barsoap

@barsoap@lemm.ee

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unshittification: 3 tech companies that recently made my life… better⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
The one thing to criticise about steam (and that they’re slowly, but surely, losing a EU court case over) is inability for customers to sell their games.

Their marketshare is organic, based on being the choice of store both from the customer and developer POV. As a customer you get the usual painless returns, great interface, community features and whatnot, as a developer you get plenty of store features which make life and customer acquisition and gamedev a lot easier (things like playtesting, next fests) and most of all you get customers because steam has lots of customers and a real, I mean real good, recommendation algorithm. Sure, Epic wants a smaller cut but you’re also not going to sell much, there, which is why they had to lure devs in with advances, guaranteed sales, etc. Larger publisher might not like steam so much because they have gigantic marketing budgets in the first place so all the discoverability/recommendation stuff is not as relevant but, well, fuck EA, Ubi, etc IDGAF, I don’t want to hear it, cry silently.

As to the “can’t sell games for lower prices elsewhere” myth: That applies to when you’re selling steam keys in places that are not steam. Which is fair, if you’re selling steam keys then that’s incurring costs for them (if nothing else, bandwidth) and they don’t even get their usual cut when you sell a steam key off-steam.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oracle hid serious data breach from customers, now hacker has it up for sale⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Oracle is not a tech company it’s a racket run by an army of lawyers.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Split Keyboards Are Superior And The Reason I’m The Writer I Am Today.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
When I’m forced into a qwerty situation it’s not just 30 seconds, I simply can’t touch-type qwerty and my current qwerty skills are way slower than 25 years ago where I had reached peak seven-and-a-half-fingers hunt-and-peck performance. In principle I should know where all the keys are, still, I can’t find them without looking.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Split Keyboards Are Superior And The Reason I’m The Writer I Am Today.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I mean yes but no. Back at some old job all the devs had the local admin password so we could do things like install drivers for bluetooth dongles on our own (I said “old job”, didn’t I) and usually everything was fine but at some point my machine just barfed, it would neither install nor uninstall drivers. I called an admin because I have no idea about windows internals. They were ecstatic, finally, an actual problem, and not walking someone in marketing through how to write an email. Some regedit magic later the problem was solved, and yes I had layout switching ready on the taskbar.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Servo vs Ladybird.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
You can do deep hierarchies in Rust, the thing Rust doesn’t have is implementation inheritance. Or more precisely said implementation inheritance that relies on anything but the interface (traits can have default methods but they’re part of the trait definition, not any implementation).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Show top LLMs buggy code and they'll finish off the mistakes rather than fix them.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Paper + pencil are still a programmer’s best friend. YMMV when it comes to graphics tablets, but no fancy software doing anything but precisely emulating paper + pencil gives you that raw braindump interface, when you have to think about how to squeeze things into syntax you have a bottleneck that chokes everything.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

People are taking naps in their car in a bank parking lot while charging.

Missed opportunity, right there, because even the operators still think in terms of “gas station”. Get a plot of land with a nice view, build a cafe, build a couple of charging stations. Make it a destination people want to go to regardless whether they need a fill-up or not.

Heck, whatever happened to car cinemas.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
With the age of those computers you might even be looking at a HDD. Those should definitely be replaced, SSDs, it depends.

In any case a new 128G SDD is on the order of 15 bucks, well worth the investment even for an age-old system (unless you have a bit more extra cash because the GB/buck optimum is in the 0.5-2T range).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oscar-winning animated film 'Flow' created entirely with free and open-source software Blender⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
The creator favoured speedy feedback on everything. And it’s not like you can’t make things look gorgeous in EEVEE, why go for fidelity when you can make things look nice.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Judges Are Fed up With Lawyers Using AI That Hallucinate Court Cases⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
We actually did. Trouble being you need experts to feed and update the thing, which works when you’re watching dams (that doesn’t need to be updated) but fails in e.g. medicine. But during the brief time where those systems were up to date they did some astonishing stuff, they were plugged into the diagnosis loop and would suggest additional tests to doctors, countering organisational blindness. Law is an even more complex matter though because applying it requires an unbounded amount of real-world and not just expert knowledge, so forget it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨25 arrested in global hit against AI-generated child sexual abuse material⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
In Germany, if 14-18yolds make nude selfies then nothing happens, if they share it with their intimate partner(s) then neither, if someone distributes (that’s the key word) the pictures on the schoolyard then the law is getting involved. Under 14yolds technically works out similar just that the criminal law won’t get involved because under 14yolds can’t commit crimes, that’s all child protective services jurisdiction which will intervene as necessary. The general advise to kids given by schools is “just don’t, it’s not worth the possible headache”. It’s a bullet point in biology (sex ed) and/or social studies (media competency), you’d have to dig into state curricula.

