love to see a youtube video that references a script that's linked in the comments and it's an obfuscated link to a one-click hoster.

THAT'S DEFINITELY STILL GONNA WORK IN FOUR YEARS

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.
the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.
it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"
I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL
it's like PHP designed by someone who learned on Visual Basic for Applications
ANYWAY I decided to not just complain about it, and archived it:
https://t.co/IKxjNQMZMK
that's the script for this video:
https://t.co/GPvTp17RDR
naturally I would comment and add a link to it, but of course I can't post links in the comments.
anyway, autohotkey is great.
have you ever wanted to get a list of drives on a system?
That's simple!

DriveGet, drives, List
now you have a variable named "drives" which is a string containing a list like "ACDEFP"
that's how programming languages work, right?
assigning variables
small brain: a=1 (fortran, C, descendants of C)
big brain: a := 1 (ALGOL, Pascal)
cosmic brain: LET A=1 (early BASIC)
multiverse brain: a <- 1 (F#, OCaml)
brane cosmology bulk brain: there is no assignment, functions output to one of their arguments (AHK)
fun fact: AHK actually also uses = and :=

it just doesn't use them for functions.
it's got "=" which is called legacy... assignment? they don't actually call it assignment.
legacy variable storage, let's say.
the fun thing is that = only takes integers, unquoted strings, and other variables.
so:

a=1
b=FOOBAR
c=%b%
but if you do:
a=1+2

that's either an error, or you'll get a string containing "1+2".
I'm not sure which. I don't really want to find out
whereas if you do:
a := 1+2

a will be set to "3"
BTW these differences in = and := mean that if you convert that above example from = to :=, you get:

a=1
b="FOOBAR"
c=b
in computer science, we call this "consistency"
this is the fundamental problem with AutoHotKey as a language:
it started as a bad batch scripting language and got a little powerful with some visual basic ideas, and then it got "fixed" into being a more usable language, but THEY LEFT THE OLD SYNTAX VALID FOR COMPATIBILITY
it's like having a language that uses Go's syntax but you can always just drop down to
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
in the middle of a method
autohotkey is a language that could have been fixed, and they tried to fix it, but they tried to fix it by nailing the "fixed" version onto the side of the broken version
I guess it's fortunate then that microsoft is trying so hard to murder autohotkey.
once it stops working there won't be any more language evolution
maybe I should port autohotkey to an arduino keyboard+mouse.

or maybe I shouldn't torture tiny computers

More from foone

Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.

More from Culture

I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
This thread examining a detrans story puts me in mind of something that shocked me to the core fifteen years ago in early 2004. I’ve not often told this so there follows a mini thread of my own.


This time in 2004 was very sensitive. Our little team at Press for Change was carefully helping to support the government to get the Gender Recognition Bill through its parliamentary stages. It had already started in the Lords and faced a committee stage with evangelical-backed..

..opposition facing the government’s Bill minister Lord Filkin and and others from all parties supporting him. The heavy lifting of daily liaison work was handled on our side by my colleague Claire @2legged whose back room lobby efforts should never go unacknowledged in any..

..account of events. Our political backdrop was a small but determined effort by two evangelical groups touting very familiar lies about trans people and, perhaps more worrying, a couple of contemporary journalists (one a Guardian staffer and one a freelance) determined to tout..

..detransition scare stories as a way to perhaps cast doubt over formalising a legal recognition process. The thing that was obvious at the time was that their stories relied on constant recycling of the same 10-12 case stories, which they had discovered because they were the..

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