Tales from the jar side: Silliest line of Java ever, State of the YT channel and newsletter, Google being evil, and the usual toots and skeets

If Dracula did ballet he'd wear a Nosferatutu (rimshot, based on @riotgrlerin.bsky.social)

Dec 29, 2024

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 22 - 29, 2024. This week I had no classes or anything. :)

Silliest Line of Java

I made the video I’d been planning for the last couple of weeks:

It’s shorter than my normal videos, which is probably a good thing. As a spoiler, here are two candidates for my silliest line of Java:

var var = Var.var(“var”);

and

var.Var var = Var.var(“var”);

The first one uses Local Variable Type Inference (LVTI) for the first var, which means it figures out what the type of the variable (the second var) is by evaluating the right-hand-side (calling the static var method in the Var class with String argument “var”). In the second one, I replace that first var with var.Var, which means the type is the Var class in the var package.

In the video, I implied the first one was sillier, but the more I think about it the more I’m leaning toward the second one, because it doesn’t even use LVTI at all, which is the whole reason for the existence of the var reserved type name. In the wildly unlikely event you have an opinion on this, please add it in the comments.

What may be apparent is that the one thing I can’t do is name the class Var with a lowercase first letter. That’s not actually allowed. But I managed to get rid of everything else that wasn’t var related.

Update: Oh no. I just realized I can make a class a lot sillier than the one in the video. Any variable in Java can start with a letter, or an underscore, _, or a dollar sign, $. The same rules apply to class or method names. That means I could make this line compile and run correctly:

_ ___ = _.__(“__”);

or this one:

$ $ = $.$(“$”);

The only thing I can’t do is to make a package with one of those names. For that I need a letter, but that means I can write:

a.a.a.a.a aaa = a.a(“aaaa!”); // 😱

Honestly any those is probably sillier than what I did in the video. Maybe I’ll have to make a follow-up.

State of the Channel

Speaking of the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel (which is where this video is deployed), the channel now officially two years old.

The analytics say:

That’s good, but the other achievement listed is:

But that’s a little misleading. Once I passed 3000 hours of watch time in the last 365 days, I was admitted to the Partner Program in a limited way, meaning I can sell stickers or whatever but I don’t get any ad revenue. For full membership I need 4000 watch hours in the last 365 days, and here’s the status of that:

That’s as of Dec 24, 2024, so the numbers are always a few days behind. Each day that goes up, but I also lose the watch hours from a year ago. Hopefully I can fill in that 145 watch hour gap in the new year.

Tftjs Anniversary

Speaking of anniversaries, I started Tales from the jar side as a newsletter on another platform, but moved it to Substack after a year. I was able to import the old issues. The issue entitled “Welcome to the Kousen IT newsletter!” was published on December 30, 2018. According to Substack, there have been 310 issues since then (presumably today’s will be 311). The very next week I started calling it Tales from the jar side, and the rest is history.

Google says that is 2191 days, or almost exactly 6 years, cranking out this newsletter every week. All the issues are free, and all are still available in the archive on Substack.

When I was considering starting the newsletter, I remember how surprised I was that my wife thought it was a good idea. I asked her, “But what if some week I can’t think of anything to say?” I think she’s still laughing.

In case you’re curious, the newsletter currently has 2471 subscribers. It jumped by about a dozen today for unknown reasons. I’d like to hit 2500, but only because that’s a nice round number. I’d probably keep writing even if the only person reading was my wife (and Bill Fly, who has been a loyal subscriber from the beginning. Hi Bill!).

Admittedly, Substack is as evil as any other social media company. They provide a safe haven for a lot of bad people to publish a lot of really awful stuff (much worse than silly lines of Java code, though I won’t give any examples). Part of the reason I stay is that they don’t charge me anything to contact all of you, and any other email newsletter provider would be rather expensive. That means as long as the newsletter is free, I’m costing them money, which I find mildly amusing.

I am tempted to charge, though, mostly because every single week I hit a length limit on the newsletter and that’s frustrating. If I split it up into multiple issues a week, I could organize it so that I could keep each one smaller and tighter. Of course, I could do that now, but I don’t know how many readers are glad this is weekly and don’t want the extra email.