Not sure where that “majority of cases” thing comes from. It might very well be true because when nudes leak on the schoolyard you suddenly have a whole school’s worth of suspects many of which (people who deleted) will not be followed up on and another significant portion (didn’t send on) might have to write an essay in exchange for terminating proceedings. Yet another reason why you should never rely on police statistics. Ten people in an elevator, one farts, ten suspects.

We do have a general criminal register but it’s not public. Employers generally are not allowed to demand certificates of good conduct unless there’s very good reason (say, kindergarten teachers) and your neighbours definitely can’t.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

“gridlock” happens in non-grid layouts too, the english name is just taken from american road patterns.

I said something about road hierarchies, you ignored it.

“show me…” no. YOU made a claim (that local information suffices, which is a VERY bold claim), so it’s on you to prove that local information suffices.

These systems are in operation. You claimed they lead to gridlock. What I get from the Chinese experiment here is that they collected data, threw an optimisation algo on it, and then adjusted local parameters, “err towards giving more green time in this direction” type of deal. They’re still going to use the same type of adaptive, local-control system that’s becoming increasingly common in the last decade.

roads are absolutely NOT “like wires”; they are like pipes. which is why civil engineers commonly use fluid dynamics to simulate traffic.

Vehicles travelling on roads constitute information travelling over roads. Are you trying to deliberately misunderstand what I’m saying. You do not need to look at the app of the parcel carrier to know that your parcel arrived, it’s right there on your doorstep. That’s information. Metaphorically, thus, package delivery trucks are wires.

“all the information is there” is not enough information to verify the claim; it’s a wild guess without evidence to back it up.

if shit where THAT simple, we’d have it figured out 50 years ago… it’s almost like this isn’t the simple problem you desperately want it to be…

50 years ago we neither had the sensors we have now, nor did we have the processing power to use it. Traffic light control was often still done electromechanically. “Adaptive” means a lot more than “pedestrians have a button and there’s an induction coil to detect a car”. Those systems actually solve the local problem optimally which, in the case of traffic management, means that the global problem is solved optimally because the problem has optimal substructure. Don’t ask me for a proof of optimal substructure I just sat on a municipal traffic committee, I don’t actually design those systems. When you observe, them, in low traffic situations, they’re green for everyone because they switch as soon as they see someone arriving and noone else needs to be let through. In higher traffic situations they prioritise throughput, but make sure to not let waiting time for others get exceedingly long, or allow large backups.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

this completely ignores larger traffic patterns like arterial roads.

with your idea you are guaranteed to get massive gridlock all along the major roads.

How. Seriously. Show me an adaptive traffic light dumb enough to cause gridlock. Not to mention that gridlock and having arterials, road hierarchies in general, are kinda incompatible with each other and most of the world doesn’t use grids in the first place.

And it’s not like we don’t have central control over here – it’s that all the information necessary to make decisions for a single traffic light is available right there, at the traffic light, because it is impossible to have traffic (or the absence thereof) and that not carrying the necessary information. Roads are wires, so to speak. Central control could make those decisions, but as local information suffices, why would it, regarding traffic lights it’s generally only monitoring. Central control can override things, things like ambulances influence traffic lights in a non-local manner (which is a luxury problem because they are allowed to cross on red anyway), but for basic operation central control could vanish and you wouldn’t see a difference, when a light loses connection but not power it just keeps on operating. Things like information systems telling people where to park need non-local control because they need non-local information.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

