namingthingsiseasy @ namingthingsiseasy @programming.dev

Posts

6

Comments

294

Joined

2 yr. ago

This is the core problem. The overlap between people who use facebook and people who are interested in VR is not very big. Most people on facebook just want to see pictures of their grandchildren and are hardly the kinds of people who would be early adopters of technologies like this. VR enthusiasts on the other hand simply have no interest in whatever kinds of shit Zuckerberg has to offer. Some might hold their noses and try it anyway, but you're just making your potential userbase smaller and smaller.

This idiotic "metaverse" thing has always been a hilarious joke and is doomed to fail. This has been obvious ever since it was announced. Zuckerberg got lucky with facebook turning out to be a great way to creep onWW keep in touch with friends and other contacts. He's not a visionary and doesn't have a clue how to build a new thing people want from scratch. But he thinks he does cause he got lucky with facebook.

Same as I wrote on the other sibling comment. I think these countries all have terrible electoral systems. But the point is, they're still ahead of the USA in terms of the fact that they will still have an awareness and understanding of third parties, whereas >90% of Americans are just programmed to believe there are only 2 options.

As a thought experiment, ask yourself what would happen if you could wave a magic wand and make every city, state and national legislative election use RCV over FPTP. Do you really think anything would change? I'm pretty sure 95% of the results would be exactly the same. Like I said above, RCV may make things better 20+ years from now, but there's also a very good chance that so few people actually use their second options that it nothing ends up changing at all. This is why I think multi-member districts or MMP are better solutions.

Understood, all of these countries have terrible electoral systems, that was not my point. My point is that Americans only have a culture of voting for one of two parties, so switching to ranked choice voting will likely change nothing at all, because Americans already practically never even consider alternate options. Hell, I doubt even 10% of them could even name a third party, so why would they consider voting for them all of a sudden just because of the switch to RCV? They're constantly blasted with the same message that you have one of two options, so chances are that they'll just pick one and ignore the rest, just like they do now.

Unpopular opinion: ranked choice voting will do little to solve the USA's democracy issues.

For starters, there are plenty of countries that do use FPTP and still have plenty of third parties in their parliaments (Canada, UK, Taiwan, Australia off the top of my head). So FPTP does not inherently preclude third parties - rather, the USA simply doesn't have any culture of multilateralism. I'd say this is mostly a byproduct of various cultural phenomena - the wealth gap, corporate media ownership, private campaign financing, win-or-lose mindset, etc.

But the greater issue is that RCV doesn't really ensure proportionality. As long as you have a single winner from each district, there will be distortions between the proportion of parties for whom people vote and the ultimate parliamentary body. For example, even if you implemented RCV across the entire USA today, I'm pretty sure most legislative bodies would still be entirely dominated by a single party because of gerrymandering and single-member districts.

So if you want to fix the USA's core issue, what you really need is a more proportional system - either have fewer, larger districts with multiple representatives from each one, or adopt something like MMP which is what Germany has (where you also cast a party vote to declare your preference for which party you most want represented in parliament and distribute proportionally along this tally across all voters). Not only does this make the final representation more fair, but it also does a much better job of making all votes matter, instead of only the lucky few in swing states or the rare competitive Congressional race.

But RCV on its own won't do much. It is still a small improvement, and if you have the opportunity to adopt it, I say go for it. But at best, I think it would take decades, or maybe even generations, before it starts to improve things.

Also, while I know this doesn't pertain quite so much to Presidential elections as the electoral college is used for, the USA is also fairly unique in that it has a directly elected head of government with much more power than other countries that also have a directly elected head of state. This is also a part of the problem - the executive branch is supposed to be the weakest of the 3 Federal branches - but it's a discussion for another time.

Not the person you responded to, but sure. Breaking muscle memory is extremely grating.

Also, it's pretty easy to type long commands with little typing. If you use ctrl+r to search backward in your history, you can easily recall long commands - and also, you can use ctrl+x,ctrl+e to edit the current command line in $EDITOR so you can edit long commands. These two tricks make it very easy to type long commands quickly with very little typing.

