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886
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2 yr. ago

  • Railways and the energy market are the two areas where liberalization most spectacularly shat the bed. It increased prices, decreased reliability, didn't deliver on anything it was supposed to, and still the neoliberals are saying "one more market incentive bro, just one more incentive and we'll build productive competition into this natural monopoly".

  • Is it prejudice if I have extensive first-hand experience with it?

    The worst environment to me (react-native)

    Which is exactly what the Windows start menu runs on, doesn't it?

    I don't even care that JS is slow, in most circumstances. I like Python, it's not any faster necessarily (though it is much easier to debug CPython than V8 when you do eventually run into low-level issues, and python is still a lot better at multithreading than javascript even if the GIL is an issue, but that's besides the point). My real problem is that the ES "standard" "library" is a complete clusterfuck, absolutely diseased, like engineers heard of the concept of technical debt and decided to build a shrine to it.

    Sure, you can technically use JS decently. That's hardly an achievement. Any sufficiently fast Turing-complete apparatus can be "used decently" if you start by re-implementing a python interpreter. But the entire ecosystem is fucked. The appeal of javascript, the entire reason it has taken over, is that the lowest bidder is not going to use decently but will do the wildest, most insane shit imaginable to get a product out the door.

    I commented the other day about PHP. Same problem. The language is too easy to use badly. Sure, you can write magnificent code in either, if you have enough experience and discipline to avoid every footgun. But when every other tool in your shop is an unlabeled footgun, maybe it's time to admit that there are some deep-seated issues.

    Speaking of treating JS like a turing machine; that's what TypeScript does. And, I have to admit, it solves maybe 40 % of the problems I have with JavaScript. I still don't like it, because the stdlib and ecosystem still sucks donkey balls and V8 is a subpar JIT interpreter in every way besides raw single-threaded performance, but at least TS itself is decent enough and lends itself to static analysis well enough for senior engineers to have a hope of safely defusing or refactoring away most footguns set off by the junior/offshore devs. Most.

  • "I want predictable behavior for all possible inputs" is hardly a requirement that requires a fortune teller to see coming.

    JavaScript has a particularly insane stdlib because this language wasn't designed, it is a botched chimera with deformities so severe it should have died 15 times over but people just won't let it.

    Then to rub salt in the wound this horrific mess became the most popular language in the world by virtue of being the only language for the most popular application ecosystem in the world (the web). So the cancer is spreading and now you can find JavaScript in servers and fucking desktop environments and now your windows start menu takes five seconds to load because fucking react.js is loading the 75 polyfills necessary to make up for the fact that JS's "standard" library looks like it was designed by 3 cocained-up gibbons.

  • I've created the Aro community on blahaj, but I've found there's just not much to talk about.

    How do you talk about something you don't feel or do?

    One thing I'd be interested in is research into the causes of aromanticism, but last I checked there's literally zero academic research that treats it as distinct from asexuality.

    I expect a strong link with autism due to the involvement of oxytocin.
    Maybe I should run a poll in aro communities to check my theory, but I'm afraid that sample size and bias would make the results meaningless.

  • I mean, their leader is literally under fire for saying the Epstein files never existed and people should just stop talking about it. Making it illegal to even mention sex trafficking is the next logical step to protect the Dear Leader, because lord knows tackling the real issues wouldn't end well for him.

    It's actually a more ideologically consistent position than most reactionary groups. They want to be able to keep diddling kids while everyone shuts up about it and the queers get shoved in concentration camps. Now that's a Good Traditional Christian Nation babyyyyyy

  • It's one of a plethora of scripting languages from the '90s which were designed to be the antithesis of "fail fast" and kept going no matter what.

    I guess what with C/C++ being the Mainstream Option at the time, not having to deal with a strict compiler must have felt like freedom. As someone who has had to maintain, cleanup and migrate ancient PHP code, I call it folly. That mindset of "let the programmer just do whatever and keep trucking" breeds awful programming practices and renders static analysis varying degrees of useless, which makes large-scale refactoring hard to automate which is just amazing when your major versions aren't even remotely FUCKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.

