo) + size(int)*2)) +size(int))

(I’ve not used C much so I’ve probably got the syntax wrong)

Mostly because at the lowest level of computing (machine code and CPU instructions), pointers are the only method (that I know of) of any kind of indirection.

At the lowest level, there are 2 types of references:

• CPU registers
• memory addresses (pointers)

Every higher level language feature for memory management (references, objects, safe pointers, garbage collection, etc) is just an abstraction over raw pointers

Pointers themselves are really just abstractions over raw integers, whose sole purpose is to index into RAM

With that in mind, pointers to pointers are a natural consequence of any kind of nested object hierarchy (linked lists, trees, objects with references to other objects, etc)

The only other kind of indirection would be self-modifying machine code (like a Wheeler Jump). But the computing world at large has nixed that idea for a multitude of reasons

Oh, so that’s what all of you are talking about.

I still don’t really see what all the fuss is about

Shell scripts don’t count

That’s not a programming language, that’s hieroglyphs

Exactly, that’s why you write down ideas immediately, when you have them

I have obsidian set to dump new notes into an “Inbox” folder

If i have an idea, i jot it down in a new note (usually from my phone), and move on

Then i can later catalog it properly

Don’t brainstorm

Collect ideas as you think of them throughout your day. Then when you need to “brainstorm”, read through your ideas and references

Relevant links:
Obsidian/Zettelkasten setup guide

How to take smart notes

Most of the time, it’s me

Even medicated, it’s impossible for me to keep a normal sleep schedule

I think of it as compensation for waking up at noon every day

It haunts me in my dreams

For lurkers hoarding high quality content for this community, this is your sign to press the button “New post”

I’ve never really had good ideas to post

Even on reddit

We kinda do, with GPS satellites that have to correct their clocks due to the effects of gravity and speed

And communication with space probes

I use 24h clocks and ISO 8601 dates almost always

Honestly, I’m better at organizing code than I am my actual life

Timezones make intuitive sense for humans

UTC / Unix timestamps make intuitive sense for computers

The issue is bridging the gap

You just brought back some unpleasant memories from high school English

The teacher insisted we take Cornell notes

I couldn’t stand how they were organized, i was/am crap at taking notes during a lecture, and I didn’t need them. I’m very good at remembering information from lectures