one intersection influences others down the line,

And gets data from them, in the form of how and when cars arrive, and that’s all you need, at that point it’s a simple problem: When an individual traffic light regulates local traffic optimally based on that local information, then it does not cause undue problems for other traffic lights. Evolution does decentralised factory shop-floor planning just fine with just local information (have a look of how the genome assembles itself into bodies), and traffic flow is vastly less complex. “Acting on local information” does not mean “blind to global concerns”, that local information includes what’s necessary to know about the global situation. You can have every traffic light talk to the one down/upstream ("I’m seeing this many cars from you, I send you this many cars) but that’s just another way to do the local sensors.

Traffic routing can make use of global information, but we were talking about deciding the length of light phases, not figuring out where to build a metro line, narrow a street, whatnot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A new study found adaptive traffic signals powered by big data reduced peak-hour travel times by 11% in China’s 100 most congested cities – saving 31.73 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
It’s not an extremely large amount of data at all, you can get perfect efficiency by having lights act on completely local, real-time, sensor data, as in “how many cars are in which direction”. AI is useful to recognise who wants to use the light but that’s the end of it. You don’t need to predict traffic patters as you don’t need them to see what’s the state of the streets right now, worse, such predictions are a source of BS. Lots of patterns happen all the time that have no precedence as construction sites shift, sportsball games get cancelled or not, whatnot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Funkwhale Wants to Filter Out Far-Right Music⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Isn’t that the age old “Is Burzum NSBM” discussion. Vikernes is definitely a Nazi, but his music, as in texts etc, isn’t infested with Nazi ideology much unlike much more clear-cut NSBM: It’s not National-Socialist Black Metal, but Black Metal than happens to be created by a National Socialist.

IMO in the end I don’t mind you listening to, or even liking, Burzum, but please have the moral wherewithal to pirate.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨25 arrested in global hit against AI-generated child sexual abuse material⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
That’s a directive, it’s not a regulation, and the regulation calling anyone under 18 a child does not mean that everything under 18 is treated the same way in actually applicable law, which directives very much aren’t. Germany, for example, splits the whole thing into under 14 and 14-18.

We certainly don’t arrest youth for sending each other nudes:

(4) Subsection (1) no. 3, also in conjunction with subsection (5), and subsection (3) do not apply to acts by persons relating to such youth pornographic content which they have produced exclusively for their personal use with the consent of the persons depicted.

…their own nudes, that is. Not that of classmates or whatnot.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Actually it's pretty cool⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
On second thought, assuming equal spacing and same size of torus, less twists actually gives less repeated coils than more twists. An uneven number sounds bad for repeatability, though, and six might either be too much (ions don’t want to twirl that fast) or the coils get too complicated to still be amenable to proper mass production or something.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Actually it's pretty cool⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah I’m blind that’s four. Having fewer twists means more coils have the same shape so it’s going to be cheaper to build but of course that’s just one dimension of a massive, massive, design space. That’s practically all they’ve been working on since Wendelstein turned on and exceeded everyone’s expectations by behaving exactly as predicted. Wouldn’t make sense to build a thing that gets Q > 1 but can’t compete with at least fossil fuels, in fact that’d be rather embarrassing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Actually it's pretty cool⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Ions don’t move along field lines they want to spiral around them that’s why. The shape of the magnetic containment field is actually quite simple, take a donut, squish it a bit, cut it open, twist one end a couple of times and glue it up again. Five times in this case, seems to be a popular choice. It’s the coils generating that field where the geometry gets Lovecraftian.

This is the Proxima Fusion stuff, they’re planning on running the first surplus energy reactor early 30s and commercialise in that decade, the whole thing is designed for mass production with economics (build cost vs. maintenance vs. electricity price etc) in mind from the get-go. And yes they’ll pull it off it’s a spinoff of the Max Planck institute, not some garage tinkerers or VC fund techbros.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Designed by men, for men: Why sex with robots does not have appeal among women⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Overpriced pornstar-branded fleshlights aren’t the only masturbators in town and it’s not like there’s no life-like dildos either. The long and short of it is that the mechanics of a lubed hole are superior to that of a hand and you’re not looking at the entry point all the time so noone actually cares what they look like.

