Okay, Visual Studio 26 still has poor color contrast in some areas (specifically, menus, lists, and other "regular" UI elements as opposed to the actual code editing area)

But credit where credit is due, they have a LOT more themes and a LOT more variety. Visual Studio used to allow you three color themes: light, dark, and blue. Now, they have all sorts of colors like green and pink.

BUT (maybe because it's an an insider build?) it didn't get added to my start menu or anything so I have to launch it by going to the visual studio version manager (now called the "installer" even though that's just one of the things it does)

It also reset my fonts again, but that's just expected at this point.

2025/6 is the year contrast dies.

Apple, obviously, with liquid glass (AKA, "I can't see what's on top or bottom!")

But now also, trying out Visual Studio 26, everything is just a slightly different shade of gray.

Won't anyone think of the clarity?! We have reached the point where we are so biased towards form over function, that our form is no longer functional! Bring back contrasting shades of colors in UI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shamefully, after years of c++ hobbyism, I've only now discovered the ABSOLUTE BEAUTY of constexpr

I thought it was just the "new way of defining constants", so I always skipped over it as more of a basic utility than a hugely powerful part of c++

I didn't realize it could do comptime code! I can pre-compile huge arrays into my binary just like I could with comptime in zig.

Fuck me, I feel stupid as hell. More c++ rants to come, surely.

Has anyone noticed ChatGPT glazing getting really bad lately? Every single one of my stupid, bone-headed fucking questions are "insightful" and "important".

FUCK you, you psychopath. Stop manipulating me.

Mentions aren't coming up in my notifications. Sorry if I'm missing crap. devRant broke.

Can anyone make a good case for the dereference-property operator being "->"

What the fuck, those keys are nowhere near where I rest my fingers while typing.

Not only that, but it's a sequence of two characters. For what reason!?!?!?

In fact, can anyone tell me what the reason is that we have a specific operator for this operation?! Why not just use the period for everything? If the left hand side is a pointer, the period can dereference and THEN resolve the scope. Otherwise, just resolve the scope to the property. Since resolving the scope on a pointer directly does nothing (IE, if you were to write "pointer.property" in current c/c++/etc), this means the operation is unambiguous and doesn't need to be two operators.

FUCK.

Did any of you other nerds sort of just glide through math in school and felt inadequate once you got to the real world, like: "I can't be a real engineer, I barely understood trig!"

That was me, then I started studying the fourier transform about a week and a half ago (because I bought an Arduino and want to make real-time sound visualizations)

I found that I actually really enjoy math on my own time. Learning about complex numbers, Euler's formula, polar form, whatever whatever - it was exciting and I was doing practice problems on paper and enjoying it!

Hopefully this momentum continues. Maybe one day I can be a genuine tough-guy engineer with math skills.

Using c++ without (most of) the standard library and avoiding operator overloads has made me like the language again. It's an extremely capable language, but my LORD is it bloated and overgrown. Using it like "c with classes" again is the way.

devRant is fast enough to use again? Excellent.

LLMs will FIX the internet, not ruin it; an argument:

Sam Altman recently acknowledged the large presence of LLMs on twitter and stated that he was finally starting to believe in dead internet theory.

And I couldn't agree more nor be any happier.

I had a sudden realization that social media has slowly crept from being "connect to your friends" to "try not to commit suicide as you climb the infinite social ladder amongst people who are not your peers"

... and I think it deserves to die. Furthermore, I think the only thing that could kill it is the greed that we're seeing finally strangle social media today.

People will never quit social media just because it's *bad for them*. It's too exciting, too interesting.

People will only quit social media if it itself becomes *bad*.

And when it becomes overbearingly full of corporate "brand personalities", LLM slop accounts churning out 500 posts a day to gain $4 in ad revenue, and 100 different AI bot accounts that add nothing to the conversation...

... that's when it's gonna be *bad* enough for people to reduce their usage of it. It will once again encourage the spaces we had before greed took a strangle-hold. Private areas for just you and your real-life friends. To be safe from the corporate slop bots, the LLMs, the 8-second videos of kittens performing impossible tasks... just you and your buds keeping up with each other.

This is the self-healing that nature is so good at. It's incredible how it always happens.

A programming language is a compromise between the absolute bullshit that a human wants to write and the absolute horsepiss that a computer wants to read.

Zig needs to get its shit together frankly.

I know the guy wants to perfect his little design, but has he never considered the fact that the shifting sands of perfection will never align for him?

Instead of working on making progress with the design he already established, he just keeps going back and changing fundamental parts as he sees fit and never making any forwards prog-

oh my god he's me.

!rant && coolThing

Today, I fully parallelized my evolution algorithm.

That means that since Thursday of last week, even though I took yesterday off, I was able to learn about metaheuristics, implement three of them (one being my own awful invention that did not perform) and successfully parallelize them.

Feeling good, man.

TL;DR: I'm reading papers and doing computer science like I could never afford to in college.

I am beginning my scientific arc.

