AnyOldName3
@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
- Comment on Stay Mad 1 day ago:
A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.
If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.
- Comment on OneDrive automatically backups folders in Windows 11 without users' permissions 3 days ago:
It’s been the default since 2015 when Windows 10 launched, although there was an obvious button to opt out during first-time setup back then which was then respected permanently. It’s got gradually less prominent over time, and maybe the article’s just doing a really bad job of explaining that it’s no longer something where your initial preference is permanent and it’ll change back to the default every so often.
- Comment on Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs 1 week ago:
It’s a silly flag to use as it only works when running 32-bit Windows applications on 64-bit Windows, and if you’re compiling from source, you should also have the option to just build a 64-bit binary in the first place. It made a degree of sense years ago when people actually used 32-bit Windows sometimes (which was usually just down to OEMs installing the wrong version on prebuilt PCs could have supported 64-bit) if you really wanted to only have one binary or you consumed a precompiled third party library and had to match its architecture.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 month ago:
And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.”
Their agenda’s to make PETA look bad so people don’t become vegan or demand higher welfare standards from meat producers, and they can continue selling meat to Americans of such low standards that it would be illegal in the rest of the civilised world.
You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.
As I said, they can’t do that once the foster programs and other shelters are full, too, and then overflow into PETA-run shelters because they’re the ones that still have a capability to receive more animals after they’re full. There aren’t enough shelters to keep every animal in good conditions until it’s either adopted or dies of natural causes, and no amount of coordination can magically create extra capacity.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 month ago:
It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_An…
As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.
If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 1 month ago:
The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.
- Comment on Breaking the news 1 month ago:
They might be. They’re clearly a major shareholder in Boeing.
- Comment on Motherboard makers apparently to blame for high-end Intel Core i9 CPU failures | Ars Technica 1 month ago:
It’s a 250W+ part running at around 1V, so it’s going to draw a lot of current. Power is supplied via many pins on the back of the CPU, and they’re connected to many traces, so it’s not putting all that current through just one. It still puts out a lot of heat anyway, which is why modern motherboards have large heat sinks, sometimes with fans, on their VRMs.
- Comment on doggos 2 months ago:
You can put magnets near dogs.
- Comment on Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets 2 months ago:
It’s super quick to swap it on Windows once you know the problem exists and know where to look. You just click the audio icon in the system tray and change the output device in the dropdown from the headset version of the device to the headphones one, and it enables all the higher-bandwidth modes. I’m not sure there’s user-accessible control over which specific codec gets used, though.
- Comment on Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets 2 months ago:
Some Bluetooth controllers can’t handle the bandwidth required for sound input and output at the same time unless it’s at very low quality, and if Windows suspects such a device is in use, it defaults to the low quality mode as users are more likely to be able to tolerate it than tolerate their headphones not working at all. It’s overly cautious, though, and uses the low quality mode far more than it has to.
- Comment on I fixed my dad's angle grinder with a ball bearing I salvaged from my gerbil's old excercise wheel a few years back. 2 months ago:
Not all bearings are created equal. This might last for years. This also might explode into fast-moving metal shards in a day. It shouldn’t be a big problem if it does, as an angle grinder should be built to contain exploding bearings, but it might be worth ordering a higher-spec bearing to have on hand before you need it in a hurry.
- Comment on More believable for a Linux OS 4 months ago:
I think you’ve misunderstood my complaint. I know how you go about composing things in a Unix shell. Within your post, you’ve mentioned several distinct languages:
- sh (I don’t see any Bash-specific extensions here)
- Perl-compatible regular expressions, via
grep -P
- printf expressions
- GNU
ps
’s format expressions - awk
That’s quite a lot of languages for such a simple task, and there’s nothing forcing any consistency between them. Indeed, awk specifically avoids being like sh because it wants to be good at the things you use awk for. I don’t personally consider something to be doing its job well if it’s going to be wildly different from the things it’s supposed to be used with, though (which is where the disagreement comes from - the people designing Unix thought of it as a benefit). It’s important to remember that the people designing Unix were very clever and were designing it for other very clever people, but also under conditions where if they hit a confusing
awk
script, they could just yell Brian, and have the inventor ofawk
walk over to their desk and explain it. On the other hand, it’s a lot of stuff for a regular person to have in their head at once, and it’s not particularly easy to discover or learn about in the first place, especially if you’re just reading a script someone else has written that uses utilities you’ve not encountered before. If a general-purpose programming language had completely different conventions in different parts of its standard library, it’d be rightly criticised for it, and the Unix shell experience isn’t a completely un-analogous entity.So, I wouldn’t consider the various tools you used that don’t behave like the other tools you used to be doing their job well, as I’d say that’s a reasonable requirement for something to be doing its job well.
