Kevin Bourrillion

... but the problem is, to the people who can't already see it, I just have no idea how to relate to them at all. I mean how do you start establishing common ground with someone when they think 2 + 2 is 2, or maybe 5, or "fish biscuit", or maybe who thinks arithmetic expressions are woke? (2/2)

Although I believe very deeply that 2 + 2 equals 4, I guess you don't really see me here passionately advocating about it, or out holding up signs, etc., trying to go out and reason with people about it.

I do feel like I *should*.... (1/2)

Arkansas bill targets 'gender nonconforming' haircuts for kids If passed, the bill would let parents sue anyone supporting a minor's social gender transition, from hairdressers to teachers and nonprofits.

An Arkansas bill (among its other provisions) targets *hairstylists* who give kids *non-gender-conforming haircuts*.

www.newsweek.com/arkansas-bil...

These people trying (with mounting desperation) to police gender are out of their effing minds.

I have published a new blog post to explain what benefits Spring developers can expect from the next-level Spring null safety support based on JSpecify and NullAway. spring.io/blog/2025/03...

It will be available for general consumption in the upcoming Spring major version at the end of the year.

fwiw, I have no problem with factual reporting that doesn't tell me how I am supposed to feel about the information. I can decide how to feel about it for myself. I'm not here to defend WaPo in general.

Incidentally the case for regex is when you can do *everything* you need in just one regex with captured groups and be done with it. If it really is that simple then great. If not... don't get stupid!

Example of what using one looks like in Kotlin (just a toy project I made to implement a complex board game):
github.com/MartianZoo/s...
Not sure if there's enough context to understand what you're seeing, but the amt of code I have to write is shockingly little.

Dan Smith is the man on this - I am only hoping to make myself useful with the things I learned through JSpecify.

Parser-combinator library. I think they have tremendous potential.

Blame arrays for this one, being grammatically jumbled to begin with (`new String[a][b]` is neither little-endian nor big-endian, but goes in "inner-outer-middle" order).

Thanks for the vote of confidence. :-) I've been doing my best to help!

(If you hit play on that and try to imagine you're hearing it come from your daughter's room after you showed her a video on Graham's Number, it will be hilariously funny)

YouTube video by Bee Smart Baby Bee Smart Baby - Baby Math Numeracy (2000)

Going from g(0) to g(1), she basically lost it. Screamed aloud and was generally inconsolable.

When it was all over she just seemed kind of hollowed out, and a bit later I literally found her watching this video from her childhood to put herself back together:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGmn...

For context, she's 18 and never particularly been a "math person", but does well enough with it.

By triple up-arrows she was audibly moaning.

At g(0) she had gathered all her limbs, forming her body into a tight, protective ball.

YouTube video by Day9TV Day[9] Story Time #4 - Graham's Number

I wish SO HARD I had been filming my daughter's reaction as I showed her this explanation of Graham's Number last night. It was incredible.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N6c...

When he got to "3 to the power of something-trillion", she laughed in genuine delight.

After that it was not funny anymore.

It doesn't matter whether it was "really" a Nazi salute, or if Trump "really" would invade Greenland. That isn't even the point. They are blurring the lines. They're ensuring there won't be a *one clear moment* when they've suddenly gone too far. They're boiling us like the proverbial frog.

Justice served. crazybob aka Bob Lee's killer has been convicted of murder 2nd degree, which should put him in prison for a long time. I had felt fairly confident of this outcome, but hearing the guy's attempts to claim "self-defense" made me feel almost physically ill, so I feel relieved now.

I completely agree with this.

I should have had it in my list, thanks.

Okay, I think we can consider comparing to the literal `null` as almost like a different operator, outside the scope of what I'm really asking about.

While that's true, I doubt it would be the right idea very often. Most non-enum classes that might be inclined to do that should just become value classes, and let the VM handle everything. Class feels like a relatively special example.

(I'm fuzzy on what claim I made that MT is a counter to)

Hopefully all new languages get this right nowadays. Identity dependence is a bad default.

"Happen to know it is firmly specified to be." :-)

I push on this because the reader of the client-side code does not necessarily have the mental database of which types this is safe for. Each javadoc lookup is a readability point deduction.

This is my "when you happen to know it does the same thing as `==`" bucket.

In a certain weird sense these types are "honorary value classes", because even though they do _have_ identity, that identity has been rendered purely redundant with the state you care about. A good thing when feasible...

* with a graph of mutable collections, when the topology of that graph matters

What I'm not listing is "when you happen to know it does the same thing as `==` and you just want your code to be shorter". I'm not *judging* you for doing it :-) I just can't quite classify it as "good".

Whatcha got?

* on primitives
* as a short-circuit *in an implementation* of `equals`
* when you need to use the "magic sentinel instance" pattern (though you'd rather avoid it)
* special "low-level" code that is concerned with object instances *themselves* and not (like most code) what those instances represent

In Java `==` is defined for every reference type, but is very often not what we want, and we sometimes have bugs until we remember to use `equals()` to determine *logical* equivalence instead.

I'm curious what are the various "good" uses for the `==` operator out there. Here are some that I know:

I can say that we are working on it!

hey that's my project :-)

The fun running is when you're winding through the duty free shop dodging shoppers and product displays. At Orly the staff clapped and cheered for us. Based on how well-run and efficient their security and passport lines were, this must be a common occurrence for them.