Easier job to do when you’re actually getting reports.

• Reporting = this breaks the rules please moderate
• Blocking = Fuck them, even if they rechnicly abide by the rules I don’t want them near me
• Muting = I don’t want to see what this person does but don’t want to hurt them beyond that

It’s not even about predictions or estimations - everything’s so many years late everyone stopped counting. They just… don’t seem to understand “scoping”? The pitch is “ultra-realistic life-size universe sandbox simulation” and they keep hitting walls because they’re using tech that’s completely inadequate for the task at hand but they won’t let that deter them. They’ve probably reimplemented every subsystem of the Crysis 3 engine a dozen times by now, and it’s still not anywhere near capable of achieving even a tenth of their ambitions. Fuck, they just very recently got their server meshing thing barely working after like a decade of development (at the cost of rewriting everything again of course).

It’s like watching a team raising billions to build the Burj Khalifa but all they have is a bunch of dry sand and some spoons. Deadlines aren’t really the issue.

That’s treading dangerously close to a specific kind of conspiracy theory there.

The EBU has pretty strong financial ties to Israel, not least of which their main sponsor Moroccan Oil. But at the end of the day you can count on the ghouls in charge to always find the coward’s way out and follow the money. It’s the exact same pattern of behavior they had with Russia in 2022, which they initially allowed to compete before backpedalling.

Pretending that this is an issue solely because of some conspiracy is not only baseless, but it also unfairly lets most European broadcasters off the hook for refusing to uphold the set the same hard lines with Israel that they set with Russia. Israel competed because European broadcasters were happy enough to include Israel. Simple as.

It’s very funny that you can get ChaptGPT to spell out the word (making each letter an individual token) and still be wrong.

Of course it makes complete sense when you know how LLMs work, but this demo does a very concise job of short-circuiting the cognitive bias that talking machine == thinking machine.

It’s like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone’s who’s “about it” is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you’ll probably never hear of.

There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people’s media consumption.
For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.

In some ways it’s a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).

Like Trump needs distraction. He could breathe slightly funny or his hands could turn a different shade of purple and the news circus would move on from the birthday book tomorrow, which doesn’t even confirm anything we didn’t already know.

Killer was well-prepared and a good shot, unlike the weirdo who tried to take out Trump. The only unusual thing is that people who have the mental acumen to actually pull something like this off and not get caught immediately tend to be mentally stable enough not to attempt something like that.

But times are a-changing and political violence in the US is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. People forgot that the Rule of Law and Social Contract were meant not just as ways to prevent conservatives from implementing ethnic/religious fundamentalism, but also to prevent this exact kind of thing happening. Trump is at the helm of a government he seemingly distrusts, whose own rules he constantly breaks or ignores, whose institutions he actively sabotages, whose fundamental principles he spits on. As a consequence trust in all three branches of government is crumbling, which inevitably legitimizes political violence as a last resort vector of change.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#argparse.ArgumentParser.add_mutually_exclusive_group

However I’ve never had to use that feature. Like I said it can make sense in specific contexts but it is a pretty strong indicator that you have built in a CLI antipattern or too much complexity.

Counterpoint: Yes, parse don’t validate, but CLIs should not be dealing with dependency management.

I love Python’s argparse because:

• It’s “Parse, don’t validate” (even supports FileType as a target)
• It enforces or strongly encourages good CLI design
  • Required arguments should in most situations be positional arguments, not flags. It’s curl <URL> not curl --url <URL>.
  • Flags should not depend on each other. That usually indicates spaghetti CLI design. Don’t do server --serve --port 8080 and server --reload with rules for mix-and-matching those, do server serve --port 8080 and server reload with two separate subparsers.
  • Mutually exclusive flags sometimes make sense but usually don’t. Don’t do --xml --json, do -f [xml|json].
  • This or( pattern of yours IMO should always be replaced by a subparser (which can use inheritance!). As a user the options’ data model should be immediately intuitive to me as I look at the --help and having mutually exclusive flags forces the user to do the extra work of dependency management. Don’t do server --env prod --auth abc --ssl, do server serve prod --auth abc --ssl where prod is its own subparser inheriting from AbstractServeParser or whatever.

Thinking of CLI flags as a direct mapping to runtime variables is the fundamental mistake here I think. A CLI should be a mapping to the set(s) of behavior(s) of your application. A good CLI may have mandatory positional arguments but has 0 mandatory flags, 0 mutually exclusive flags, and if it implements multiple separate behaviors should be a tree of subparsers. Any mandatory or mutually exclusive flags should be an immediate warning that you’re not being very UNIX-y in your CLI design.

