• 5 Posts
  • 886 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle
  • Because usually if you end up at the API reference in that situation it’s a code / project smell that other stuff is going wrong.

    If I want to use a library to do something, you should be able to search for what you want to do + language / framework, find the library’s docs, follow the install instructions and then look through the highest level API / instructions and then just go from there.

    If you find yourself confused at unhelpful API references that just means that they have badly written top level API docs, badly written intros, or quite probably just badly written APIs.



  • It goes against the simplified idea of evolution, in that, having a huge amount of off-spring die for no reason should generally be selected against since it’s wasteful.

    But evolution isn’t a straight march to a finish line, it can only use what it has to work with and it’s entirely possible for a branch of it to get stuck in weird specific ways that aren’t helpful.



  • I mean, research funding is a huge problem, but half the problem is that journalists and reporters are largely people who went into English or Communications and stopped taking or learning any science past the high school level and thus don’t actually know how to read papers or report on them. Not to mention that critically reading a scientific paper and evaluating in the context of other research takes a significant amount of time, more time than is given to write a normal newspaper article.

    And they’re reporting that science to people who on average know the same or less than them, so their mistakes and misreporting is never caught or corrected.