balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Trans people in Kansas are being ordered to surrender their drivers licenses 7 hours ago:
The constitution prohibits “ex post facto” laws - how can you revoke someone’s documentation when they complied with the laws as they were at the time?
I agree with you generally that this should be illegal, but it probably isn’t.
It definitely isn’t ex post facto; this is not a law that punishes anyone from a legal perspective, it merely changes the requirements for a certain privilege (the ability to drive a vehicle). If it declared these licenses invalid before the date of the law (which could carry punishments for illegally operating vehicles), then it would be ex post facto.
Another way to put it is that it simply makes a certain action illegal which was previously legal, and laws do that sort of thing all the time. Consider that in the US you didn’t need a driver’s license in order to drive at all until 1913. That NJ law also “revoked” someone’s privilege even though they complied with the laws previously, requiring them to get a permit that they didn’t need before. But, since it didn’t introduce any punishments for not having the permit before it was introduced, it wasn’t ex post facto.
Of course the law is also clearly discriminatory, but US’s extremely limited anti-discrimination laws are likely not broad enough to be applied here.
The current events should awaken many people to the sad fact that US laws and its entire legal system exists primarily to protect the wealthy and the powerful from everyone else; all other functions are secondary. As such, many horrible, immoral, and unjust things will be legal under US laws, and many others will be twisted into being legal by the supreme court.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 22 hours ago:
It’s not the fault of consumers, monopolization and price fixing are inevitable outcomes of capitalism.
- Comment on 'I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb': OpenClaw AI chose to 'speedrun' deleting Meta AI safety director's inbox due to a 'rookie error' 1 day ago:
Yes, fully agreed. What dummies!
– Sent from my ThinkPad
- Comment on 'I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb': OpenClaw AI chose to 'speedrun' deleting Meta AI safety director's inbox due to a 'rookie error' 1 day ago:
It actually does this already sometimes, especially if you chat to it long enough. Not because it’s “smart”, but because it’s just emulating a writing style of a corporate middle manager.
- Comment on User accidentally gains control of over 6,700 robot vacuums while tinkering with their own device to enable control with a PlayStation controller 2 days ago:
‘Company deliberately has control of over 6,700 robot vacuums while selling them to unsuspecting general public’
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 days ago:
As another vegan: sorry, no, it’s not accurate. And the texture/meltiness is just completely off. It is similar enough for me to enjoy it and not want real cheese anymore. However, for many people (especially americans) cheese is some holy substance, so we do need to continue improving vegan cheeses for more people to jump.
- Comment on This MF is quadrupling down and dropping Alien files before dropping the full, unredacted Epstein Files. GODDAMN. 6 days ago:
It is not used correctly. The word UFO starts with a consonant in all major English dialects, as such the correct article is “a”, as in “a UFO”. See www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-a-or-an
- Comment on Hopefully, he will be 6 underground by that time. 1 week ago:
There was very very little to complain about with her.
- Promising full military support to a settler colony currently committing a genocide using US weapons
- Campaigning with fucking Cheneys and pandering to fascists
- Not promising any actual support for trans people, stopping at "I will follow the law"
- Not being actually voted on by anyone, instead just appointed by DNC
- Most importantly: she’s a neolib, and the working class has been suffering materially due to neolib policies for the past 50 years, people want change
There is a shitton to complain about her. I would’ve voted for her if I was in the US, but it’s crazy to just shove a status-quo establishment neoliberal and expect people who are surviving paycheck-to-paycheck due to that very ideology to be excited about it.
- Comment on Western Digital runs out of HDD capacity: CEO says massive AI deals secured, price surges ahead 1 week ago:
Even if that happens (which is not a guarantee), it is no worse than status quo. Until then, unless you are an active threat to China, and are planning on visiting it, you don’t have to worry about it.
