You lose information when DST kicks in - which is not great. It is trivial to convert to any timezone so there is little point in logging in anything but UTC and keeps everything consistent. Especially when comparing dates from servers in different timezones.

So, if you just use the system API, then this means logging with syslog(3). Learn how to use it.

This is old advice. These days just log to stdout, no need for your process to understand syslog, systemd, containers and modern systems just capture stdout and forward that where it needs to do. Then all applications can be simple and it us up to the system to handle them in a consistent way.

NOTICE level: this will certainly be the level at which the program will run when in production

I have never see anyone use this log level ever. Most use or default to Info or Warn. Even the author later says

I run my server code at level INFO usually, but my desktop programs run at level DEBUG.

If your message uses a special charset or even UTF-8, it might not render correctly at the end, but worst it could be corrupted in transit and become unreadable.

I don’t know if this is true anymore. UTF-8 is ubiquitous these days and I would be surprised if any logging system could not handle it, or at least any modern one. I am very tempted to start adding some emoji to my logs to find out though.

User 54543 successfully registered e-mail user@domain.com

Now that is a big no no. Never ever log PII data if you don’t want a world of hurt later on.

2013-01-12 17:49:37,656 [T1] INFO c.d.g.UserRequest User plays {‘user’:1334563, ‘card’:‘4 of spade’, ‘game’:23425656}

I do not like that at all. The message should not contain json. Most logging libraries let you add context in a consistent way and can output the whole log line in Json. Having escaped json in json because you decided to add json manually is a pain, just use the tools you are given properly.

Add timestamps either in UTC or local time plus offset

Never log in local time. DST fucks shit up when you do that. Use UTC for everything and convert when displayed if needed, but always store dates in UTC.

Think of Your Audience

Very much this. I have seen far too many error message that give fuck all context to the problem and require diving through source code to figure out the hell went wrong. Think about how logs will be read without the context of the source code at hand.

It is a digital signage display (ie in store ads, menus, displays etc) - not meant for desktop use.

Whatever language you chose you might want to also look at the htmx JS library. It lets you write in your html snippets better interactivity without actually needing to write JS. It basically lets you do things like when you click on an element, it can make a request to your server and replace some other element with the contents your server responds with - all with attributes on HTML tags instead of writing JS. This lets you keep all the state on the backend and lets you write more backend logic without only relying on full page refreshes to update small sections of the page.

For a backend language I would use rust as that is what I am most familiar with now and enjoy using the most. Most languages are adequate at serving backend code though so it is hard to go wrong with anything that you enjoy using. Though with rust I tend to find I have fewer issues when I deploy something as appose to other languages which can cause all sorts of runtime errors as they let you ignore the error paths by default.

Yup, and that is because people only ever lean DRY coding by its name. It is never really what it originally meant, when to use it and more importantly when not to use it. So loads of people apply it religiously and over use it. This is true of all the popular catchy named methodologies/principals etc.

Yup, this is part of what’s lead me to advocate for SRP (the single responsibility principle).

Even that gets overused and abused. My big problem with it is what is a single responsibility. It is poorly defined and leads to people thinking that the smallest possible thing is one responsibility. But when people think like that they create thousands of one to three line functions which just ends up losing the what the program is trying to do. Following logic through deeply nested function calls IMO is just as bad if not worst than having everything in a single function.

There is a nice middle ground where SRP makes sense but like all patterns they never talk about where that line is. Overuse of any pattern, methodology or principle is a bad thing and it is very easy to do if you don’t think about what it is trying to achieve and when applying it no longer fits that goal.

Basically, everything in moderation and never lean on a single thing.

Refactoring should not be a separate task that a boss can deny. You need to do feature X, feature X benefits from reworking some abstraction a bit, then you rework that abstraction before starting on feature X. And then maybe refactor a bit more after feature X now you know what it looks like. None of that should take substantially longer, and saves vast amounts of time later on if you don’t include it as part of the feature work.

You can occasionally squeeze in a feature without reworking things first if time for something is tight, but you will run into problems if you do this too often and start thinking refactoring is a separate task to feature work.

“Best practices” might help you to avoid writing worse code.

TBH I am not sure about this. I have seen many “Best practices” make code worst not better. Not because the rules themselves are bad but people take them as religious gospel and apply them to every situation in hopes of making their code better without actually looking at if it is making their code better.

For instance I see this a lot in DRY code. While the rules themselves are useful to know and apply they are too easily over applied removing any benefit they originally gave and result in overly abstract code. The number of times I have added duplication back into code to remove a layer of abstraction that was not working only to maybe reapply it in a different way, often keeping some duplication.

Suddenly requirements change and now it’s bad code.

This only leads to bad code when people get to afraid to refactor things in light of the new requirements.Which sadly happens far to often. People seem to like to keep what was there already and follow existing patterns even well after they are no longer suitable. I have made quite a lot of bad code better by just ripping out the old patterns and putting back something that better fits the current requirements - quite often in code I have written before and others have added to over time.

How do we know these are the AI chatbots instructions and not just instructions it made up? They make things up all the time, why do we trust it in this instance?