    PHP's original design is just fundamentally atrocious. It became popular in large part because unmaintainable code is usually someone else's problem.

    A language that I would definitely use for server-side rendering and that was already good from its first stable release is Go. It was thoughtfully designed and lends itself really well to static analysis, while still being easy to write and decently performant.

  • Virtually every payment processor uses VISA/MasterCard in the back-end. For EU users PayPal can be backed by SEPA mandates instead (direct bank pre-authorization), but otherwise VISA/MC is holding payment processors by the balls in virtually every other market. Without Visa/MC, there is no way to bring funds in or out of your account.

    The only alternative is to negotiate interconnection with banks directly, but that's a very high bar for broad adoption. It has happened on a small scale (e.g. Payconiq in the Benelux) and the EU is attempting to broaden that to the rest of the continent, but it's a very tough sell because they have to convince every major bank to support the new standard.

    This is a textbook case where capitalism isn't the solution because there are only two market actors and a virtually insurmountable barrier to entry.

  • It's not related to Trump/Congress. They almost unironically got OnlyFans to ban sexual content from their own website a few years back due to the militant actions of one fringe puritanical group. They got memed so hard they eventually backed down, but MasterCard&Visa have been acting as World Sexuality Police for a very long time.

    I don't think it's a rational financial decision, AFAICT they just have a puritanical leadership. As a cartel they don't have to be maximally financially efficient. Their continued existence is an artefact of the 20th century, and their corporate values reflect that.

    Hopefully Wero takes off soon to introduce some competition in the online payment market.

  • groof

    Jump
  • Linguistics is a descriptive science.

    Language though is not science, it's a cultural practice. Adhering to a specific set of rules to signal belonging to a specific cultural subgroup is perfectly normal; and deviation from those rules is not a socially neutral act. When and how you deviate signals a lot of things about you and what you're saying.

    That's why slang is fascinating. It always tells a story. Whether it's English Prep School jargon that breached containment, whitewashed AAVL, group in-jokes, unconventional emojis, etc., a slang word says a lot about the person who uses it.

    That is to say, if you unironically start saying "rooves", I can't say whether you'll start a trend that will ultimately change English forever (weirder things have happened). But I can assure you that the immediate effect will be that people will label you "tumblr weirdo". Which would be a correct assessment, so that's effective subtextual communication. Yay linguistics!

  • How about factoring in vehicle wear, tear, insurance, and depreciation? You said "hybrid" so I'm thinking car, not bicycle. And cars are pretty damn pricy per (especially city) mile, hybrid or not. Also regular insurance policies often don't allow doing such gigs for obvious reasons.

    I also don't know labor laws in the US, but here those companies got in major trouble because even ignoring the exploitative nature of the gig, they were misclassifying employment as "contract work" which allowed them to avoid paying employment taxes, days off, medical pay, insurance, etc. basically displacing all that burden on the State's social systems. That's the definition of unsustainable.

  • There were definitely a couple literal demented sociopath rapists in the mix. What changed wasn't the law, but the political context and institutions.

    It took decades for the GOP to systematically destroy faith in institutions.

    It took years of Trump presidency followed by a strong reaffirmation of popular support in the last election.

    It took Obama and Biden abdicating their duty to their electorate by respectively refusing to nominate a new Justice and refusing to prosecute Trump for sedition.

    It took the media failing their duty to inform voters of Trump's past, intentions, and state of mind.

    It took decades of slow work by the right to reframe the media landscape to be less truthful and more obedient.

    It took social media and their algorithms to galvanize fascism.

    It took an entire cold war and war on terror to normalize an absolutely abnormal and near insurmountable militarization of domestic law enforcement.

    The US constitution is not to blame. That's a cop-out answer, a lame scapegoat. America wouldn't be saved by passing amendments alone. The rot goes far deeper than that. Just like the 13th amendment didn't do much to fix the system of racial injustice the US was built on. If it was just a matter of wording, a silly loophole, it wouldn't have worked. It worked because the vast majority of Americans abdicated their allegiance to the Bill of Rights, to Human Rights, and to Democracy.

