The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

Let this be known as Famous Last Words, because this is the next four weeks of the course:



This is not what I expected when I signed up for this class. Is this useful in a practical sense...?

 

*Steven Universe voice* Give me THE BITS! THE BITS! THE BITS!

 

Man, I dunno about this course. I'm going to keep on with it but passing might be a skin-of-my-teeth deal, because I spent HOURS on what looked like a very short assignment and barely got anywhere. I'm not sure if I'm just... missing a ton of knowledge that I'm expected to have, if the material is just that vague and confusing, or if it's meant to be brutally difficult. At any rate, that 'about 9 hours a week for an average grade' is already a lie. :T

If you're curious, I think you can see the reading material without being enrolled, here. My current assignment is to create three methods that operate on words -- which in this case means (confusingly to me) units of data consisting of a fixed number of bits (so like, there's 8-bit words, 16-bit words, etc.). I actually managed to get task one working; here's the instructions for all three:

Spoiler

/*
* Task 1: Population count (number of 1-bits in a word)
*
* Complete the following function that takes as parameter
* a 32-bit word, w, and returns __the number of 1-bits__ in w.
*
*/

/* Task 2: Reverse bit positions
*
* Complete the following function that takes as parameter
* a 16-bit word, w, and returns a 16-bit word, r, such that
* for every j=0,1,...,15,
* the value of the bit at position j in r is equal to
* the value of the bit at position 15-j in w.
*
*/

/*
* Task 3: Left rotation
*
* Complete the following function that takes two parameters
*
* 1) a 64-bit word, w, and
* 2) a 32-bit word, k.
*
* The function returns a 64-bit word, r, such that
* for all j=0,1,...,63
* the value of the bit at position (j+k)%64 in r is equal to
* the value of the bit at position j in w.
*
*/

Task 2 has... not been going well. Task 1 didn't go well for quite some time; my initial solution worked up until the point it was fed a negative number. The material only talks about dealing with nonnegative numbers. I googled and read for actual hours until, after digging through the material yet again, I saw a promising few lines in the tellAbout methods that I could adapt for my purposes.

Maybe tomorrow I'll do better, provided Stinky Bastard Man doesn't shout me awake at 6 am again and refuse to let me go to sleep. I'm feeling kind of depressed and stupid right now, though.

 

Yes and no. It depends on what direction you’re looking to go. There are a number of little things you can do to make your code more efficient even in a pretty high level language if you understand how data is represented in memory.

There’s weird gotchas you can avoid or fix, like my friend who couldn’t figure out why his php code was not stopping when a loop had counted down to zero. I suggested he change the test so it looked for numbers sufficiently close to zero rather than equal to zero, like -0.01 < x < 0.01 or something, and that fixed the problem. That probably means that at some point one of the numbers was converted to floating point, and the conversion isn’t necessarily exact because there’s fractions and exponents involved. Sometimes you get a result that ends up being like 0.000000001 when it returns from the war. That’s technically not equal to zero. Your loop will not stop if you told it exactly zero.

You can shave off time and complexity from your code sometimes by knowing whether there is a bitwise function that could do the operation you’re looking for, because manipulating bits directly is very, very fast. If you needed to divide or multiply by two, you could have it shift the bits with respect to place value, like how you can multiply or divide by 10 in decimal just by moving the numbers over one. 15.2 becomes 152 or 1.52 depending on which direction. This is a blazingly fast way to do that kind of math, but only if you know enough to figure out exactly how you can expect the number to be represented in memory on this machine, and precisely what your language will do if you ask for a bit shift. Otherwise you may get bizarre and unhappy results.

You could have an entire successful programming career and never need to know about any of this. It is definitely still useful to know because it can give you insight into how to make more efficient programming decisions. I think if you’d rather not dive into C or something very computationally demanding like data science with massive samples or networking which is just peculiar, it’s entirely optional and you can merrily avoid it if it’s not your thing.

 

I'm not sure I can handle this course. I haven't been able to make any progress on my assignments; I'm having an awful time figuring out how to apply bitwise operations to solve problems. I think I understand them, but I go to do an assignment and I can't figure out how to even start. It isn't just in a 'wow this is harder than I expected' way, but in a 'I just learned how to climb stairs but I'm expected to scale a cliff' way. No one in the help channels for this course is having more than the most minor problems.

It kind of reminds me back when I was a little kid in first grade, and an advanced enough reader I was placed with third graders for reading... but they were covering things in a way that I hadn't been taught and hadn't picked up on my own. I could read the texts just fine, understand the words, tell you what happened, but I didn't know how think about them thematically (or whatever third graders were expected to do) at all.

I know. Whine whine whine. I'm just... really upset at myself. I figure this is my fault, I just wish I had any idea how I fucked up so badly and got into a course I am in no way qualified to take.

 

I don't think that read as whiny at all. I'm honestly wondering where the fuck they found these students who more or less get bitwise operations so fast. Maybe your school has a secret underground superstudent creation project.

 

The top of my chest has been all tight since I went out yesterday, and I'm trying not to be a hypochondriac about it. I was SUPER ANXIOUS about being in a busy mall under the circumstances, and anxiety makes it hard to breathe! It slacked up in the evening, after all. And it's dusty in here, very much past time to mop and my desk is harboring an awful lot of cat fur. I'm having the usual allergy bullshit, and I can and do get wheezy when it's flaring up especially bad.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sooo I'm kind of panic cleaning today.