On the other hand, PowerShell can do all of this without needing to call into any external tools while using a single language designed to be consistent with itself. You’ve actually managed to land on what I’d consider a pretty bad case for PowerShell as instead of using an obvious command like
Get-ComputerInfo
, you need:(Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem).FreePhysicalMemory / 1024
Even so, you can tell at a glance that it’s getting the computer system, accessing it’s free physical memory, and dividing the number by 1024.
To get the process ID with the largest working set, you’d use something like
(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet | Select-Object -Last 1).Id # or (Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet)[-1].Id
I’m assuming either your
ps
is different to mine, or you’ve got a typo, as mine gives the parent process ID as the second column, not the process’ own ID, which is a good demonstration of the benefits of structured data in a shell - you don’t need sed/awk/grep incantations to extract the data you need, and don’t need to learn the right output flag for each program to get JSON output and pipe it tojq
.There’s not a PowerShell builtin that does the same job as
watch
, but it’s not a standard POSIX tool, so I’m not going to consider it cheating if I don’t bother implementing it for this post.So overall, there’s still the same concept of composing something to do a specific task out of parts, and the way you need to think about it isn’t wildly different, but:
- PowerShell sees its jurisdiction as being much larger than Bash does, so a lot of ancillary tools are unnecessary as they’re part of the one thing it aims to do well.
- Because PowerShell is one thing, it’s got a pretty consistent design between different functions, so each one’s better at its job as you don’t need to know as much about it the first time you see it in order to make it work.
- The verbosity of naming means you can understand what something is at first glace, and can discover it easily if you need it but don’t know what it’s called -
Select-String
does what it says on the tin.grep
only does what it says on the tin if you already know it’s global regular expression print. - Structured data is easier to move between commands and extract information from.
Specifically regarding the Unix philosophy, it’s really just the first two bullet points that are relevant - a different definition of thing is used, and consistency is a part of doing a job well.
- Comment on More believable for a Linux OS 4 months ago:
Powershell isn’t perfect, but I like it a lot more than anything that takes
sh
as a major influence or thing to maintain backwards compatibility with. I don’t think the Unix philosophy of having lots of small tools that do one thing and do it well that you compose together has ever been achieved as I think being consistent with other tools you use at the same time should be part of doing your thing well, and things like sed, grep and perl all having different regular expression syntax demonstrate inconsistency and are easy to find. I also like that powershell is so verbose as it makes it much easier to read someone else’s script without knowing much powershell, and doesn’t end up getting in the way of actually writing powershell as the autocomplete is really good. I like having a type system and structured data, too.Some of these things are brought to a unixier shell with nushell, but I’m not convinced it’ll take off. Even if people use it, it’ll be a long while before you Google a problem and the solution also includes a nushell snippet, whereas for any Windows problem, you’ll typically get a GUI solution and a powershell solution, and only a maniac would give a CMD solution.
- Comment on More believable for a Linux OS 4 months ago:
Commands and flags (for native powershell commands) are case insensitive, but the autocomplete both in the shell and text editors is really good, so people typically use it and have it tidy up whatever they’ve written to match the canonical case.
- Comment on Altered Carbon 4 months ago:
It was Anthony Mackie and it wasn’t good, at least not in comparison to the first season.
- Comment on Altered Carbon 4 months ago:
There’s no secular reason to think that the universe would care, or that a universe capable of caring would see it as a problem.
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 4 months ago:
I think it’s currently in A/B testing as it’s not like this on either of my Windows machines that installed updates this week. I don’t think they let you disable the things you’re in A/B testing for.
Either that, or it’s not GDPR compliant, and they’re not rolling it out to the UK or EU.
- Comment on Surely dark UX doesn't work in the long run 4 months ago:
He got upset that there was an X button making it look like he could remove the ads, but it didn’t remove the ads.
- Comment on How does employing a rapist not constitute an unsafe work environment for female employees? 4 months ago:
You’re thinking of at-will employment states. Right to work is about joining unions and making that difficult.