Grooveshark. Now that's a name that I really miss. I'll never stop being mad about that site being taken down.

Thanks for sharing! How do you feel about the transition from individual contributor to manager? What made you switch? How do you deal with the new responsibilities? How do you deal with the fact that you have to rely on others to get the job done rather than doing it yourself?

The solution is staring at them straight in the face. Unfortunately, they're so utterly brainwashed that they'll never even consider it.

I'm sure people are trying to address the problems, I'm not saying that's not happening. What I find maddening however is the double standard between how issues are handled when it's fossil fuels vs. green energy. Every tiny issue with green energy is breathlessly amplified, while there's no shortage of idiotic solutions to resolve issues in carbon-based energy infrastructure.

It's this atmosphere that I'm trying to raise awareness of and change!

Fantastic way to get around firewalls. One of my previous jobs firewalled every server which made developing our network services hell. But they installed an SSH server on pretty much every machine in on the LAN. We got really really good at learning how to set up local port tunnels (even multi-hop ones) to get our work done.

If the infrastructure can't handle it, then upgrade the fucking infrastructure! Politicians will fall at voters' feet to build new roads, highways, etc., but when it comes to the green energy transition, there's no problem too minuscule to be ignored!

I'll happily admit that there are going to be many issues in the green energy transition; we should acknowledge them, but we should also strive to address them, rather than throwing our hands up in the air and idly promulgating the status quo.

A few years ago we were able to upgrade everything (OS and Apps) using a single command. I remember this was something we boasted about when talking to Windows and Mac fans. It was such an amazing feature. Something that users of proprietary systems hadn’t even heard about. We had this on desktops before things like Apple’s App Store and Play Store were a thing.

If this actually were Linux's killer feature, then Linux would have had a much higher market share by now.

Make no mistake, this is my favourite feature of Linux as well, and I have never used a snap/flatpack/appimage in my entire life. But it doesn't have the kind of broader public appeal that you seem to be suggesting.

Preach it! One of my colleagues writes all his machine learning code in Matlab. Brilliant person, has done some incredible research, but can do anything with the code because no organization is going to bring Matlab into its clusters and pay for all the licenses needed to run it. So while plenty of presentations and papers have been written of this research, the actual process of letting people use it takes an additional army of Python developers to translate and test every new feature and enhancement.

This is what happens when you build your career around walled garden platforms. Inevitably, you'll reach a dead end. Focus on learning tools that enable you the most. Open source will always win in the end, because it will never come with this very heavy piece of baggage that proprietary tools have. This is why the internet is built on Linux and not Windows.

Unity is the same way. When you build your career on a technology that a single company can strip from you on a whim, that's a big risk. I really hope that Godot and other open source engines take off after this. It will be a painful transition for many developers, but hopefully it's a lesson very well learned.

I think what tripped you up here is that you iterated over the wrong object. In your second solution:

    
for letter in chosen_word:
  if guess == letter:
    for i in range(len(chosen_word[letter])):
      display.insert(i, guess)

  

while in the correct solution:

    
for position in range(word_length):
  letter = chosen_word[position]
  if letter == guess:
    display[position] = letter

  

The most important difference here is that in your code block, you iterate over the letters, ie. 'a', 'a', 'r', ..., while in the second you iterate over the numerical indices of the string, 0, 1, 2, .... In this specific use case, it's much easier to use the numerical indices - because you can see how the second code block is using position in two places - once to retrieve the letter from the solution, and then again to update the display when the if condition matches.

Usually we prefer iteration using the method you used in your solution. But in this case, it's easier to just iterate by index because you're retrieving the element from one string, and updating the same position in the other string. You have no way of knowing what position to modify in display unless you have the numerical position, so it's much easier to iterate that way in this case.

Yes. It's my way of voting with my wallet. I already have a few nice headphones and I'm not replacing them just because phone manufacturers are cheap and lazy.

Besides, I hate batteries. They always die at the most inconvenient time. And USB-c just for audio is way overkill.