- Comment on Western Digital runs out of HDD capacity: CEO says massive AI deals secured, price surges ahead 1 week ago:
Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
Ok, so this makes the most sense to me. This would indeed need to be handled, I think the best solution is for EU to come up with a set of dispute resolution procedures and pass it as a law for everyone to follow. That way, disputes would be resolved the same way regardless of what network or bank you are using, which sounds the most reasonable to me.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
Aha, interesting. I never had a credit card because it always felt like a very weird idea to me, but I think I get it a bit more now. Still weird that it’s visa/MC money and not your bank’s though.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
Does Visa/Mastercard actually offer any protection themselves? When I’ve had to reverse debit card transactions due to fraud or otherwise, I always just called/reached out to my bank and they did it without getting Visa/MC involved. Since this system is pretty much SEPA in a trench coat, I’m pretty sure the same would work here.
- Comment on Nvidia might not have any new gaming GPUs in 2026 — and could be 'slashing production' of existing GeForce models 2 weeks ago:
Honestly it’s fine. LSPs are nice but you don’t need them per se. A combination of tmux, entr, a fast incremental compiler, grep, and proper documentation can get you a long way there.
- Comment on Nvidia might not have any new gaming GPUs in 2026 — and could be 'slashing production' of existing GeForce models 2 weeks ago:
It’s nicer to develop anything on a beefy machine, I was rocking a 7950X until recently. The compile times are a huge boon, and for some modern bloated bullshit (looking at you, Android) you definitely need a beefy machine to build it in a realistic timeframe.
However, we can totally solve a lot of real-world problems with old cheap crappy hardware, we just never wanted to because it was “cheaper” for some poor soul in China to build a new PC every year than for a developer to spend an extra week thinking about efficiency. That appears to be changing now, especially if your code will be running on consumer hardware.
My dad used to “write” software for basic aerodynamic modelling on punchcards, on a mainframe that has about us much computing power as some modern microcontrollers. You wouldn’t even consider it a potato by today’s standards. I’m sure if we have our wits about us, we can optimize our stacks to compile code on a friggin 3.5GHz 10-core CPU (which are 10 year old now).
- Comment on Nvidia might not have any new gaming GPUs in 2026 — and could be 'slashing production' of existing GeForce models 2 weeks ago:
You can write code just fine on 20 or even 30 year old hardware. Basically if it runs Linux, chances are it can also run vim and compile code. If you spring for 10 year old hardware, you can even get an LSP + coc or helix, for error highlighting and goto definition and code actions. And you definitely don’t need a GPU for it (unless you’re doing something GPU-specific of course).
Editing 720p videos (which, if you encode with a high enough bitrate, still looks alright) can be done on 10-15 year old hardware.
Research is where it gets complicated. It does indeed often require a lot of computing power to do modern computational research. But for some simpler stuff - especially outside STEM - you can sometimes get away with a LibreOffice spreadsheet on an old Dell or something.
From the looks of it we will have to get used to doing more with less when it comes to computers. And TBH I’m all for it. I just hope that either my job won’t require compiling a lot more stuff, or they provide me with a modern machine at their expense.
- Comment on PSA 2 weeks ago:
It’s funny you should say that, if you look at the living standards & human development before and after, it’s pretty clear that the revolution was overall a really good thing.
- Comment on Man posts his incorrect opinion online 2 weeks ago:
UK is clearly “shoes on” on the map though, it’s marked is green.
- Comment on Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder 2 weeks ago:
Well, yeah, the dev environment was compromised but the author restored everything and checked that it all works.
Personally I use Pipepipe and Outertube on my android phone, and just watch through a browser with adblock on my Linux phone. Although I don’t watch youtube too often, especially on my phone (maybe twice a month or so), I didn’t notice any issues with either of those methods, and never got any ads either.
- Comment on Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder 2 weeks ago:
BTW you can/should install an alternative YT frontend on smart TVs, if you want to watch YT and are forced to use a smart TV. Even something semi-suitable like Pipepipe will do, but there are also frontends more suited for TV use, e.g. SmartTube
- Comment on Rent is theft 3 weeks ago:
It depends on what is meant by “ownership”.