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 4 months ago:
There are other rarely-used C+±like languages that fit your criteria, and they basically all aim to eliminate the kind of thing I was talking about. If someone was used to one of those and tried picking up C++ for the first time, they’d probably end up with working, but unnecessarily slow C++, having assumed the compiler would do a bunch of things for them that it actually wouldn’t.
The popular low-level systems programming languages that aren’t C++ are C and Rust. Neither is object-oriented. C programmers forced to use C++ tend to basically write C with a smattering of features that make it not compile with a C compiler, and produce a horror show that brings out the worst of both languages and looks nothing like C++ a C++ programmer would write, then write a blog post about how terrible C++ is because when they tried using it like C, it wasn’t as good at being C as C was. Rust programmers generally have past experience with C++, so tend to know how to use it properly, even if they hate the experience.
- Comment on Councils call for pavement parking to be banned across England 4 months ago:
From the highway code:
244
You MUST NOT park partially or wholly on the pavement in London, and should not do so elsewhere unless signs permit it. Parking on the pavement can obstruct and seriously inconvenience pedestrians, people in wheelchairs or with visual impairments and people with prams or pushchairs.
Law GL(GP)A sect 15
Signs explicitly permitting it are rare.
- Comment on Councils call for pavement parking to be banned across England 4 months ago:
From the highway code:
244
You MUST NOT park partially or wholly on the pavement in London, and should not do so elsewhere unless signs permit it. Parking on the pavement can obstruct and seriously inconvenience pedestrians, people in wheelchairs or with visual impairments and people with prams or pushchairs.
Law GL(GP)A sect 15
Signs explicitly permitting it are rare.
- Comment on Councils call for pavement parking to be banned across England 4 months ago:
When I had driving lessons, it was taught that most people think that’s the rule, and in real life it practically is the rule, but it’s on the books as illegal to put your car on the pavement at all, and you’ll be penalised for it during the parking parts of a driving test.
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 4 months ago:
I’d say this is pretty dependent on the language. For example, with C++, you need to micromanage (or at least benefit from micromanaging) a lot of things that you can get away without knowing about at all with other languages. That stuff takes time to pick up if you’re self-teaching as you can write stuff that looks like it works without knowing its half as fast as it could be because you aren’t making use of move semantics, and if a colleague is teaching you, then that’s time they’re not spending directly doing their own work. On the other hand, someone with Typescript experience could write pretty decent Javascript from the get-go.
- Comment on Unity bans VLC from Unity Store. 5 months ago:
Epic donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Godot when Unity was being dumb this summer, so either they think an open-source project is on the brink of making their competitor unprofitable and collapse, and think enough of the studios jumping ship will come to Unreal to cover that sum, or they’re concerned that someone will start enforcing antitrust laws and want something to point at to say they’re not a monopoly.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 5 months ago:
That kind of thing used to reliably work for me, so it’s not ludicrous that they’d expect it to stop work.
- Comment on Why do new sites embed tweets? 6 months ago:
Fair use only covers critique, parody and education, and only with a whole bunch of extra nuance (e.g. you can’t just put a clip of yourself saying you didn’t like a movie at the end of the movie and get away with hosting it on your site by claiming it was critique, and you can’t download a PDF of a textbook and get away with it by claiming it was for education). Fair use lets you do a lot less than people think.
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 6 months ago:
Or the trustee would get their home raided and devices taken, too.
- Comment on Whats the difference between cheap and expensive modern TVs? 6 months ago:
Quantum dot LED TVs don’t actually use quantum dot LEDs (yay, marketing). They’re built like any other LCD, but instead of having a white backlight (typically a blue LED with a phosphor to fluoresce the blue to green and red, too, making white) and then a colour filter behind each pixel subelement to only let the right colour through, they have a blue LED backlight, and then a quantum dot film that fluoresces the blue to the right colour.
The advantage of this is that you’re not making light in colours you can’t use just to get absorbed by the filter and turned into heat, so can make the backlight brighter, which, when combined with other techniques to make good LCDs, is enough to make them comparable to OLEDs in quality and price.
Actual quantum dot LEDs let you make light at practically any frequency you want, like OLEDs (traditional LEDs only make light at bandgap frequencies for atoms of elements, and there’s not a huge choice of suitable elements, hence blue LEDs taking decades to materialise after other colours were cheap). In theory, quantum dot LEDs won’t have burn-in problems, but they’re currently not practical to make a TV out of, giving marketing people plenty of time to weasel out of their fuckup with naming existing QLED TVs.