 

Like, if I'm already sick, I'm already sick, but at least I won't have to live like a total filth goblin if I am, and if I'm not, I get to enjoy a clean apartment with a considerably lower dust quotient.

 

Finished my panic cleaning, results are: clean kitchen counters, clean bathroom (including all-too-prone-to-soap-scum shower), clean floors (vacuumed and mopped!), desk and a few shelves freed of dust and cat hair. I also jury-rigged a way to keep my ethernet cable up off the floor instead of coiled around being a trip hazard in front of a doorway because the modem can only plug in to a really awkward wall juuust out of the main room. Oh, and dishes and weekly laundry done and folded. Just need to put fresh linens on the bed.

Still not sure how much I should worry about the upper chest tightness. Anxiety is high! I kept getting bouts of OH GOD AM I FEVERISH as I worked and it's like, no, I took my adhd meds this morning, I always feel hotter than normal when I've taken them. This is a years-long known issue. I don't feel crusty around the edges anymore now that cat fur and dander has been well-mitigated at least, so I guess I'll see how I feel tomorrow.

 

Currently battling existential despair via FFXIV crafting. It's... sort of working. I'll place on the leaderboards for the current crafting competition and get a lame title, though!

 

literally all of my xiv friends are doing exactly this, I wish crafting didn't make me crave death

 

Lame title get. I wish I'd gone harder on the crafting -- or rather, that I'd actually dipped into the really difficult expert crafts that give more points a lot earlier, because the top 12 title is actually pretty cool, and while the expert crafting was super frustrating at first it ended up being really engaging. Buuut of course I did the usual thing of taking forever to make ABSOLUTELY SURE I was ready and wanting to do it.

This is a lifelong character trait. I apparently could walk relatively early, but wouldn't do it without holding onto something until I was a year and a half old. My mom has said she thinks I was making absolutely sure I was ready. Which isn't terrible on its own, but when it extends to almost everything it just holds me back.

OH WELL. It's just a title in a video game. At least I'll always have my angry marble to show off with. *hugs Demi-Ozma*

 

Aud was pining for games since her laptop has a fainting spell every time she tries to run anything remotely taxing, so I dug up a functioning ROM site and gave her some emulator links, since I know old consoles will run just fine on even an ailing machine. I also grabbed a pile of things to add to my hoarded away ROMs that I may or may not ever get to... *thinking* I should probably tidy up one of the tablets and put some emulators on it, assuming the touchscreen experience isn't too awful on emulated games. (Wish I'd gotten around to buying a tablet keyboard sooner... oh well.) Alternately, I can see if my ancient netbook still works -- it had stopped being able to handle most websites the last time I used it, and would lock up completely if I even went to the Tumblr log in screen, but old emulators should be fine.

 

mother
fucking
ANTS

I was just! about! to go to bed! When J noticed a bunch of ants milling around by the entryway door! Ants that had very definitely not been there two hours ago! And there were a bunch in the entryway! He vacuumed them up and plugged a hole with blue-tac and I wiped the floor with disinfectant but I checked back to pour some salt around the hole and more ants

I cleaned those up via chemical warfare and paper towels, plugged another couple of likely holes, and poured that goddamn salt, and now I'm waiting for a while to see if it worked or if I should just start. screaming.

WHY NOW

 

STARTS SCREAMING

 

Oh fucking fantastic

I think I found the real place they're coming in from -- there's a bit of floor under the gap they're coming in from that's kind of sunken in a bit and has.... give.

This is not great! This is really not great!

 

Ants: vacuumed up. Gap: sealed up as well as I could with the rest of our blue-tack. More salt: poured around the area, just in case. Nerves: FRAZZLED

We'll need to caulk up that gap in the short term, probably, but I'm certain we should talk to the housing agency about it. Pandemic or not this looks like a huge problem waiting to happen. Oh, and ant traps, maybe, if we can find some cat-safe ones.

I don't like killing the little dudes but this is not their home and they need to not be in here! There's plenty of outdoors to make nests in, including perfectly good patches of forest mere meters away!

 

Ants were out and about again this morning. Vacuumed, laid out coffee in front of the entryway door on the entryway side, but still got some stragglers braving it to wander in here.

So J came home with ant bait full of tasty poison treats for our invaders. He set it up in the entryway (which has a door that the cats can't open) and that has presumably kept them busy because no more have forged through the coffee barrier. I'm sorry I had to resort to chemical warfare, but this is MY HOME and MY FOOD and they can fuck right off.

We also have a maintenance ticket in because there's clearly some sort structural problem going on with this too, as well as the fact that these crawlies have made a home under our floor.

 

My sister got back to me!! She's fine, the virus doesn't seem to have hit her ship at all, she's just incredibly busy. That's a relief.

 

I've been dragging my feet really badly about going to bed lately, and I'm pretty sure it's because I know I won't want to get up in the morning. It's not about the being tired part, but that when I'm in bed the pull of the 'why bother' inertia is awfully strong.

Once I'm actually up I have some semblance of executive function and want to stay up, but when it comes time to sleep I have to face going through the whole stupid routine again the next morning. :|