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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The first part applies to… Most of the world outside of Europe?

    The second part applies, to lesser degrees, to a large part of the world. Such as the USA.

    What even is this argument. Israel’s not a state? Well fucking great, so following that logic which state should we hold responsible for Israel’s crimes then?

    Europe’s colonial past is a whole-ass subject but amongst all the potential ways to try to make up for it, “stop formally recognizing former colonies because we fucked it up too badly” is one of the worst takes I’ve heard.


  • So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.

    Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.

    Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.


  • Fabric is superior in comfort and cost.

    But if you absolutely want leather for looks/stain resistance, there historically hasn’t been much of a choice. Plastic fake leather alternatives degrade pretty badly under UV light, causing cracking/flaking after just a few years. As anyone who has owned a fake leather chair or jacket would have noticed. But the expected lifetime of a car interior is measured in decades.

    The article mentions some startup innovating on new synthetic hemp-based fake leather, it’ll be interesting to see if they can match the long-term durability of genuine leather. Otherwise it’ll be a shame if those interiors fall apart in 5-10 years, reupholstering an entire car is not a small job.


  • At this point anyone who pretends like they don’t know Trump is a fascist is either suffering from severe cognitive impairment and should seek medical attention, or more likely a fascist themselves. You don’t get to live through the past 6 months and play the “but i didn’t knoooooowwwww :((((((” card.

    Pick a side and fight, but don’t pretend that the fascist regime will go away with hearts and minds and a nice little conversation. These people know what they’re doing, and they’ll happily kill you to keep doing it. Resist or don’t but don’t pretend that this will go away by just motivating people to turn out next election cycle.


  • Did magisk become a lot better at hiding from banking apps? Because people have been saying “it’s fine, just install magisk and use the option to hide it” but my experience is “it only works sometimes for some apps, otherwise you’re fucked or you will be fucked next time the app updates its countermeasures”. But that was a few years ago.

    It’s an absolute dealbreaker though. Without reliable mobile banking and eID it’s very painful to do any kind of online payment or admin work.


  • I’ve seen a video (maybe it was Smarter Every Day?) about a research team experimenting with the effects and acclimation potential of small-radius coriolis stations. From what I remember we can get used to the centrifugal force well enough, even though experiencing coriolis forces across the length of your body is certainly an unusual situation.

    Profitability is a huge problem regardless though. The ISS is getting destroyed by the end of the decade, and no replacement is seriously planned. The ISS was born in a geopolitical context of unprecedented international cooperation in the '90s, and that era is long gone. Unless China, the EU or US (lmao) wants to finance an ISS replacement all on their lonesome, not much will happen there for the foreseeable future. There’s not a whole lot “because we can” budgets going around these days.



  • Is it prejudice if I have extensive first-hand experience with it?

    The worst environment to me (react-native)

    Which is exactly what the Windows start menu runs on, doesn’t it?

    I don’t even care that JS is slow, in most circumstances. I like Python, it’s not any faster necessarily (though it is much easier to debug CPython than V8 when you do eventually run into low-level issues, and python is still a lot better at multithreading than javascript even if the GIL is an issue, but that’s besides the point). My real problem is that the ES “standard” “library” is a complete clusterfuck, absolutely diseased, like engineers heard of the concept of technical debt and decided to build a shrine to it.

    Sure, you can technically use JS decently. That’s hardly an achievement. Any sufficiently fast Turing-complete apparatus can be “used decently” if you start by re-implementing a python interpreter. But the entire ecosystem is fucked. The appeal of javascript, the entire reason it has taken over, is that the lowest bidder is not going to use decently but will do the wildest, most insane shit imaginable to get a product out the door.

    I commented the other day about PHP. Same problem. The language is too easy to use badly. Sure, you can write magnificent code in either, if you have enough experience and discipline to avoid every footgun. But when every other tool in your shop is an unlabeled footgun, maybe it’s time to admit that there are some deep-seated issues.

    Speaking of treating JS like a turing machine; that’s what TypeScript does. And, I have to admit, it solves maybe 40 % of the problems I have with JavaScript. I still don’t like it, because the stdlib and ecosystem still sucks donkey balls and V8 is a subpar JIT interpreter in every way besides raw single-threaded performance, but at least TS itself is decent enough and lends itself to static analysis well enough for senior engineers to have a hope of safely defusing or refactoring away most footguns set off by the junior/offshore devs. Most.


  • “I want predictable behavior for all possible inputs” is hardly a requirement that requires a fortune teller to see coming.

    JavaScript has a particularly insane stdlib because this language wasn’t designed, it is a botched chimera with deformities so severe it should have died 15 times over but people just won’t let it.