Yes, the branded stuff does exist, humans, male female, doesn’t matter, enter parasocial relationships news at 11. Can you imagine how well Justin Bieber dildos would sell.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Nah it’s a different axis. Rust doesn’t have a GC, you do need to think about memory, it’s just that the compiler generally enforces things for you. You learn to think like borrowck thinks because you don’t want to get yelled at. Going back to C then you suddenly mistrust a lot of code a lot more, and rightly so.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
Unsafe Rust may be similar to C, though even though there’s wibbles like the borrow checker still running, you still get more guarantees about the code than with C. Safe Rust can, on occasion, look more like Haskell than C.

Are they both systems languages? Yes of course otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about using them in the kernel. Makes no sense to extend the possible comparison candidates to include Prolog, arbitrarily making look C and Rust more similar by introducing a far-off comparison point.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Portable drone jammer uses a Raspberry Pi tactical Software Defined Radio⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Nah pretty much any country should have regulations about things like max power allowed, deliberate interference etc. anywhere on the spectrum. Just because the law says “these bands are for everyone to play around with” doesn’t mean that you can just EMP the whole thing.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

ok change 18 to 20, same argument

Not really, one is “I don’t want to go to prison”, the other is “these are too young for me”. Anyway:

don’t tell me there aren’t any single 40yo women interested in him lol

How many of those 40yolds are jealous, and what what kind of social narrative could they be pushing to make him stop dating that young. Also, how many of them would themselves have dated him with a 30 year age gap.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Those are good approaches, I would note that the “90% is written” one is mostly about code comprehension, not writing (as in: Actually architect something), and the requirement thing is a thing that you should, IMO, learn as a junior, it’s not a prerequisite. It needs a lot of experience, and often domain knowledge new candidates have no chance of having. But, then, throwing such stuff at them and then judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.

The main question I ask myself, in general, is “can this person look at code from different angles”. Somewhat like rotating a cube in your mind’s eye if you get what I mean. And it might even that they’re no good at it, but they demonstrate the ability when talking about coffee making. People who don’t get lost when you’re talking about cash registers having a common queue having better overall latency than cash registers with individual queues. Just as a carpenter would ask someone “do you like working with your hands”, the question is “do you like to rotate implication structures in your mind”.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Maybe, instead of not asking those questions, he answers them in a way that you do not agree with? Maybe even based on factors that you overlook?

I’m not quite as old as Leo but that frontal cortex thing is a very hard cutoff. You seem to be very focussed on the “18” thing, that’s not how human development and attraction works. According to the chart he has not dated an 18yold since he was 26.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
So you’re not blaming the women, you’re not saying that they don’t know what they’re getting into, either, everyone knows what Leo is up to, so you’re calling Leo creepy for – not questioning decisions the women make?

There’s also a weird characterisation of agency, here. You’re only characterising Leo as an active participant, not the women, you’re saying what Leo does is use things that he has, passively (fame, wealth), to actively “get” women. I’d be much more convinced if you said he’s a good flirt. Are women such passive creatures that when they see someone rich and famous, they just cannot help themselves but spread their legs? I find it hard to reconcile such a narrative with feminism, it’s absolutely regressive.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
The frontal cortex matures from roughly 14 to the early 20s, characteristic of that age is to be both impulsive and confused, while the cortex is already fully functional you’re still figuring out what to actually use it for.

That is: In the early 20s you become fully adult. Not in the legal sense (that’s usually 18), but biologically. You’re a grown-up. To argue that they can’t make their own decisions is highly infantilising.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:
Not in any way a new phenomenon, there’s a reason fizzbuzz was invented, there’s been a steady stream of CS graduates who can’t code their way out of a wet paper bag ever since the profession hit the mainstream.

Actually fucking interview your candidates, especially if you’re sourcing candidates from a country with for-profit education and/or rote learning cultures, both of which suck when it comes to failing people who didn’t learn anything. No BS coding tests go for “explain this code to me” kind of stuff, worst case they can understand code but suck at producing it, that’s still prime QA material right there.