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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • We don’t know what an eventual outcome will be right now and it would be… weird to talk about help financing “defense” for years and then actually negotiate for concessions.

    It’s an open secret that if all Russian nukes would disappear over night, the other members of the UN security council would probably party for a week. The US (and the EU) is supporting Ukraine because that’s the right thing to do AND it is in their interest because who knows what a bigger Russia will do next. But they’re also doing it because it’s weakening Russia and that’s also in their interest, even though they would never publicly say it or not with the intensity that they actually think that way.

    Long story short, if the absolute optimal (for Ukraine and “the west”) thing happens:

    • the war exhausts Russia more than Ukraine + supporters
    • the timing for negotiations is chosen in a way that is extremely bad for Russia, to the effect that Russia doesn’t have to just apologize, return territory, pay reparations, and all that, but ALSO give up other things.
    • like UN observers and limits to their military.
    • nuclear disarmament
    • ???

    It would look extremely badly if politicians, actual leaders of nations, were to talk about “defense” for years and then actually ask those things in the end. Which they want to.

    So (imo, it’s all speculation) it’s preemptive PR management that leaves room for that asking for more things than would be justifiable with “defense”.




  • Why the heck would 2 projects share the same library?

    Coming from the olden days, with good package management, infrequent updates and the idea that you wanted to indeed save that x number of bytes on the disk and in memory, only installing one was the way to go.

    Python also wasn’t exactly a high brow academic effort to brain storm the next big thing, it was built to be a simple tool and that included just fetching some library from your system was good enough. It only ended up being popular because it is very easy to get your feet wet and do something quick.


  • The difficulty with python tooling is that you have to learn which tools you can and should completely ignore.

    Unless you are a 100x engineer managing 500 projects with conflicting versions, build systems, docker, websites, and AAAH…

    • you don’t really need venvs
    • you should not use more than on package manager (I recommend pip) and you should cling to it with all your might and never switch. Mixing e.g. conda, on linux system installers like apt, is the problem. Just using one is fine.
    • You don’t “need” need any other tools. They are bonuses that you should use and learn how to use, exactly when you need them and not before. (type hinting checker, linting, testing, etc…)

    Why is it like this?

    Isolation for reliability, because it costs the businesses real $$$ when stuff goes down.

    venvs exists to prevent the case that “project 1” and “project 2” use the same library “foobar”. Except, “project 1” is old, the maintainer is held up and can’t update as fast and “project 2” is a cutting edge start up that always uses the newest tech.

    When python imports a library it would use “the libary” that is installed. If project 2 uses foobar version 15.9 which changed functionality, and project 1 uses foobar uses version 1.0, you get a bug, always, in either project 1 or project 2. Venvs solve this by providing project specific sets of libraries and interpreters.

    In practice for many if not most users, this is meaningless, because if you’re making e.g. a plot with matplotlib, that won’t change. But people have “best practices” so they just do stuff even if they don’t need it.

    It is a tradeoff between being fine with breakage and fixing it when it occurs and not being fine with breakage. The two approaches won’t mix.

    very specific (often outdated) version of python,

    They are giving you the version that they know worked. Often you can just remove the specific version pinning and it will work fine, because again, it doesn’t actually change that much. But still, the project that’s online was the working state.



  • Depends, it’s been a bit disappointing to see virtually no change since I started using it, particularly in terms of QoL. It is open source, so that’s on everyone, including me, but I had hoped for more speed, etc…

    Mastodon is way better when it comes to filtering.

    Having the option of a reddit clone is pretty good though and I will stick with it. Who knows when and where it will get that critical bit of momentum.

    It’s already superior to regular forums, in my opinion, so now the question is what kind of format you want to have discussions in, instead of having to default to forums. That choice is a definite upside and I’m glad it exists.



  • I don’t think that there is an obligation with that kind of standard, no.

    Banking and security, accessibility yes.

    Specific choice of “user side software”, probably not. And it’s somewhat unlikely to happen too, because if you think about apps on phones, if suddenly a completely new phone OS were to show up and had 30% market share, it wouldn’t make sense to have a law that would legally require them to offer an app on that platform

    And Chrome isn’t “officially bad” in a legal sense.

    The internet standards themselves are a bit… imprecise too. Implementing them in browser is ultimately up to the companies, there is no legal body requiring a browser to have or not have features. They just usually sort of do the same things because going different paths would be stupid. Mostly. Sometimes they totally do that, though, e.g. calendars and contact info have a standard, but all implementations are a mess and transfer is a pain.


  • When things collide, they transfer their movement energy. If things collide like this >- They will continue in roughly the same direction. If they collide like this -> <- their movement will cancel out and they will fall into the sun.

    Satistically, at the “beginning of time”, in a random sphere around the sun, things will not be completely the same. So everything will either collide and fall. Or it will collide and continue in roughly the same direction. What we have now are the leftovers that were moving in roughly the same direction and colliding so little that they didn’t fall into the sun because of that.

    The same is true for the “disk”: If you start with a roughly evenly distributed sphere of gases or something, there is a middle somewhere where there is a little bit more mass than anywhere else. That’s where things will go.


  • At the cost of sounding naive and stupid

    It may be a naive question, but it’s a very important naive question. Naive doesn’t mean bad.

    The answer is that that is not possible, because the compiler is supposed to translate the very specific language of C into mostly very specific machine instructions. The programmers who wrote the code, did so because they usually expect a very specific behavior. So, that would be broken.

    But also, the “unsafety” is in the behavior of the system and built into the language and the compiler.

    It’s a bit of a flawed comparison, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of wooden poles, because of the advantages that wood offers, and then complain that they are flammable. You can build it in steel, but you have to replace all of the poles. Just the poles on the left side won’t do.

    And you can’t automatically detect the unsafe parts and just patch those either. If we could, we could just fix them directly or we could automatically transpile them. Darpa is trying that at the moment.


  • I think the timing isn’t quite right, because the other social media places aren’t figuratively totally on fire.

    There isn’t “the great social media collapse of 20XX” happening, because of some security issue or servers being super expensive or ads being actually 99% of the content. The forces that be are managing things well enough that things aren’t collapsing right now.

    There is no single actually big celebrity that has picked a fediverse platform as the place to be, follow and discuss news.

    And there is no killer feature that you can only get here.

    The bonfire is stacked nicely, but there is no spark. For now. That could change at any moment, but it could also take a while.


  • I don’t think the timing is quite right.

    I don’t really have anything meaningful to contribute to the feeds and most of the discussions are a bit pointless. They’re not really changing anything. So, in part those other platforms are fueled by outrage culture. Which I know is bad, so not having it is good, but then we also don’t have the growth from it.

    The technology is there and that should help. Apparently people aren’t going to mass migrate from reddit quite yet, even though the push last year probably helped a lot.

    It is a network problem. I think the slow growth will / should happen eventually, because the fediverse is an objectively good place to start a community. It’s just not going to be fast and other platforms adding push factors would help obviously. We’ll see where reddit goes with their paid subs.

    I don’t think the low effort posts are a problem, there is hardly motivation to interact with an empty page and there is slightly more if there are “boring topics”. At least it’s a place.








  • Sure. Yes. I’m aware.

    The point is, if an employee isn’t productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.

    If the work is being done, even if the employee isn’t always 100% focused, the company shouldn’t care.

    If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.

    using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.

    No, companies don’t allow WFH because they don’t trust employees or can’t verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don’t understand that work and couldn’t judge if it’s being done correctly without adults in the room.


    tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.