I am guessing it will just be sharded and hidden throughout the code in areas that get triggered as you play though the game.

The only real question is if it is quicker to find it in the code or to play though the game. IMO that is all a bit pointless as once it is cracked it will be cracked. All this does is maybe buy a few hours after launch (assuming the game files are not predownloaded before then) at best before all the info is available online. And now they have announced this quite a few will take it as a challenge and I doubt it will really slow anyone down.

The license is MIT, so should be fine for most things

From the article:

A quick Microsoft demo video shows the Copilot key in between the cluster of arrow keys and the right Alt button, a place where many keyboards usually put a menu button, a right Ctrl key, another Windows key, or something similar. The exact positioning, and the key being replaced, may vary depending on the size and layout of the keyboard.

a hearing doc won’t be much help with anything aside from hearing

Irrelevant to my argument. All I mean is because they go to visit someone for one problem can mean they visit other people for other problems they have - rather than ignoring things and staying at home. And I am not claiming what I said to be the actual cause - at least no more than what the study can claim. There could be many other factors at play here as well. My only point is to not confuse causation for correlation and that these types of studies are almost useless in what they tell us.

Hell, even spurious correlations happen all the time. You cannot use two graphs looking similar to prove any point without a lot of control for all the other variables that might be at play and not go looking at large amounts of data for anything that might seem interesting.

“We found that adults with hearing loss who regularly used hearing aids had a 24% lower risk of mortality than those who never wore them,” said Janet Choi, MD, MPH, an otolaryngologist with Keck Medicine and lead researcher of the study. “These results are exciting because they suggest that hearing aids may play a protective role in people’s health and prevent early death.”

While the study did not examine why hearing aids may help those who need them live longer, Choi points to recent research linking hearing aid use with lowered levels of depression and dementia. She speculates that the improvements in mental health and cognition that come with improved hearing can promote better overall health, which may improve life span.

This is the classic causation vs correlation problem with these studies. I can also speculate: Did the hearing aid actually do anything at all - or do the people that go to the doctors for a hearing aid also go to the doctors for other problems they might have and so get more treatment for other conditions? That seems far more likely to have a bigger effect IMO.

We spent much of the year fighting these dangerous “child safety” bills, while also pointing out to legislators that comprehensive data privacy legislation would be more likely to pass constitutional muster and address many of the issues that these child safety bills focus on.

Because they don’t actually care about child safety. massive online censorship and surveillance is the goal here - kids are the excuse they are using to try and get it to pass as it has no hope in hell without some sort of mask on it. The only things they ever do for children is banning abortions and erode privacy. Never anything that would actually help, like feeding them in school, or better prenatal support and leave at work, or medical insurance for everyone. Instead they fight against these measures and for things that won’t help children in the slightest.

As long as I can remember

Just use the search bar… the only one they have that is on every page at the top right. That takes you to the results which defaults to code, but you can change it on the side to show repos, issues, prs, etc. You can even limit it to single repos or whole organisations.

I would start by learning rust at a user level via the rust book to get you familiar with the language without the extra layers that embedded systems tend to add on top of things. Keep in mind that the embedded space in rust is still maturing, though it is maturing quite quickly. However one of the biggest limitations ATM is the amount of architectures available - if you need to target one not supported then you cannot use rust ATM (though there is quite a few different projects bringing in support for more architectures).

If you only need to use architectures that rust supports than once you have the basics of rust down take a look at the embedded book, the Discovery book and the Embedonomicon. Then there are various crates for different boards such as ruduino for the arduino uno, or the rp-pico for the raspberry pi pico, or various other crates for specific boards. There are also higher and lower level crates for things - like ones specific to a dev board and ones that are specific to a chipset.

Lastly, there are embedded frameworks like Embassy that are helpful for more complex applications.

I’m still forgetting things I learned 3 or even 4 times like how to do a for each loop.

I have been programming for decades now and still have to look up how an if statement works in bash - or other similar things, especially when switching between languages. It takes 5 seconds to look up and remember so I would not bother worrying about it. Far better to know when you need to use an if or for loop and quickly look up the syntax then to know the syntax but not when to use it.

I see tutorials say to make a tic tac toe game or a calculator or to contribute to open source code. Which is good I suppose but all of it feels too advanced and I get lost on how to begin.

Break problems down into simpler problems, then break those down into simpler problems until you have a trivial problem you can solve. Then build up from there. Like take a tic tac toe game - lots of things to consider that can all be dealt with in isolation. Like rendering the game to the screen, that is one problem you can start with, and can be broken down even further to maybe how to draw a grid to the screen, which again can be broken down to how to draw a box or line.

You might even want to look at the book " Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving by V. Anton Spraul" which goes into this way of thinking in more detail.

Rust, it is a pleasure to work with and far more flexible in where/what it can run then a lot of languages. Good oneverything from embedded systems to running on the web. Only really C and C++ can beat it on that, but those are farlesss pleasant to work with. Even if it is not as mature in some area quite yet, it just gets more support for things as time goes on.