Over the past few days, I have been working on implementing my own Evolutionary Algorithms

I've been doing a combination of "experimentation" and (probably less than I should,) actual research.

My Mark 1 was just a proof of concept that set up the data structures correctly, Mark 2 generalized the data structures and actually implemented some natural selection, but this was really just made up by me so I'm only getting mediocre results.

Next step: I have two papers lined up to read on EAs. Mark 3 might not implement them exactly, but I hope to beat the performance of Mark 2.

I'm encouraged by the fact that these research papers have TONS of different things they tried, and I'm really only on my first prototype (since Mark 1 didn't have any selection implementation, only randomness)

Follow along if interested:

https://github.com/AlgoRythm-Dylan/...

PSA: You setting up a RAG + System Prompt + Agent + Intents does NOT mean you “trained an AI”.

Happy Monday fellas. I'm gonna be pretty grumpy tomorrow morning because:

- Tonight's TO-DO list is writing unit tests and getting past a blocker to my project which I have been avoiding. Unit tests cause depression.
- After a recent bout of depression, I started smoking more weed than I was comfortable with and tonight starts my temporary sobriety. Withdrawal from THC causes more depression.

Wish me some God damned luck bros.

My secret addiction: defining all colors/ properties in CSS3 variables so that I can easily make my website theme-compatible, and then never making any themes for it.

Hey, at least it keeps my colors consistent....

@retoor account wiped and spamming comments, what's this about?

DOM custom events, and the Node.JS Event class are both so easy to work with and intuitive. Why doesn't JavaScript have native events? It was literally made for UI.

Also: I asked ChatGPT this exact thing before I posted because I had a sneaaaaking suspicion AND I WAS RIGHT. He called it a fuckin quirk.

ChatGPT is a 14 year old that just learned a new word and won't stop using it.

Anyone else unable to post comments on the app or webapp?

Trying to get flex container overflow to scroll is like funking pulling teeth. I've worked with flex containers for 5+ years straight and it still makes me want to kill myself.

Here's the tools you need to make a flex container scroll. God help you if it's nested more than 2-3 containers from the root. You apply these randomly until you see the scroll bar in the correct place.

min-height: 0px;
min-height: min-content;
overflow: auto;
overflow: hidden;
display: flex;
flex: 1;

(Real pro tip: you can place a "dummy" element inside the container you wish to make scroll. The dummy element should be a huge size, like 10k pixels. This allows you to see what containers up the DOM tree are still not correct (any container that is 10,000px is WRONG. Work your way down the DOM tree and fix fix fix))

If ChatGPT calls my problem a "classic" or it's solution a "subtle quirk of <framework>" one more fuckin time I'm gonna be the first human to murder an AI

I hate rollover video previews!!! Looking at you TouTube!!!! If I want a preview of the video, make it a button or something. The thumbnail disappearing and network activity lag every single time my mouse happens to barely caress an item in the video feed is SUPER FUCKING ANNOYING!

Especially on mobile!!!

Anyone else just randomly hit Help > About on programs when you’re bored?

In modern C#, everything's an interface.

Zig is actually sort of similar. I guess I owe it to C# for teaching me the magic.

Sorry, I mean:

IZig is IActually ISort of ISimilar. (IContinued...)

Wow, the new iOS design... looks like shit. It's hard to read text on top of the "liquid glass" and it's just sort of ugly looking.

How in the ever-god-fearing FUCK am I just now learning about git tag????

https://git-scm.com/book/en/...

Spent another 20 minutes blaming my tools when the issue was my fault again. Just wanted to let you friendly folks know.

(Forgot a “CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS” statement because on my other dev box, that database……. Already exists)

Just got WHIPLASH from seeing a racist ad in my local gym.

Racist is a bit dramatic, but at the VERY least, it's tone-deaf as fuck and from MY perspective (Where I missed the first 10 seconds of the ad) it was definitely racist feeling. Even with the context, I think it's pretty strange.

Anyways, this grocery chain is running this advertisement campaign about their yellow tags. I guess yellow tags in their store are supposed to be good! So they depict a bunch of yellow things and put text on screen saying that "yellow is (positive attribute etc etc)"

You might already see where this is going?

Basically, they had one scene with bold yellow text "YELLOW IS HAPPY" and the background of yellow tulips. Again, I joined the chat while the ad was already going so I barely had time to read all the text before the scene changed.

The next scene that they chose to depict yellow things?

Oh, just a child in yellow overalls holding a yellow ice pop. Oh, and the child was Asian...

SERIOUSLY how tone deaf could you POSSIBLY BE. DON'T PUT ASAINS IN YOUR COMMERCIAL ALL ABOUT YELLOW THINGS!!!!!!!!!!!

It was especially jarring since I lacked almost all context. I thought it was some shitty comedy sketch for a moment.

Link: https://youtube.com/watch/...

As mentioned in a previous rant, I'm not super happy about available graphical (s)ftp options.

Tried the command line and honestly, it's better than anything else.

The concepts are simple, and the tools are even better IMO. Being able to `put *` from a folder is great.