Personally I’m in favor of some modified version of the chinese system where almost everyone “owns” a home, but their children can’t inherit it. I think technically the state owns all the housing, and provides people with a cheap/free lifetime lease of some kind. There should also be a limit on how many properties a single person can own, and renting those places out should be banned.
And then as a compliment there should also be some excess state-owned social housing. There are edge-cases where for one reason or another you can’t/don’t want to own.
So yeah in general I think we need to abolish the concept of homeownership as it exists in the west.
- Comment on Rent is theft 3 weeks ago:
Even if you misinterpret the argument that way, social housing could be provided for free at the point of use, with no rent to be paid. The main distinction is whether the housing is owned and controlled by private or public entities; the former will necessarily demand a profit to be made, the latter can operate “at a loss” by spending taxpayer funds as a social service.
- Comment on Rent is theft 3 weeks ago:
Generally yes, because you are also building up equity that way. Renting is just money wasted down the drain.
- Comment on YSK that everything the New York Times about Donald Trump actually happened 3 weeks ago:
Who are the “good guys”? The only remotely non-evil person who had a serious bid for president is Sanders, the rest are straight up pieces of shit who bankroll genocides, bomb civilians, and empower their billionaire donors. Even then, Sanders is ineffective, somewhat zionist, and old, and I don’t see a viable young replacement even for someone like him.
In the US, the political mainstream isn’t “good guys vs bad guys”, it’s 80% hitler vs 100% hitler.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
The benefit of the fediverse is that it’s trivially “forkable”. If lemmy.world and other big instances get overwhelmed with bullshit, I fully expect that many smaller chill/focused instances will defederate and keep on doing their own things, chatting only with each other. Perhaps there would also be some in-between, instances which are federated with both worlds, and where you can get a combination of tons of niche information/entertainment but with bots, and a small amount of genuine human interaction. I hope if that ever happens, lemmy-the-software gets sorting algorithms to deal with these situations.
- Comment on How accurate is this? 3 weeks ago:
TBH like a half of those questions is something I could ask when I was younger, and the other half might have been asked by my friends when they were high. I hope I didn’t upset the retail workers too much…
- Comment on The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K 3 weeks ago:
Nah, honestly, I think stuffing an entire computer inside a monitor and relying on it to generate/show content is a bad idea no matter what software it runs. A dumb TV + a small computing dongle requires only a tiny fraction more labor to produce than a smart TV, but it’s so much easier to upgrade in the future if you decide you need faster boot times or wanna game on the TV, etc. And if the TV breaks before the dongle does, you can also buy a new TV and keep all your settings/media without transferring anything.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Honestly it’s not the worst idea, the french have tried something like that during one of their revolutions.
Semi-relatedly, I’m salty they didn’t push for duodecimal numbers and base metric on that, it would incorporate the only good part of imperial system & 12-based time system, not only into measurements but also all other aspects of life.
Then they could make time consistent too, maybe have like 10000 (20736 in decimal) “metric seconds” in a day (which would mean 1 “metric second” ≈ 4 “normal” seconds) and derive stuff from there (e.g. 100 “metric seconds” in a “metric minute”, 10 “metric minutes” in a “metric hour”, 10 “metric hours” in a “metric day”). Would be really quite neat.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Of the two, Celsius is less arbitrary because it is based on actual measurable reproducible things and not “we threw in some salts in water, and guesstimated a human body temperature”. It also makes a lot of sense in our post-industrial society because we do/don’t want to freeze/boil water almost every day for a variety of uses. Water is both an extremely important substance for humans and its freezing/boiling points occur in everyday life (unlike air or common metals).
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
To be fair, it’s the other way around. Kelvin scale is Celsius scale shifted by -273.16 ℃.