Wth is “Fixing memory leaks using pointers”?
Honestly, CSS is a fucking joke and it’s solely to blame for why centering something isn’t always straightforward.
By the way, this picture is a crock of shit for people who aren’t programmers. Anyone who is a programmer will not take it seriously because programming is so much more about helping others instead of shaming them.
CSS is amazing, if you know how to use it 😉
Everybody complaining about css like “but it doesn’t do what I want if to do without me investing a minute into why”.
Ironically, it’s oh so often the RTFM crowd.
Stackoverflow: exists solely from the urge of developers to help developers, and since ExpertsExchange was paid dogshit.
This meme: pisses on its whole purpose.
Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?
I have to say, I’m pretty sure those guys were in the past too.
Getting to keep your job is your medal then.
I can’t remember some syntax unless I do it at least 100 times. I often look up stuff that I have already done before and know because of my goldfish memory.
I once had an intern attempt to install sudo using NPM and when that didn’t work he asked ChatGPT “Why can’t I install sudo from NPM?” while I’m trying to explain it to him.
He was smart, but somehow knew very little about commercial computers despite being on the verge of getting his master’s in computer science.
“Wait why can’t I install windows iso from vscode extension store?”
I still want to get into coding the OG manual way (because I enjoy pain and disappointment apparently) but now it seems like a waste of time since vibe coders and 13 year olds already are lightyears ahead of me. Also I have no reason to learn it, all apps are already built xD
I’m in the same boat. I used to be an amateur front and back end web developer. Almost made a text based RPG in middle school. I had to stop when shit got crazy in high school and college, but I don’t feel like any programming is worth my time right now. I’m focusing on gardening and maybe some cooking. You know, human activities that we can still enjoy.
Yeahh exactly. AI has pretty much ruined computer based fun now. Which in some ways is good, we should all learn physical hobbies again and not be reliant on tech. I still enjoy my hobby desktop computers though, I just enjoy learning how it really works under the surface.
all apps are already built
Couldn’t be further from the truth. You also have to consider competition.
True. But it seems like it’s way too late to start learning any programming now. Plus it’s saturated. I’ll learn it on the side for fun but it’ll probably never be a viable job for me
Can’t think of anything that could serve a major need right now, but I absolutely identified things in my life where I could use a preexisting tool to accomplish my goal, but it’s much less hassle for me to use the one I made for myself. You don’t have to transform the world, sometimes you can help yourself with a minor inconvenience and then put it out there for anyone who might find themselves with the same inconvenience.
Yeah OK, but back then, an office suite was like 500 LOC.
I’m 19 and in the past, apparently.
I turned 40 two days ago. Get off my lawn!
When you turn 40 do they issue you a lawn or do you not turn 40 until you have a lawn?
You get a lawn and white New Balances at 30. At 40 you get nearsightedness and additional back pain.
You are issued a lawn IF you have chronic back pain. Otherwise you have to wait until you’re at least 50.
Love the shoutout to Margaret Hamilton
The majority of “programmers in the past” should be women actually, but our meme formats are still too patriarchal to express that in 2025.
The moon landing by hand wouldn’t have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.
We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp’s gender.
The glory days of Derp and Derpina
Obligatory Grace Hopper
So were “computers”. It used to be a job, delegated mostly to women. The JD is doing calculations day in and day out.
“Creates a whole game in assembly” is probably referring to roller coaster tycoon, which was written by a man. (lots of other games were written in asm, like many NES games, but I’d wager RCT was what they were alluding to)
That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.
No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.
“too patriarchal” no one was thinking of “furthering the goals of the patriarchy” or whatever your delusions tell you.
It’s just people making memes, and most people who make memes who are guys will make memes with guys in them, because they identify with them the most.
Your brain dead take is pure cancer.
I agree with you: I never intended to imply explicit anti-diversity intentions or even awareness of the biases embedded in our culture.
Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Implicit biases are activated involuntarily, unconsciously, and without one’s awareness or intentional control (see, e.g., Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Kang, et al., 2012; Nier, 2005; Rudman, 2004a)
The large initial percentage of female coders was due to computer having been a female job, because secretary was. Their role within companies didn’t change, what changed is that they were using machines to do the computing instead of doing it by hand.
We’re kinda lucky to have the woke trifecta (Ada, Grace, Alan) (first programmer (woman), inventor of compilers (woman), absolute unit (gay)) to keep the chuds at bay. Even if we weren’t all socially inept nerds (or pretending to be so to bosses) there’s only so much you can do, culturally, if the population is growing exponentially. Uncle Bob (yes I know he’s a chud) did the maths at some point IIRC it was something like the number of programmers doubling every two years. Which also means that at any one point in time roughly 2/3rds of programmers have no idea what they’re doing, which explains the javascript ecosystem.
You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
At first I thought this was the Wicked Witch of the West’s actress and thought she must have been multitalented. Then I looked it up to verify. Nope, same name, different women.
If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:
At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.
So many great points in a short comment. I love your high bandwidth writing style!
Dude. Chill. Ain’t nobody giving a shit about your take on someone else’s take.
I feel very confident in my understanding of random 8 bit CPUs and their support chips, but asking me to center a div is like this xkcd.
tar --help
(joke)
YOU FOOL! THE ACTUAL COMMAND WAStar -?That dash looks an awful lot like an em-dash
Normal:
-Em:
–That reminds me of this Elle Cordova short: https://youtube.com/shorts/ky0YOo7_Y0o
I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).
That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.
And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).
I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as
man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn’t be easier,tar xf <tarball>and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting,tar tf <tarball>. Unless you’re using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you’re using without you having to remember if you needzorJor whatever.
I got tired of looking up the options for each possible combination of archiving + compression, so today I have a “magic” bash function that can extract almost any format.
Then for compressing, I only use
zip, which doesn’t need any args other than the archive name and the thing you’re compressing. It needs-rwhen recursing on dirs, but unlike “eXtract” and “Ze”, that’s a good mnemonic.tar -eXtract Ze Vucking File
Thanks! This will definitely help me to remember it from now on.
Me 6 months from now:
tar -EZVF
Me in 6 months "
how to install winzip using terminal"
Nobody wants to deliberately use the wrong compression type when extracting, so modern tar will figure out the compression itself if you just point it at a file. So
tar -xf filenameworks on almost anything. You don’t need to remember which flag to use on a.tar.bz2file and which one for a.tar.xzfile.That doesn’t give me a memorable mnemonic though.
tar -eXtract File
yeah, but then how am I supposed to remember “tar” ? :P
Tape ARchive -eXtract File
It is sticky and pretty much ruins clothes.
One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.
Literally the only time I’ve ever run into that is when I was trying to manipulate the path it extracted to. In 99% of cases I’m doing tf, xf, or cf plus flags for the compression type, etc, and those differences are irrelevant.
I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. This thread started because I said I’ve never understood why people talk like tar is some indecipherable black magic. Common tasks are easy and there’s a man page for everything else.
Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn’t deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question
After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.
Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked
I often found the correct answers in the comments of an answer
Before that you had to hang out on flipside or other gamedev sites and show your worthiness before begging for information.
I was so proud when they shared the DS hack (basically a homebrew SDK made by trial and error by some people) so that I could make small games on it.
My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called “programmers” overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don’t need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.
And vice versa, you don’t need to know how to centre a div to create a game in assembler. I’m comfortable using pointers and managing memory, but don’t ask me to do anything with web UI.
I’m guessing that someone who figured out how to keep a high score box centered on screen using assembly will figure it out to do it with CSS.
The reverse, not so much…
But you dont what the code of the assembly-style centered div in your codebase. Because nobody will be able to read it and understand what it even does. There are abstraction specific ways to solve problems and the right way to do something in assembly is not the right way to do it in CSS.
Agreed, in my limited experience with both CSS is like the conceptual opposite of assembly. When I do web design I tell it what I want to look like but can’t see how it’s getting there because that’s done for me. Assembly is the lowest level of abstraction we’ve got and it took me ages to write a little program for class that returns an argument in it (Jasmin VM) and then get GCC to compile it.
I would say that CSS is like doing an incantation that magically makes the site look good if you do it right, and assembly is like building something by hand.
This can be generalized to say that programming has become such a diverse profession that you will find experts in one area that know very little about others. There’s simply too many things that are programmed in too many ways for anyone to know it all anymore. Hell, that was the case in the 70’s and 80’s too.
I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn’t know how to quit nano. NANO!
Nano… Like… The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
Onscreen instructions unclear, pressed Shift+6+X. Still stuck in Nano.
Burnt into the old LCD screen.
And your retinas.
Yeah, that one…
That deserves a “do you know how to read?”, because the exit command is on the lower part of the screen for nano
Huh? Isn’t it like right there at the bottom of the screen?
I guess not knowing that ^X means Control+X could be the issue, but still…
TIL!
Can exit nano on my own, have the common sense to not call in a panic about it before at least looking it up. (Which is how I learned how to exit it: looking it up.) But was never taught about ^ meaning “Control+” until your comment, especially since nowadays people write it out as “Control+” or “CTRL+”.
I might have put two and two together when dealing with everything else in nano after I learned to exit, but never really internalized the rule “^ means Control+”. So thank you for your comment!
Disclaimer: I feel like I am too stupid for most of programming.dev but participate here anyways because I learn stuff from the comments.
Don’t feel stupid. It’s bad enough that all of IT is one giant impostor-syndrome support group. There’s literally too much for any one person to know, and it’s been that way for a very long time. Just give it your all, and memorize how to reliably search and look things up; take notes for the really important stuff. The rest will filter into your memory with practice.
Also: anyone that holds this kind of thing over your head is attempting to distract from how much they don’t know. Most people in this industry understand and don’t judge.
As for the
^thing, I recall seeing that as far back as the 1990’s. I want to say Microsoft actually popularized it, but it could easily be OS2 (IBM) or Apple. In hindsight, it’s kind of wild to have a TUI (terminal user interface) hold your hand like this. Nano (and Pico) are kind of in a special category like that.