  • 16 transactions per second

    Please, that's nothing. In a mass adoption scenario, the whole thing would either crumble or eat a significant portion of the world's electric production.

    I won't have an argument about the futility of the whole decentralization endeavor and how it fails to meaningfully address any of the very real concerns that central banking has addressed over the centuries. History has already proven all of you fools.

  • The central bank facilitating electronic cash flow makes so much more sense than letting random foreign corporations siphon billions in profit they clearly don't deserve in the slightest from your economy.

    Good on Brazil for breaking free. There's finally been some push here in the EU for EPI/Wero, but progress has been frigid and online payment processing remains extremely fragmented to the point that if I buy something online outside the Benelux with a small vendor, chances are very high I will have to fall back to an American payment processor, which is insane.

  • And literally not a single one of them is useful for the purpose of quick, efficient, and secure transactions.

    Blockchains are slow and inefficient by design, since they need to build consensus. On any sufficiently popular blockchain, transactions are either fast or secure, never both.

    The "fix" that the crypto industry has come up with is to re-invent banks, except with even more crime and virtually no regulations. Now you're just entrusting FTX with your coins to enjoy "immediate" transfers, how could that possibly go wrong?

  • They are designed to crumple on impact, absorbing energy by bending - quite a bit actually. You would die if you stood behind a crash barrier in a crash. So it's a good thing they're not being put right next to sidewalks, in addition to the accessibility issues.

    The actual thing wrong here is that sidewalks go on streets (slow speed, pedestrian traffic) and crash barriers go on roads (high speeds, no expected pedestrian traffic). If you need pedestrian access between two points only connected by road, build a separated path.

    No pedestrian should feel unsafe due to the lack of a crash barrier, because no pedestrian should be expected to walk next to car traffic going so fast that curbs aren't enough of a deterrent.

    The problem is North America in particular is infected with stroads, roads with street-like characteristics (i.e. lots of houses, businesses, intersections) but retaining the throughput and speed of a road. This design is fundamentally dangerous, to road users and in particular to pedestrians. There are ways to rehabilitate stroads into streets, but that requires actual thoughtful urban planning and not a bandaid solution like "encase sidewalks in concrete".

  • That's just factually incorrect. This 25 km/h limit has been law for years in (most of?) Europe. And it is totally possible to "jailbreak" virtually any common platform.

    The real problem is that if you get into an accident you might get sued and dropped by your insurance company, and be held liable for all damages. No thanks.

  • I'm not American so I won't involve myself in the organization of your protests.

    But from experience when shit hits the fan at even a third of that magnitude, you're supposed to be flooding the streets every Saturday. Don't set up 15 committees for a bimonthly thing that people will forget about. Make it unforgettable because it's next Saturday, every week.

  • If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

    That's an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it's the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you're probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

    1. More protesting, yesterday. The "no kings" protest would have been half-decent if they were a start, but as a one-off thing it is more than pathetic.
    2. Political organization parallel to the neutered DNC to push the envelope beyond mildly worded letters and twitter clapbacks.
    3. When the feds come to perform violent unconstitutional acts in your neighborhood, there is a proper response other than "shut the blinds and cower in fear". Unfortunately the moderators of this instance will delete my message if I propose it.
  • Americans: "Best we can do is one large-ish peaceful protest a couple months ago. Ah well, we tried everything, and we're all out of ideas."

    Thousands of kids died for Americans' right to bear arms and yet when the Gestapo jumps out of an unmarked van to kidnap their neighbor the most the average American can manage is to duck and film a TikTok. Absolute disgrace of a country.

    "American ideals"? All bark, no bite. You'll spend billions making horny patriotic Hollywood movies about how Great and Free you are, but a couple masked bitch-ass Nazi shows up to round up the brown people and the whole neighborhood is suddenly like pwease don't huwt me mistaw officaw, wight this way, also pwease fuck my wife.

    Your country disgusts me. Not so much because 30 % of y'all are actual Nazis. But because virtually everyone else is a complete coward about it.

  • Technology @lemmy.world

    Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website

    Programming @programming.dev

    Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly