JubilantJaguar @ JubilantJaguar @lemmy.world

European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. **I nev

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2 yr. ago

"640k should be enough for anybody"

Okay but you mean which is harder?? Both projects rely on a bunch of salaried professionals supervising an army of volunteers. Firefox is a web browser, i.e. notoriously the space shuttle of software. But the Wikipedia is doing some surprisingly innovative and cutting-edge stuff with its own codebase too, as I understand it. Whichever is costlier, I'm not sure we're talking about an order of magnitude of difference.

Yes I heard about that! The illogical abomination that is English spelling and grammar is going to destroy the world's languages one by one!

While this analysis is somewhat convincing, let's not forget that for now Firefox is all we have. Important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In my ideal scenario, Mozilla becomes like the Wikimedia Foundation. Which has somehow also accumulated "Scrooge McDuck amounts" of cash but seems to be on a firmer footing and better managed.

I have a much better plan: deprecate the stupid apostrophe for all possessives! It always looks semi-illiterate to me, like the 15th-century Dutch printsetters weren't hot on English grammar (not sure, but I bet this is in fact how it happened - German possessives manage fine without the apostrophe).

With you on all counts.

Yeah yeah I know. But "set" (fun fact: it's the word with the most meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary) is the transitive form of "sit", so it's more grammatical, more elegant and shorter than "step". Which obviously comes from a mishearing by someone who didn't read books, yet people will still get indignant and claim that it's somehow better! I need to lie down. ;)

I like it. Not unbad at all.

Yeah but "irregardless" is like "un-non-flammable"

To "step foot on". I don't care that millennial journalists are now sullying the literal NYT with this, it's WRONG. It's to set foot on. To SET foot on.

This absolutist attitude is why Trump is in the White House. In democracy, you ask for everything, you get nothing.

All fine words no doubt (no irony intended). But for the sake of argument I would argue that we need to give a hearing to everything that poorer people claim to care about, and not just the bits that fit with our priors about what they should want.

I'll put it In brutal terms. IMO we need to get the Trump-adjacent masses to vote for higher taxes to pay for macro-things like healthcare (in the US) and redistribution and massive action on the environment. If their price is a tough line on immigration and an end to the constant bellyaching about micro-things like systemic racism and trans rights, then I personally am more than fine with that.

Yes, it does seem to be a problem with progressives in recent years, at least in the anglo countries - preferring to talk about abstract ideas of justice and "equity" and group power dynamics etc, rather than engage with what actual poor people are concerned about.

Policing people's speech is cheaper than agitating for tax rises and healthcare. Just saying.

Really makes me pleased not to be American when I read things like this. Unfortunately this really is an American exception. These days there are even some pretty poor countries with universal healthcare. It's just something most countries do as soon as they can afford it, it makes sense in lots of ways. But not America. You have my sympathy.

Completely agree. It bothers me that so many people can't see the obvious problem that it's going to be impossible for 9 billion people to "get ahead" on this small planet that we all have to share and which is already stressed to the limit. Either people just aren't thinking very deeply or, worse, they're tacitly assuming that they'll be the winners and to hell with everyone else.

To personalize this a bit (but not too much!), I can say that I now earn less than I did just after I graduated 20 or so years ago. Far from being a disaster, this was planned and I'm more than happy with the situation. A rising salary should not be destiny. Apart from anything else, time is money and if you have a lot of one then you tend to have not enough of the other.

But yes, every civilized society should guarantee a basic income and healthcare.

At some point our species is going to have to move beyond this rapacious zero-sum logic of "unsticking" economies and "getting ahead" and instead learn how to distribute all that wealth better.

The obvious answer is to jump in and actually code something you want to use yourself. It will be fun, right?

I must admit that this kind of question always baffles me a bit. Why would anyone want to do boring courses and video tutorials when they can just get started on a real problem and learn as they go? There's nothing more dull than solving a fake problem.

Unless - unless! - it's that really you're interested in the status and money that comes with coding rather than the coding itself. In which case go ahead and get lots of paper qualifications and jump thru hoops to polish up that CV etc etc. But be prepared for a boring career.

Absolutely fair.

Interested in the answer too! Of course, you could get the same result from a 5-buck VPS with zero maintenance and rock-solid reliability (my solution). But sure, 5 bucks is 5 bucks. And also, encryption is optional if it's your own device.

Using this thing right here as an RSS reader! TIL.

mongabay@rss.ponder.cat - Mongabay

An excellent source that I'm ashamed I only discovered recently. Consistently first-rate independent journalism on literally the most important subjects there are. Should be better known. Read. Donate.

Great other choices too.