#Programming

[soapsquare]

the reason gifs can do this is actually kind of weird, because gif files are made up of certain "blocks", like "graphics control extension" or "plain text extension", these blocks mostly all do something to make the gif like defining the size or colors of the frame

but one of these blocks is kinda weird, its the "Application extension" block. this block is supposed to store data for specific applications, could be a pretty useful feature right? idk maybe cus its basically not used by anyone, EXCEPT! for netscape, because netscape had its own application extension, and what it allowed for was to define how many times a gif can loop for from 0(loops forever) to 65535 times. And because netscape was super popular when they introduced this basically every other browser would also use this application extension, and this feature stuck with us untill today unlike netscape

so now if you look at most gifs today you will likely find this one stupid application extension in the file, and sure enough when we download this gif we can see this:

the left part is the hexadecimal values and on the right its translated to normal characters where we can clearly see that beautiful NETSCAPE 2.0 label

now you might see that 01 hex value at the end right before the zero's and think that why it only loops one time like the stupid little idiot you are, but the thing is, no, thats just always there. actually those first two bytes after that 01 defines how many times it should loop, and like the good little smart girl you are youve spotted that its zero, which should mean that it should loop forever, but it doesnt, and the thing is, even if you set that to 1 it wont do anything, thats cus the entire block doesnt do anything, so basically most gifs will waste about 18 bytes of data

and yet this gif doesnt loop, so how does it do that? well if we go to the last frame in the gif to the Graphics Control Extension block we see this:

21: this byte signifies that this is the start of an extension block

F9: this is a Graphics Control Extension

04: this block is four bytes long

04: this is a packed byte which means the bits in the byte have their own function and is not important right now

but those two bytes that are highlighted are interesting because those bytes determine the delay between frames in tens of milliseconds, and theyre not zero! and actually these two bytes together make 9900, which means the delay between the last frame and the first is actually 99 seconds! this gif is not a non looping gif, it loops! OP is a fraud! death!

[yourordinarycat]

i think this is the original article if anyone was wondering. it is absolutely wonderful: https://www.initiatewebdevelopment.com/Csharp/HTML%20Pages/display%20output%20labels.html

i also like this one (source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/composition/composition-effects)

[cidthecoatrack-blog]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[attarrax]

only real nerdy nerds know what this drawing was used for. if you know— tell me and we will be best friends forever if you're right :-)

(don't cheat)

[track-maniac]

in the gitted lab. straight up "pushing it". and by "it", haha, well. let's just say. Bad code

[prokopetz]

I 100% agree with the criticism that the central problem with "AI"/LLM evangelism is that people pushing it fundamentally do not value labour, but I often see it phrased with a caveat that they don't value labour except for writing code, and... like, no, they don't value the labour that goes into writing code, either. Tech grifter CEOs have been trying to get rid of programmers within their organisations for years – long before LLMs were a thing – whether it's through algorithmic approaches, "zero coding" development platforms, or just outsourcing it all to overseas sweatshops. The only reason they haven't succeeded thus far is because every time they try, all of their toys break. They pretend to value programming as labour because it's the one area where they can't feasibly ignore the fact that the outcomes of their "disruption" are uniformly shit, but they'd drop the pretence in a heartbeat if they could.

[chongoblog]

Programming is so funny. It says

"ERROR: int can not be converted to a string"

And you're just like "oh, okay. *adds ".ToString()" to the end*"

"Alright that's okay ^w^"

[samueldays]

I don't like this xkcd, ordinary joe won't understand the joke and technical me will object that this isn't a linear time sort and isn't O(n), neither in practice nor in principle. It doesn't look cursed to me, just wrong.

The practical objection: Even in a first world country, I've experienced a power outage more than once every ten years. This algorithm takes more than ten years to sort a 365-item list, and therefore fails to terminate for even moderately sized lists.

The limit case objection: For a sufficiently long list, the argument to sleep() becomes negative, which depending on your programming language might resolve to sleeping indefinitely, for zero seconds, for an undefined amount of time, or Type Error. None of these will sleep a negative time as required.

The best case is O(n), and the worst case is that someone checks why.

Linear Sort [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[The panel shows five lines of code:] function LinearSort(list): StartTime=Time() MergeSort(list) Sleep(1e6*length(list)-(Time()-StartTime)) return

[Caption below the panel:] How to sort a list in linear time

[engravedlives]

random green blinkies

[lazypiper]

So I've been playing this Minecraft server with some friends recently, and one of the mods we have on it is this lil computer mod, with these blocks that serve as LUA environments and can have code run on them right

So I thought it'd be a fun change of pace to not 'join the server' directly at all, and exclusively play through remotely controlling these lil computer blocks via a small websocket server I made- seemed like a unique way to play and I, of course, love robot characters. It's been going well so far! Been really fun

buUUT

I'm sitting here playing with everyone else in the server and people are actively referring to me as a robot/machine/etc and mentioning robotic parts like 'threatening' to hit my power button when getting jokingly mad and discussing my nature as a digital consciousness spread throughout a buncha puters here etc and it's been REALLY fun and

This feels WAY too much like gender euphoria

This has potentially developed into a complicated situation what the fuck do I do

[captaindrewboy]

I hate when I tell people I'm into Comp Sci and programming and they go "ooh there's a lot of money there". I'm not DOING it for the MONEY I'm DOING it because I want to FUCK the COMPUTER!!!!

[fotocany]

🫀

Us ❤️

x - x - x | x - x | x - x - x

[ahsnapitskat]

Hey, I know we may not know each other but I wish you the best of luck with whatever you have going on. I hope something great happens to you, you deserve it. 💕

[coffin-spider]

The gremlins in my mind want to own a lil mini computer like this as if I we're some strange sci-fi novel character. To you beautiful humans who make stuff like this and know how to use raspberry pies, I love you. My fantasy to be a cyberpunk/lainecore/space girl is fuled by your mastery of this lil goobers

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I programmed my wife on Java.