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Comment · 1 month ago
I don't think that's a generous way to interpret it.

I see it more as: every day they will go on the slack channel and pause, wondering "Is there a neat trick I've learned or used recently?" then they share it. It's like a ritual to remember that you can share things because it's easy to forget other people don't work the same way you do. Writing it all at once is difficult (you have to remember a lot of stuff at once) and it tends to go unread.

I also think every single day is a stretch, but it's nice to pause once in a while to think about how you could help other people with something you've learned.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 7 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Unlearning OOP does not necessarily involve forgetting abstraction and the concept of an object. "Unlearning OOP" involves freeing yourself from the notion that all programming should be designed as an object hierarchy. There is/was a tendency in object-oriented programming to consider that it is the only way Real Software™ is made. You tend to focus more on the architecture of your system than its actual features.

Notice the prerequisite to unlearning something is learning it first. I don't think anyone proposes that the concept of an object is useless.

Comment · 1 year ago
> The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth happened in 1958 without much violence.

Quoting from the article:

  Things came to a head in 1958 as France struggled to decolonize. There was strong opposition within France to Algerian independence and part of the army openly rebelled. Important generals threatened a coup unless de Gaulle was returned to power. They sent paratroopers to capture Corsica in case anyone missed their point.
The article even fails to mention Operation Resurrection. Hopefully we don't need coups every time we want a new constituent assembly.
Comment · 1 year ago
I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

Also, I think it solves a different problem: it prevents spoofing/MITM but what about legitimate certificates? We would still need CAs that actually curate their customers and hold them accountable. And we would need email servers/clients to differentiate between strict CAs and ones that are used solely for encryption purposes.

I don't know that DNS should be applied to emails as is anyway but I find it could force spammers to operate with publicly available information which would make holding them accountable easier.

Comment · 1 year ago
Why should curation be centralized? We do not need a "decentralized dictatorship" (what would that even be? that's antithetical) and we certainly do not need a centralized one. It seems crazy that your solutions to AI, spam, and "automated traffic" (I don't know what that is, I assume web crawlers and such) is that the police control every single transaction.

First off, we can simply let the user, or client software, choose. Why should we let centralized servers do that by default?

At scale, DNS is somewhat centralized but authorities are disconnected from internet providers and web browsers. They're the best actors to regulate this.

For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders? There could be different limits based on whether you are an individual or a company, and whether you're sending 10'000 emails or just 100.

Regardless of whether these are good solutions -- why jump to extreme ones? "TINA" is not a helpful argument, it's a slogan.

Comment · 1 year ago
Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.
Comment · 1 year ago
How so? Where are the bugs you speak of? I don't find the UI to be nightmarish either. Can you point to specific issues the site maintainer can look at?

If this is the worst modern website you've seen, you're very lucky.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
From the repository's README:

  Commented source code of the C64 Lode Runner Game - Including the copy protection
Comment · 1 year ago
It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.

The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".

The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.

Comment · 1 year ago
Even if we did manage to achieve such an upgrade, we would still have to successfully manage to secure the rare earths required for electronics manufacturing. Extracting and processing these resources is becoming more and more complex. Especially when you consider we would need these resources not only to sustain our current infrastructure, but also to improve it.
Comment · 1 year ago
> Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment.

What do you mean? What would free software requiring redistribution payment look like? Say I send a copy of a free-as-in-freedom game that I may or may not have modified in some way to a friend or on a forum, should I pay its author(s) for this? How could I, for instance, commission someone to modify software if I want to change it when I don't have the skills to do so myself, in your definition of free software? I think a simpler definition, like Stallman's, is less restrictive of software modification.

Restricting how software is redistributed holds a great deal of power, especially when you remember the idea behind free software is that you get to have control over your software. Copyleft is such an example -- it is highly restrictive.

I get the financial issue one could have with free software as defined by Stallman; freeing the software you distribute is a difficult decision. Free software is advocated from the point of view of its users, who are ignorant to the difficulties one might face when developing and publishing software. If this is a decision you can make, it is kinder to your users to free the software you publish.

Side note: free software requires one to examine how they value commodities. Do you value the object itself, or the human time it took to make it? In a world where software is thought of as free by default, developers can be paid not per copy, but per patch. I believe such a world would be better for software quality because I agree with you that competitive markets are better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.

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