#comp eng

Whats the opposite of gothic? I'm in love with comp sci anti-gothic where it's just people being surprisingly polite and nice and funny through computers. A program's first lines are always "Hello world!". SMTP protocols apparently say "hello, pleased to meet you" to each other to establish a connection with a handshake. Python has a different version called Andaconda, which has a smaller version called miniconda. C++ is just C continuously improving on itself, because the ++ operator means to add one onto a previous value, and C# is two ++ stacked on top of each other. Lawmakers have to talk about the ethics of saving "cookies" to computers because one guy liked fortune cookies and decided to call them that. The internet itself wasn't created with security in mind because it was just meant to be a way for a group of people who trusted each other using it to send each other information, and so on, and so forth

Academic semester so bad it has you googling next semester's homework to start doing pre-readings

I'm not sure if it's just me getting a ton of "programmers as wizards" content recently, but I love LOVE the implication that sorcerers have to understand the world somewhat non-intuitively, looking for shortcuts and simplifications of the very fabric of the universe Like, a novice wizard might try and cast "fireball" by thinking "I should ignite a fuel source, which means I need to start by summoning an ignitable, and individually igniting every gram of the fuel until I run out", a practiced wizard says "You can simply cast fireball once on a basal ignitable and use the energy from the reaction to summon fireball & fuel again, triggering a cascading explosion effect until the room runs out of things to ignite" A third wizard points out it's indeed possible for the second wizard to actually contain the fireball if they'd just write a simple rune on their summoning circle detailing how much fuel the fireball should actually consume, and why would you just let your explosion spell go on forever because dude, do you WANT all of your spells to decimate your magic stores? You're going to run out of magic and die or you're going to cast this outdoors and kill everyone

It is absolutely amazing how much upper div computer science/engineering relies on vectors and probabilities, considering those two classes were basically footnotes in my school's computer science curriculum

Why, oh why, do applications beget applications?