Do you remember the “press any key to exit”? Someone asked where is the “any” key.
Nano nano!
drinks water with finger
Ork humor. Love it.
I mean, maybe it was just me but I had to search what the hell ^ meant in nano, but after that it was alright.
I had an intermediate not understand how to read a pipe-delimited text file.
Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I’m vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn’t have a clue how.
awk is practically made for record processing, within the shell you can set
$IFS. The reason so many ancient UNIX file formats use:as separator is because that’s the default setting of$IFS.It’s all a huge PITA, though. I mean there’s a reason why people started using perl instead. Nushell is great for that kind of stuff, even more so if you have random json or such lying around it loads just as easily. “Everything is a string” was a mistake.
The former.
One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn’t be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn’t powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn’t be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
There’s a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I
the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We’re talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
You couldn’t crank your CPU in the olden days, it’d make games run in fast forward.
Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn’t really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game
Okay but how do u center a div in 2025
If using plain CSS, usually it’s enough to set
widthappropriately, andmargin-leftandmargin-righttoauto.If using a Modern Frontend/CSS Framework, then may God have mercy on your poor soul.
(Seriously I just started a new project with TailwindCSS and I’m so confused. But not entirely desperate yet.)
So what is the point of these frameworks if they make it harder?
If you spend a lot of time on a single framework, you will transcend and become a sort of frontend diety, growing multiple extra limbs allowing you to type in CSS classes faster than any mere mortal
Until everyone moves over to the next thing and you start from 0 again. Web dev is a nightmare.
What’s sad is that web development is only a nightmare so websites can be worse.
I genuinely believe it’s part of the concerted effort by the cabal to make us accept a ‘new normal.’
They don’t want an environment where anyone feels like they can make a website. They want us to believe we need to spend years studying before we can do anything, and even then we can only do what our bosses tell us to.
This is a bit of a stretch I think…
Web development is complicated because it’s indredibly poorly “designed” from the beginning, and doing a full redo is impossible.
It is 100x easier today than it was in 2006 when I started.
It’s easier today to make a website that would be ‘acceptable’ in 2006.
Generally I find many these frameworks will make some complicated things simple, but the cost is some things that were once simple are now complicated. They can be great if you just need the things they simplify - or in other words can stick to what they were intended for, but my favorite way of keeping things simple is to avoid using complicated and heavy frameworks.
I think they exist because of ignorance.
People who don’t understand how to do a task will usually choose the wrong tools for that task.
If someone is trying to cover up their lack of knowledge, they will usually make things more complicated than they need to be.
w-... mx-auto, replace the 3 dots with your desired width value, and that’s it with tailwindI’m doing a small hobby project (a ladder/ranking system for playing beer sports with my community), and I tried out Tailwind.
I gave up and loaded Bootstrap instead, but I will probably end up just writing all the CSS myself.
Seems so silly to have 15 CSS classes on a single DOM element…
Who’s saying you’re using the frameworks correctly?
Shouldn’t they be designed in an intuitive manner that makes misuse more difficult than regular use?
Otherwise, why even bother using them? It’s like now you need to know all the ins and outs of CSS and a trendy framework that will lock you into their ecosystem.
Kidding aside, I think the popular frameworks these days are incredibly well made. Frontend web has always been hell, and if your job is producing functional web GUIs, you can’t do it on a large scale without them.
Based on my own experience developing GUIs, I’ve reached the conclusion that creating them through code is obsolete.
We should be focusing on developing GUIs to develop GUIs, like Godot, instead of ‘frameworks’ that make an obsolete method of doing things even more cumbersome and complex.
Well, I find bootstrap very intuitive, and I don’t have 15 classes on my elements. That’s why I was asking.
Why is that silly? As long as the classes follow a strict naming scheme & have useful abstractions, that seems much better than having to give every node a unique class name that doesn’t necessarily have much meaning. I can’t count the number of “container” and “wrapper” and “content” classes I’ve seen & written, where the names don’t describe anything useful.
If you define what you mean by centering I’ll give you a straight answer.
Vertically? Horizontally? Center the text or the entire box? Compared to the viewport, the parent container or the entire page?
“Centering” isn’t as straight forward as you’d think, and what you actually want usually depends on the situation.
Nah, just flex them boxes
Yeah that works if you wanna center a box of content it relative to the parent container, either horizontally or vertically. For other situations we’ve got different tools
Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.
Depends if you’re centering the div or the things in the div. Which has probably been the main issue since CSS was invented.
While centering div, you add one to 2023.
Make your web page in GIMP, export to PNG,
<img>.Same way you did it in 2024 but it’s easier because the springgirdles have been replaced with rotated manglebrackets.
You count half the pixels and put them in a margin-left
Ask the browser nicely while using please and thanks.
maybe the div is already where it’s meant to be
2050: people still wondering how to center a div because html and CSS is a nightmare.
What threw me was having to set a width.
It’s not about the center, it’s about the friends we made along the way.
