spicy noodles

I quite like the star-button on Mastodon for this. Just pings the comment author that you appreciated their comment. So, it’s not an indication to some algorithm that this comment is incredibly relevant for everyone, because well, some comments just aren’t.

Somewhat tangential, but USB-C docking stations, as useful as it is to have everything in one cable, it can also be annoying.

At the office, I often just want to charge my laptop with them, but they also give me a wired internet connection, which, thanks to corporate networking shitfuckery, doesn’t work. So, every time I plug in, I have to disable that wired connection.

Also, recently a colleague had problems getting her headset working when she was plugged into certain docks, ultimately due to a bug in the OS.
Like, alright, that should be fixed in the OS, but that USB-C dock doesn’t even have a speaker attached to it. It’s completely useless that it shows up as an audio device.
And even after we found a workaround to fix her headset, she will now have to switch over her audio device every time she plugs into a dock.

So, basically it’s now one step to plug in the cable, but potentially multiple steps to undo half of what you unwillingly plugged in…

Apparently, “Theorems for free!” is a paper that talks about an extensive ability to reason about parts of programs, if you follow some rather basic rules.

However, lots of popular programming languages throw this ability out the window, because they do not want to enforce those basic rules.
Most languages, for example, allow for rather uncontrolled side effects and to be able to reason as a programmer, you have to make the assumption that no one else abused side effects.

The instanceof is rather referring to dynamic typing, though, as e.g. employed by Python and JS, which makes it difficult to make any assumptions at all.

So, in statically typed languages, when you’re implementing a function, you can declare that a given parameter is a number or a string etc. and the compiler will enforce that for you. In dynamically typed languages, you have to assume that anyone calling your function is using it correctly, which is a difficult assumption to make after a refactoring in a larger codebase.

All in all, such different levels of rigorosity can be fine, but the larger your codebase grows, the more you do want such rules to be enforced, so you can just ignore the rest of the codebase.

Sure, but hopefully you have no trouble believing that simultaneously, nuclear power companies and governments wanting to use nuclear, despite the risks, have been propagandizing for nuclear.

Pro-nuclear folks are often completely unaccepting of there being risks and externalized costs, which feels to me like they’re subject to propaganda (notwithstanding that I’m likely subject to different propaganda).

Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:

I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.

Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.

Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.

All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.

Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.

Yeah, and at least those are their pets and they don’t, like, violently kidnap wild Pokémon to force those into fights.

Connect Four, I win!

What kind of propaganda non-sense article is that? I live in Germany. We’re doing absolutely fine.

For anyone left behind, Minetest is a community-developed alternative.

It’s more of a game engine/launcher + highly moddable, so the base game is rather minimalistic, but you can simply install more extensive games. For example, for a very Minecraft-like experience, MineClone2 is your best bet.

You mean, like on Ubuntu?

I agree that it would look quite different with the genders reversed. However, gender equality is not like mathematical equality, where every situation needs to be reversible.

Women have traditionally been less sex-positive and less dominant, which many consider indicators of a lack of true gender equality, so a progressive community will celebrate a reversal of that.

A long time ago in high school, my crush at the time was panicking, because a bug was crawling around her table. I was nearby, caught the bug, but then while still panicking, she told me to kill it.

I didn’t care to kill it, it was a harmless bug, but figured, eh, at least I’ll be her hero.

…nope. Immediately after I stepped on it, she hit me with “Why did you kill it?”. She’s vegetarian, just forgot her own principles for a moment while panicking.

Yes, she was not the most rational lady, but either way, that was when I learnt to have my own principles.

Few years later, there was a wasp in our classroom, which was drowsy from the heating. It managed to fly half around the room, then landed right on my sleeve. Everyone told me to whack it with a book, but I figured, fuck it, it can’t sting me through my sleeve, I’ll carry it to a nearby window.

She was in the room, too. This was long after I could have been her hero for anything. But that made it feel all the better, to show her I’ve grown up since.

What felt even better, though, was that I was my own personal hero, because these were my own principles.

I wasn’t sure about it either. There’s security researchers out there who might genuinely want to get a virus to run in a VM.

But yeah, the cmalw-lib-2.0 gives it away…

I don’t know, man, I’m still routing for having a bulldozer drive over random walkways throughout the day.

Bad at parking or got a car that just won’t fit into parking lots? → Enjoy a newly shortened car.

Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.

Some examples:

• Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
• Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
• Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared

And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.

Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.

Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.

You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.

But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.

I always imagine, the poor social media person’s wage directly depends on how many viral posts they’ve made. And so they try and they try again, hoping that one day, one of their sterile brand-safe posts will somehow hit a nerve and make it big time.

Unfortunately, that still does not make these forced jokes any funnier.

There’s been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.

Lemmy was the first one that I’m aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.

https://tilvids.com has some reasonable ones, although they’re often just as well YouTubers, so you get similar clickbait, unfortunately.

My personal favourite is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, although it’s quite tricky to get into and still brutally difficult, even if you are in it.

It’s similar in concept to Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which others have mentioned here. Maybe try that one first. 🙃