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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • So I take it you’re against the government subsidizing science research in general? “The government shouldn’t fund new technology” is a stupid and destructive position. We’d be living in the 1800s if it were up to solely the capitalistic market. I mean, the first broadly effective antibiotics that are responsible for saving probably hundreds of millions of lives at least only exist because of people working in government-funded labs, under government-funded universities, for the government. Why should the environment be treated like it doesn’t matter to our civilization?


  • “There is no future without electrification. But just electrification will not get us there,”

    Daniel Posen is an associate professor in U of T’s department of civil and mineral engineering, and the Canada Research Chair in system-scale environmental impacts of energy and transport technologies. He agrees electrification is vital. But relying solely on electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions from transportation may not be enough, especially if we want to do it in time to stop a catastrophic two-degree rise in global temperatures.

    The article you link contradicts you, it clearly suggests that adoption of EVs reduce carbon emissions, but we still need to do more (e.g. ACTUALLY HAVE PUBLIC TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE) to prevent a climate catastrophe.




  • A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.

    Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.

    Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.





  • What made me and I imagine a large chunk of other people convert to revanced/similar apps is the super aggressive advertising, it’s impossible to use youtube when you get a double ad before and after every 5 second video and get 30 second midrolls every like 3 minutes. You can’t skip through a video to find the part you want to see because you’ll just get an ad. It’s extremely infuriating and time-consuming, it used to be where I was willing to deal with it but they fucked it up. Now I can never go back to ad-riddled YouTube, even if it has a “reasonable” amount of advertising (I am now in the belief that no amount of advertising is reasonable anymore though).




  • I don’t work on any widely-used languages (I’ve made my own but not anything important) but I do think the designers of Zig and Rust have very good reasons for using semicolons – I read some reasons from the Rust devs themselves somewhere but I can’t remember them other than it vaguely being about how Rust is expression-based and intended to be lightweight and how whitespace significance can create confusion around how to read and write certain things and bla bla bla…

    but my personal opinion, what I generally I would imagine it’s for other than readability, is because the code can look a lot cleaner when an expression returned from a block is just the expression, and not expression plus some token like return. It’s especially nice in long closures or extremely short and simple blocks. I would rather consistently have to write expressions broadly like let a = { b + c }; rather than let a = { return b + c }. The semicolon has significance as a “result discarder” so expressions can be the default, so it’s on the surface a lot more functional-friendly.

    Also this is more specific but I hate the way WS languages generally handle quotes


  • That said, with how few expressions are return values, I do wonder why semicolons are the default rather than adding a special character to indicate return values.

    you mean like return/break/etc.?

    because Rust was designed to remind you of functional programming despite not being very functional, and because semicolons allow way better syntax rules in Rust and are generally pretty vital for good, readable lowish-level code. it also allows Rust programmers to use newlines/indents and stuff to pretty up their code a lot without littering it with random \ and |> and begin end and such everywhere, which, given how dense Rust code can be and how much it uses iterators and weird trait magic, is a big plus for readability


  • Depends on the language. I’m not gonna find shit to copy-paste for what I’m doing in Scala 3 or F#, but in Rust or C++ I’ll frequently Google an issue I can’t figure out and someone will have some fancy black magic hacker solution with super-iterators and turbofishies and weird type inference that I couldn’t think of myself and just throw it in my code with some minor modifications :)





  • There are plenty of browsers. Dillo, NetSurf, surf, w3m, Lynx, Links, Via, Midori, Pale Moon although it’s based on a fork of Gecko, Tunnel, qutebrowser. And there are even options for a search engine, although the only one worth considering that isn’t just a layer on top of other search engines is Kagi which costs $10 a month, and I wouldn’t exactly call it minimalist.

    The problem is that no browser can allow you to escape the horror that is web standards & practices that have been developed over decades and are almost unchangeable, without sacrificing basic web functionality and just making it a worse experience than it needs to be at least. The fact is that practically the entire web is reliant on JavaScript, on top of HTML and CSS which take a lot more resources to utilize/display than it looks, meaning 3 interpreters constantly running that must be sandboxed to each tab you have open with a lot of overhead to manage security.

    In an ideal world we’d all just be using provably-safe high-performance compiled WASM-but-stronger (from functional languages or more likely Rust or something less boiler-platey but similar), without having such a complex and fucked dependency situation*, where we wouldn’t need to sandbox interpreted languages and slaughter performance. Of course, in an ideal world, we also wouldn’t have to be concerned about aggressive tracking, ads, clickbait, SEO abuse, scams, or even malware, so there’s not much use in imagining a reality where we actually have quality web browsing.

    The actual answer to using the web without the fucked-ness of browsers is to not use a web browser at all for sites you use frequently. Use stuff like this instead.

    *seriously, you can write the most basic website with JavaScript and it’ll probably rely on tens of thousands of expressions of code which realistically should just be expressable in like a small page or two, you do webdev and you’ll probably accidentally be implicitly committing a sacrifice to some Aztec God in order to check if a number is even or odd

    Also just imagine if all of web dev was just ML/Scala/Rust/Swift/Erlang without compiling to JavaScript 🤤 That is the definition of a perfect universe