If I do decide to charge at some point, the Sunday edition will remain free, and that one will always have the Toots and Skeets section that’s probably the reason many of you are here. I would move a lot of the technical content to a dedicated day, and the other, non-technical but hopefully still interesting, content to a third day.

We’ll see. I won’t make any changes without letting you know, and as I say there will continue to be a free issue every Sunday.

Speaking of Evil Social Media Companies

I was notified by YouTube that I can opt into or out of using my videos for training AI systems:

To be frank, I don’t much care. I’m far less worried about using my videos as training data than most people are. I figure everything I release into the world is available to everybody, and act accordingly. If an AI is going to replace me, well, good luck with that. I’ll deal with it when it comes up.

If you do check the box in the image (and it is NOT checked by default), then you get a drop-down list of vendors. Here’s the complete list:

(I’m not sure why IBM got garbled on that capture, but it’s the one between Apple and Meta.)

Guess who is NOT on that list? Google, the owner of YouTube. My first reaction was that it was good of YouTube to give us the opportunity to opt out of supplying training data, and even to make that the default option. Then I realized that you can’t opt out of giving Google the right to training its Gemini product on your videos no matter what you do.

I know, Google isn’t a “third-party vendor” by this calculation, but there’s nowhere else to opt out of their engine, at least not that I found. Not to be overly cynical, but it looks like Google is admitting they’re using your videos, and they’re asking if it’s okay to sell your data to others as well. They made it opt-in by default just to keep the regulators happy.

As I say, I really don’t care. I don’t think my data is all that unique or irreproducible. I imagine all my published books are available as downloaded pdfs on pirate sites all over the world, too, and I figure I gain more from that than I lose. I’ve never made a dime of revenue from either YouTube or Substack, and if you take the revenue I’ve gotten from all my books and divide by the number of hours I spent working on them, it’s so far below minimum wage it probably goes negative. (rimshot) I’m not going to get worked up about that.

On the other hand, I did get a small amount of pleasure out of leaving out xAI from the permission list. Anything to jab Elon in the eye, though I’m sure he’ll never notice.

Toots and Skeets

Yacht Rock

I recently watched the Yacht Rock “dockumentary” on HBO (Max, whatever) recently.

It was entertaining, and fortunately, the makers didn’t take themselves too seriously either. Back when I used to read Bill Simmon’s columns (when he was still The Sports Guy), he used that term a lot, which he got from an old YouTube series put out by some comedians talking about soft rock music in the Bay area in the late 70s and early 80s. Think Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, Steely Dan, and similar bands.

The term didn’t exist back then, and it barely exists now. It’s mostly a slightly derogatory way for Millenials and younger to refer to old Boomer music of my era. Naturally YouTube Music now has a Yacht Rock channel, and I checked it out until I remembered how boring most of that stuff is after a while. I can only listen to so much Bread or Air Supply or Toto before I need something with more substance to it.

Still, the documentary was fun. Michael McDonald still comes across as a good guy, and I always wanted to be able to sing like him. I thought maybe I’d get there, but that’s only What A Fool Believes. (rimshot)

And other stuff, too

Not that we were happy about it. Every purchase was an ordeal. They wanted all your information and tried to sell you their credit card every time, even for a $5 purchase.

No jeans allowed

In case you missed it, Magnus Carlsen, defending World Rapid and World Blitz chess champion, showed up for one of the days of this year’s competition in New York while wearing jeans and refused to change out of them. FIDE, the uptight governing body that makes up and enforces the dress code, wanted to forfeit him a round. He told them what they could do with that.

Honestly, FIDE (and chess in general) needs Magnus far more than he needs them. I expect viewership of the matches dropped like a rock. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes over time.

Earworm of the day

I like to believe John Lennon would be proud.

Best use of the Voice ever

The Dune: Prophecy series started slow but got better as it went along. I can’t tell for sure, but I suspect my wife is practicing her Voice for the right moment.