    Then to rub salt in the wound this horrific mess became the most popular language in the world by virtue of being the only language for the most popular application ecosystem in the world (the web). So the cancer is spreading and now you can find JavaScript in servers and fucking desktop environments and now your windows start menu takes five seconds to load because fucking react.js is loading the 75 polyfills necessary to make up for the fact that JS’s “standard” library looks like it was designed by 3 cocained-up gibbons.


  • I’ve created the Aro community on blahaj, but I’ve found there’s just not much to talk about.

    How do you talk about something you don’t feel or do?

    One thing I’d be interested in is research into the causes of aromanticism, but last I checked there’s literally zero academic research that treats it as distinct from asexuality.

    I expect a strong link with autism due to the involvement of oxytocin.
    Maybe I should run a poll in aro communities to check my theory, but I’m afraid that sample size and bias would make the results meaningless.



  • It’s one of a plethora of scripting languages from the '90s which were designed to be the antithesis of “fail fast” and kept going no matter what.

    I guess what with C/C++ being the Mainstream Option at the time, not having to deal with a strict compiler must have felt like freedom. As someone who has had to maintain, cleanup and migrate ancient PHP code, I call it folly. That mindset of “let the programmer just do whatever and keep trucking” breeds awful programming practices and renders static analysis varying degrees of useless, which makes large-scale refactoring hard to automate which is just amazing when your major versions aren’t even remotely FUCKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.

    PHP’s original design is just fundamentally atrocious. It became popular in large part because unmaintainable code is usually someone else’s problem.

    A language that I would definitely use for server-side rendering and that was already good from its first stable release is Go. It was thoughtfully designed and lends itself really well to static analysis, while still being easy to write and decently performant.



  • There were definitely a couple literal demented sociopath rapists in the mix. What changed wasn’t the law, but the political context and institutions.

    It took decades for the GOP to systematically destroy faith in institutions.

    It took years of Trump presidency followed by a strong reaffirmation of popular support in the last election.

    It took Obama and Biden abdicating their duty to their electorate by respectively refusing to nominate a new Justice and refusing to prosecute Trump for sedition.

    It took the media failing their duty to inform voters of Trump’s past, intentions, and state of mind.

    It took decades of slow work by the right to reframe the media landscape to be less truthful and more obedient.

    It took social media and their algorithms to galvanize fascism.

    It took an entire cold war and war on terror to normalize an absolutely abnormal and near insurmountable militarization of domestic law enforcement.

    The US constitution is not to blame. That’s a cop-out answer, a lame scapegoat. America wouldn’t be saved by passing amendments alone. The rot goes far deeper than that. Just like the 13th amendment didn’t do much to fix the system of racial injustice the US was built on. If it was just a matter of wording, a silly loophole, it wouldn’t have worked. It worked because the vast majority of Americans abdicated their allegiance to the Bill of Rights, to Human Rights, and to Democracy.



  • The central bank facilitating electronic cash flow makes so much more sense than letting random foreign corporations siphon billions in profit they clearly don’t deserve in the slightest from your economy.

    Good on Brazil for breaking free. There’s finally been some push here in the EU for EPI/Wero, but progress has been frigid and online payment processing remains extremely fragmented to the point that if I buy something online outside the Benelux with a small vendor, chances are very high I will have to fall back to an American payment processor, which is insane.


  • And literally not a single one of them is useful for the purpose of quick, efficient, and secure transactions.

    Blockchains are slow and inefficient by design, since they need to build consensus. On any sufficiently popular blockchain, transactions are either fast or secure, never both.

    The “fix” that the crypto industry has come up with is to re-invent banks, except with even more crime and virtually no regulations. Now you’re just entrusting FTX with your coins to enjoy “immediate” transfers, how could that possibly go wrong?


  • They are designed to crumple on impact, absorbing energy by bending - quite a bit actually. You would die if you stood behind a crash barrier in a crash. So it’s a good thing they’re not being put right next to sidewalks, in addition to the accessibility issues.

    The actual thing wrong here is that sidewalks go on streets (slow speed, pedestrian traffic) and crash barriers go on roads (high speeds, no expected pedestrian traffic). If you need pedestrian access between two points only connected by road, build a separated path.

    No pedestrian should feel unsafe due to the lack of a crash barrier, because no pedestrian should be expected to walk next to car traffic going so fast that curbs aren’t enough of a deterrent.

    The problem is North America in particular is infected with stroads, roads with street-like characteristics (i.e. lots of houses, businesses, intersections) but retaining the throughput and speed of a road. This design is fundamentally dangerous, to road users and in particular to pedestrians. There are ways to rehabilitate stroads into streets, but that requires actual thoughtful urban planning and not a bandaid solution like “encase sidewalks in concrete”.