interolivary @ interolivary @beehaw.org

Currently between olives

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2 yr. ago

honestly it feels like "being OK" and "producing art" don't coincide all that often 😅

Well I certainly didn't before you mentioned it, but I can now practically hear his laconic voice read me the last two panels

If you think this current brand of capitalism requires plebs to have money, I'm not sure how you explain the fact that when taking inflation into account wages have been either stagnant or actually going down ever since the 70's / 80's, the amount of wealth owned by the same plebs compared to the "financial ruling class" (mainly executives and such, and especially the banking sector thanks to deregulation) has shrunk dramatically, and cost of living keeps getting higher, while at the same time the compensation for the "financial ruling class" has grown at a frankly exponential rate.

Sufficiently advanced AI will, if anything, make it even more likely that that "ruling class" will realize they don't need quite as many of us around because all we do us suck up their resources and complain how we haven't eaten anything but cup noodles in a week and our teeth hurt.

They should replace workers and people should deserve to live without being workers, but it should also be painfully obvious that our current economic system won't support this idea, and won't until we do some pretty drastic things.

It's not that we couldn't build a post-scarcity society probably even right now given some pretty radical adjustment of resource allocations, we just don't want to build one – "we" being the 0.01% that have such insane amounts of wealth that they've essentially taken over the whole economic system, largely thanks to eg. dumb fucks like Reagan and sociopathic fucks like Thatcher and the people who idolize them buying into the idea that they too can be that rich because the wealth will somehow magically trickle down.

I honestly don't quite get why it's so common to hate Javascript.

I mean, it's not my favorite language to put it mildly (I prefer type systems that beat me into submission) but as far as popular dynamically typed languages go, it's not nearly the worst offender out there. Yes, lol, weird things equal weird things when you use == but that's not exactly unique among dynamic languages, and some people couldn't come to terms with it not being like Java despite the name so they never bothered learning how prototypal inheritance works, and also who the fuck needed both null and undefined when either of those by itself is already a mistake and introducing them to a language should be grounds for a nice, solid kick to the groin.

But, warts and all, the implementations are generally reasonably performant as far as these things go, the syntax is recognizable because eg. braces are common whether we like them or not and notably also survives copy-pasting from eg. the internet or anything that doesn't use the same whitespace you do, and it'll happily let you write code in a quite multiparadigm way, leading to some people to insist Javascript is kind of like Scheme and other people to insist Javascript is nothing like Scheme.

So, shit could be worse. And by "shit" and "worse" I mean eg. Python, notable for achievements such as: being one of the first if not the first language with a designer who huffed enough solvents to think that semantically significant whitespace is a great idea especially combined with no real standardization on whether you need to use tabs or spaces, and which often doesn't survive being copy-pasted from the web and is a nightmare to format; being unable to actually run anything in parallel up until very recently because lol why bother with granular locking in the runtime when you can just have one global interpreter lock and be done with it; or being popular in part due to the fact that its FFI makes it easy to write modules for it in languages that aren't a crime against common sense and can run faster and more parallel than an 80's BASIC interpreter. And let's not even go into the whole "virtual environment" thing.

So while Python's not quite INTERCAL-bad, at least INTERCAL doesn't have significant whitespace and its manuals are really damn funny.

And then there's eg. Ruby, with 9999 ways to do everything and all of them so slow that it aspires to one day be as fast as INTERCAL, and PHP which is a practical joke that went too far and somehow managed to eventually convince people it's actually a real language.

edit: oh and if you don't know about INTERCAL, I can highly recommend checking out the the C-INTERCAL revision's manual, which includes eg. a very helpful circuitous diagram and a logical table to explain one of its more odd operators. There's also a resource page that's maintained by one of the perpetrators of the C-INTERCAL revision.

please apply a logistic transformation to your dates

Which is definitely a totally normal and everyday operation that normal people do with dates

Yeah, if there's one thing Risa's known for, it's "coloring inside the lines" 😄

I've been using Kagi for about half a year now, and I've definitely been very happy with it. As you pointed out, the fact that you pay for it with actual money and not with your attention (ie. ad views) means that they actually have an incentive to show you good results instead of endless walls of spammy links that lead to pages using their ad network.

People don't seem to realize that Google's not a search engine company with an ad network, but an ad network company with a search engine: the ads pay for all of Google's services, so they're incentivized to fill your search results with bullshit that you have to dig through, but that uses their ad network – every useless spam link you have visit when looking for the thing you actually searched for means more 💰 for Google.

The fact that so many big online services are ad-funded has led to the situation where people seem to believe that we're entitled to have everything for free online. While open source projects run by volunteers are definitely a thing (as is obvious considering where we are), I don't think it's reasonable to assume that every online service should have rely on voluntary donations and volunteer work, and that developers should work on your free pet service during their time off from their actual work

How on earth does paying for a service mean someone's "being taken advantage of"? You do realize that Google, Bing et al aren't actually free? The whole problem with eg. Google is the fact that they're an ad company with a search engine and not the other way around, which creates perverse incentives to show you bullshit results as long as it means more ad views for them (and they control both the supply and demand side of that ad network, which makes it even worse). That's literally the reason why Google's results have gotten so bad.

While I'd love to live in an economic system where people could just build good web search engines for free and on a volunteer basis, unfortunately we don't find ourselves in such a system at this time. I'd rather pay for a search service than use one that's incentivized to not show me what I'm searching for, and I'd also rather pay for developer time than assume that they'll work on services for free during their time off (which is the reality with eg. Lemmy admins)

potato products that aren’t made of pressed potato eyebuds and anuses

I'm not sure what you've been eating exactly, but I think most the Pringles I've eaten have been anus-free.

Not that I'd buy them myself, anus-free or not.

What's "yikes" about that?

lol and here I was thinking I had a gap in my Trek trek meme knowledge.

Also, don't be too hard on yourself: considering the frankly ridiculous amount of information that we modern humans cram into our craniums, tripping up on an actor's name is prettty minor 😀

That's one thing that really bugs me about Javascript (weirdly enough I'm okay with eg prototypal inheritance and how this works, or at least worked before the bolted on classes that were added because apparently I'm like one of the dozen or so people who had no problems with those concepts). The fact that all numbers are floats can lead to a lot of fun and exciting bugs that people might not even realize are there until they suddenly get a weird decimal where they expected an integer

I, uh… what?

Humans, Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans are descended from Jeffrey Combs

Ha yeah I've read about the stray Soviet RTGs. Great power source for some godsforsaken lighthouse etc. in Siberia, but much to the surprise of exactly nobody, of course they just left them lying around when the Union collapsed. I have a vague memory of there having been some, err… incidents related to those, something along the lines of some poor Siberian schmuck finding one and going "ahh, this metallic doodad is nice and warm, I think I'll camp next to it"

A-ha, fellow interrobang enjoyer!

But yeah, how frickin' cool would it be to have an implant powered by an RTG‽ Honestly the most cyberpunk thing I've heard in a while

Huh, that's interesting. I found a wiki article that describes a diamond battery that generates current from beta particles emitted by carbon-14, but that one's only good for microwatts. I also found some pages that referred to diamond batteries that use nuclear waste, like this one, which might be what you were thinking of? No idea what the wattage of those would be, but I'd guess more than ¹⁴C

I'm not sure Hahn would have cared about that, considering he was paranoid about people being able to shock his dick with their minds, and he stole a bunch of smoke detectors to get at the americium because reasons 😅