bitcrafter @ bitcrafter @lemmy.sdf.org

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2 yr. ago

I get it, and that is a totally valid experience that you and probably many other people have had, but I personally never considered myself to be doomscrolling when seeing what was new with the Haskell programming language, going through what crazy experience people have had playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup lately, learning from the the really insightful in-depth explanations of history that were posted to AskHistorians, and so on. I do not consider the subtraction of these things from my life to have ultimately been a benefit, it just makes me feel less in the loop about the things that I care about.

I actually liked the premise of the Ori because basically up to that point they were fighting people who claimed to be gods but were really just aliens with advanced technology, whereas with the Ori they were fighting beings that basically were gods so it was a whole lot harder to convince anyone to side with them. The biggest problem I had with it was that the show seemed to run out of money before they could properly tie everything up, a bit reminiscent of the final season of the Expanse (over which I am still very bitter, though at least it motivated me to read the books, which do satisfyingly tie everything up). In particular, in the episode ::: spoiler spoiler where they kill all of the Ori by sending the bomb thing through the portal ::: they have basically a huge dramatic victory that merited some kind of visually impressive spectacle and instead all that happened was basically that they just turned to each other and said, "Well, so I guess that means we succeeded. Yay."

Because that way you can use it wherever something accepts WASM. In particular, as mentioned in the linked article, Javy started its life as a way for you to submit code to Shopify Functions in JavaScript, as Shopify Functions lets you submit code as WASM so that you can program in whatever language you prefer.

No, Erlang has a completely different paradigm than Prolog, it just looks superficially similar because the people who created Erlang liked Prolog's syntax so that's what they used as the basis for Erlang instead of the more standard ALGOL-derived syntax that most of us are used to.

As much as I've been enjoying Lemmy and really like it as a platform, I don't think any of this this is fine because there are just too many niche communities that are either unwilling or unable to just pick up and move, which means that in practice to the extent that I only participate here and not on Reddit I am missing out on a lot of content that I used to look forward to.

You are conflating capitalism with corporations; they are not at all the same thing. The former is an economic system, whereas the latter is the legal creation of a fictional "person" for the express purpose of shielding private individuals from legal consequences.

Mind you, that is not always a bad thing. If someone decides to start a new business using a portion of their savings, it is arguably good to allow them to do so in such a way that if the business fails (and my understanding is that something like 90% of them do, so this is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome) then they lose only their investment and not their entire life savings or worse end up deeply in personal debt because otherwise we as a society would lose out on a lot of beneficial enterprises due to them being too risky. The problem comes in when this legal fiction acts as such a strong shield that it enables and encourages people to act in extremely harmful ways with virtual impunity because only the fictional person that is the corporation gets punished rather than the individuals who made the harmful decisions.

Yeah, I've had enough bad experiences with this that I actually ended up unsubscribing from many of the science subreddits.

I don't know much about Void Linux. What is it's selling point that makes it unique?

For day-to-day purposes, if you are used to Fahrenheit but not Celsius or vice versa, and all you want to do is get a rough sense of how warm or cold it is outside without having to do arithmetic involving fractions in your head, then remember that there are two temperatures in Celsius that are roughly the same in Fahrenheit but with their digits transposed: 16° C ~ 61° F, and 28° C ~ 82° F. You can then roughly interpolate/extrapolate by about 2° F for every 1° C.

Hence the "unless there's something seriously wrong with the previous research" part. That is always a possibility, of course, but it's much less likely that is the case then that this single study is the thing that is wrong.

I don't know, this story is very reminiscent of the kind of thing my elementary school age cousin writes, but with a greater mastery of vocabulary and grammar. It's not in any way great, bit it's charming in it's own way when held against that (low) standard.

When you buy a subscription to Reddit you get free coins you can use to give out these awards, so at least some of the time the award didn't actually cost anything above what they were already paying for their subscription.

There's essentially an open standard for streaming video so it's not like the old days where you needed to download a platform-specific component to watch streaming video. I use Linux as my primary environment and I can't even remember the last time I had trouble with it; certainly not for several years at least. I've used Netflix, DisneyPlus, Amazon, Paramount+, and probably others.

Just as a heads up, though, if you are using Firefox then the first time you go to any of these sites it will prompt you as to whether you are fine with enable support for DRM video, and you need to click "Yes". This is a one-time thing, though. (It does this because if you are an open source purist then you might not want to do this so it likes to get your permission first; most browsers just assume that you don't care and enable it by default.)

Nah, at this point his only option is to cancel Starship and redirect all of its development funding into building a time machine so that he can dramatically increase the amount of weed he was smoking at the time he got the brilliant idea to buy Twitter so that his brain is made incapable of actually following through with it.

Agreed. I might be an information technology aficionado, but I couldn't care less about how my car works as long as it does its job, so it'd be a bit hypocritical of me to judge the person I pay to fix my car for not being knowledgeable about computers.

this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading

I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the "not stressed" end, so I've gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.

That isn't the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn't working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the "not stressed" end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren't saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.

It can be nice not to have to worry about types when you are doing exploratory programming. For example, I once started by writing a function that did a computation and then returned another function constructed from the result of that computation, and then realized that I'd actually like to attach some metadata to that function. In Python, that is super-easy: you just add a new attribute to the object and you're done. At some point I wanted to tag it with an attribute that was itself a function, and that was easy as well. Eventually I got to the point where I was tagging it with a zillion functions and realized that I was being silly and replaced it with a proper class with methods. If I'd known in advance that this is where I was going to end up then I would have started with the class, but it was only after messing around that I got a solid notion of what the shape of the thing I was constructing should be, and it helped that I was able to mess around with things in arbitrary ways until I figured out what I really wanted without the language getting in my way at intermediate points.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that this is the only or best way to program, just that there are situations where having this level of flexibility available in the language can be incredibly freeing.

And don't get me wrong, I also love types for two reasons. First, because they let you create a machine-checked specification of what your code is doing, and the more powerful the type system, the better you can do at capturing important invariants in the types. Second, because powerful type systems enable their own kind of exploratory programming where instead of experimenting with code until it does what you want you instead experiment with the types until they express how you want your program to behave, after which writing the implementation is often very straightforward because it is so heavily constrained by the types (and the compiler will tell you when you screwed up).

Huh, interesting, that page says that vegan diets "reduced food costs by up to one third [emphasis mine]", which I guess is nothing to scoff at but on the other hand doesn't seem that large; I would have expected the relative cost of including meat in your diet to increase food costs by much more given how resource-intensive it is to produce meat compared to producing vegetables.