Jetrel

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
453
Submissions
191
Member since
Feb 23
www.frogatto.com
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Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
My radicalization came from an incident a few years ago where some brownshirts yelled "trump won" and emptied a clip into my sister's friend's house party. They were uninvolved with politics, and had no obvious "marks" like gender shit, ethnicity (white); just anything that conceivably would have made them a target. Just normal, innocent 20-somethings.

I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him.

Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats.

All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say.

-

It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.

Comment · 1 year ago
Yeah; frankly, in almost all languages, some early works of literature tend to be THE thing that establishes canonical spelling. A lot of this is simply that they act as an argument-settler when two people can't agree how something "ought to be" spelled. In fact, sometimes they go so far as to warp pronunciation, cementing little verbal quirks that only some speakers had.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
It's not soldered. It used to be, but ever since the M1, it's in-CPU. The ram is actually part of the CPU die.

Needless to say it has batshit insane implications for memory bandwidth.

I've got an M1, and the load time for apps is absolutely fucking insane by comparison to my iMac; there's at least one AAA game whose loading time dropped from about 5 minutes on my quad-core intel, to 5 seconds on my mac studio.

There's just a shitload of text-processing and compiling going on any time a large game gets launched. It's been incredibly good for compiling C++ and Node apps, as well.

Comment · 3 years ago
Yep; tons of credit cards do usurious bait-and-switch stuff like that, under the express hope to make it up on people who have occasional "slippages" where they miss it by one pay period.

The "siren song" on those is the whole "if you're careful you can cancel" trick the users think they're pulling off. They may individually, but not in aggregate.

These cards are often much easier to get approved for.

Comment · 3 years ago
This person gets it.
Comment · 3 years ago
The reality is that nobody wants the alternative. Another commenter was replying to you pitching a mobile debian version, and went on to explain that said mobile debian version isn't usable ... and that's probably because the size of the community of people actually interested in it is so vanishingly tiny that they can't sustain development.

It's like watching the stillborn OpenPandora or GP2x, and discovering that "devices bought almost exclusively to pirate SNES/SEGA games" have no devs writing games for their market because ... well ... you know ...

———

Woke: using OSS as a dev model because it's inherently more efficient/effective and leads to better software Broke: using OSS because "muh rights".

Comment · 3 years ago
In the finest tradition of Jean-Louis Gassée:

The app store is a condom (or a covid mask). It's not all about "you"; it doesn't matter a damned sight if YOU are careful, or if YOU are responsible. Other people can make god-awful decisions that screw you over, and you have no power to stop them. Or rather: the app store IS your power to stop them.

I can't count the number of times I've seen windows users get duped by phishing that gives a bad actor root access. If that's your family member, that's YOUR problem; it doesn't matter if you were super careful — if your 18 year old son fucks up because he just didn't realize he was getting hacked, well — you're liable. That's what regulations are about; just like the FDA, just everything else.

I like having a platform where there is no fear. Same reason I like vaccines, same reason I like food safety regulations, etc. It's about network effects.

———

The worst thing about all this stuff is: when tragedies like this happened back in the day (and I remember, clearly, friends having their drives get wiped by script kiddies) — you suffer in silence. You sob and cry about whatever happened to you, and try to "raise awareness" in the open-source community about how maybe we should do something better, and nobody listens.

A lot of this stuff in the OSS community reminds me of gun nuts and school shootings; people wring their hands when a personal tragedy happens, the solution is right in front of them should they dare to actually adopt it, but they refuse to adopt it because it's ideologically untenable. So they just pretend the problem never happened until it personally hits their own family — and the worst thing is watching their friends, around them, engage in the same denial.

The two "real consequences" are losing your data (drive wipes, randomware, etc), and financial fraud (someone getting your CC number or bank access). I personally know people who've been hit by this. It's heartwrenching when it happens.

Have the political will to adopt the solution.

Comment · 3 years ago
That's fully possible, even easy, on an iOS device.

---

The kind of programming people are agitating for in threads like these is emphatically NOT general-purpose programming. It's a very specific kind of proto-programming - being able to write direct inputs in exactly the kind of way you'd write software in the 1980s; a core example being the ability to write for a built-in BASIC interpreter, right on the commandline.

Plot twist: that shit's useless.

I grew up in that era, and that kind of programming is a toy. You can write gimmicky little things like outputting text in various colors, or at extraordinary expense, you can use these incredibly basic building-blocks to jerry-rig higher-level constructs to actually accomplish something meaningful.

It's an incredibly damning indictment that most of the successful pieces of software from that era started by bootstrapping their way out of having to do direct "dos/apple console" programming and wrote a high-level interpreter for something better so they didn't have to deal with that; every major title did something like its own virtual machine (c.f. lucasarts games), its own lisp interpreter, etc.

It doesn't teach you to program; it teaches you to bootstrap language interpreters — if you get incredibly lucky and figure that out on your own. The other "99% of space marines get attrited in training"; the other 99% of aspiring programmers from that era never figured that out, and gave up at the blinkenlights stage, without ever building an actual piece of software, or really getting their machine to actually do anything. I use that example to illustrate the absurdity: the WH40K trope is meant to be satire, because that level of attrition in any field is just a bafflingly wasteful way to elevate people to higher skillsets. Survivor bias may make heroes out of the tiny minority of people who actually made it (the Jordan Mechners of the world), but the cost in people who never "break through" isn't worth it.

I'd rather teach people to actually program. Teaching them to build the ingredients for programming (not the universal ingredients, but just the ingredients to enable it on one very particular kind of host medium) isn't it.

My regard to that "programming" era is: "rest in piss, you won't be missed".

Comment · 3 years ago
He notably took credit for ending the lawlessness of the 90s, which was really bad. Russia went through a couple of years of being an outright "failed state", with basically no police operating in much of the country, and rampant gang violence, extortion, and lots of people wondering how they were going to survive, let alone put food on the table.

Putin played the classic "tough on crime" authoritarian tack, except the crime wave was genuine, and huge. The routine street crime and killings were brought to a stop, and ... unfortunately he's been riding the popularity wave from that for at least 20 years. I mean — he didn't solve the high-level corruption of basically having a mafia class run things, which robs the average people of opportunity, but he did slam down on street crime, at least.

Credit for this is a bit misplaced, but it is a reason why he was unusually popular for quite a while.

Comment · 3 years ago
It's almost like the fundamental basis of crypto is fraud. Like they're not actually selling anything, besides "british south sea company" ~~stock shares~~ coins.
Comment · 4 years ago
At this point, I don't think much of famous schools, and might even find them a -minus- on hiring criterion. I'd be much more likely to hire someone from a tier-2 school who doesn't have any of the negative baggage — the wealth and "connections" are kind of a big risk factor to my mind.

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