I’ve been using the AI to help me with some beginner level rust compilation checks recently.

I never once got an accurate solution, but half the time it gave me a decent enough keyword to google or broken pattern to fix myself. The other half of the time it kept giving me back my own code proudly telling me it fixed it.

Don’t worry though, AGI is right around the corner. Just one more trillion dollars bro. One trillion and we’ll provide untold value to the shareholders bro. Trust me bro.

It has certainly helped to be able to work from home in the last couple years so I do take a walk during lunchtime. Working in an office you’re expected to socialize during lunch breaks, which happen indoors…

Even then, 30 minutes of daylight every day five days a week in the best case scenario is NOT a lot, especially when it’s cloudy for weeks on end so saying “daylight” is already kind of stretching it.

You mustn’t get “winter depression” particularly bad then. I can’t get anything done when DST does away. Extreme cold or extreme heat I can easily find physical solutions to (my house is well-insulated), but spending all daylight hours in front of a screen then having zero sunlight for after-work activities is just a burden I have to bear 5 months out of the year and it makes me want to kill myself or become a bricklayer or sth.

I don’t trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I’m kinda surprised Google didn’t already gift an underage child to Trump so he’d make the problem go away.

However a perfectly viable option that I’m sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google’s former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone’s best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.

This wouldn’t be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a “common good” is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.

North American trees species have evolved to have more vibrant fall colors than European species.

So you’re basically proving that British guy’s point that yes, they are a different color but no-one believes it because they think they know what fall looks like in temperate climates.

music-library $ du -h -d 0 .
270G	.

I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.

When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?

The EU is currently deepthroating Trump so hard that it’s completely out of breath and all our clothes are ruined.

With how volatile Trump is this could change literally anyday, but with the current political equilibrium all google would have to do is gift trump a shiny golden thing so he makes a threatening remark about gas exports and the EU would go “uwu yes master right away master, do you want to fuck my gaping asshole while you’re at it?”.

This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency… on Arch Linux. It’s rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org’s homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.

Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?

Well you hardly have a leg to stand on about “feeling superior” when you’re out here being smug about criticizing harmless tastes.

I don’t see how listening to vinyls in the privacy of my own home is considered performative, but if that’s the only reasoning you’re willing to entertain… Well go right ahead, I thought I made a good case for it but I guess I was wrong and I am buying vinyls for the clout.

You’ve completely missed the point.

You grew up in a world where the quirks of analog formats were nothing but technical limitations to be overcome. It is true that a FLAC is literally superior in every way to a Vinyl if your value function only takes in cost, quality, and convenience.

HOWEVER Gen Z grew up in a world where music was always cheap and convenient to access. We also (mostly) grew up in a world of touchscreens and always-online gadgets and doodads. My generation’s first portable music player was often the iPod touch. You know what all of that does to a person? It creates a deep craving for tactile feedback. For technology that doesn’t nag with software updates, for music that can’t be “unlicensed” and pulled from your library remotely, for a music player that you can touch and feel and interact with in a more meaningful way than tapping on the little square of glass that already runs our lives. For the little rituals that have been stripped away, like flipping a vinyl at the midway point or rewinding a tape.

The entire point of analog is that it’s “worse”. It’s un-clinical, it’s raw, it’s tactile, it’s physical. Listening to my favorite albums on vinyl is such a better experience than through the disembodied shuffle of my phone. I don’t crave maximum audio fidelity or convenience because I always could have those things literally whenever I want.

If it’s all money… How do you propose the fascists will go away? Good words and peaceful protests don’t mean shit when the oligarchs own the quasi-totality of the media landscape.

As a totally unrelated thought, Luigi’s alleged cheap 3D printer did more for access to healthcare in the US than every government from the past decade-and-a-half and that’s a straight fact.

I won’t comment on whether political violence is the right thing to do, but if you think the civil rights movement was peaceful you’ve been taught some disgustingly whitewashed history. Ever heard of the Black Panthers? They got in firefights with the police all the time, even though many would later pretend that MLK was the only and unanimous voice for all of America’s oppressed.

Also the whole Civil Rights movement can be traced to the Civil War, instigated in part by people like John Brown whose whole thing was massacring slavers in the name of God.

This rewriting of history of America as a nation of peaceful citizens who got their Rights by Asking Nicely fucking pisses me off.