• 0 Posts
  • 232 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: May 29th, 2024

help-circle



  • It’s a tool, useful in some contexts and not useful in others.

    In my opinion this is a thought terminating cliche in programming and the IT industry in general. It can be, and is, said in response to any sentiment about any thing.

    Now, saying what sort of context you think something should or should not be used in, and what qualities of that thing make it desirable/undesirable in that context, could lead to fruitful discussion. But just “use the right tool for the right job” doesn’t contribute anything.





  • They all started killing each other because plasmid use makes you psychotic, unless you can afford to keep taking more and more.

    They all started taking plasmids because they needed to compete in the workplace (then later, in the war) or end up homeless / dead.

    Plasmids were legal in the first place because Randism, being based 100% on individual responsibility, doesn’t believe that things like feedback loops or cumulative effects can happen at a societal level, and so doesn’t believe in regulations.

    Plasmids are a pretty clear metaphor for dehumanizing yourself to serve the market, especially because the Randian superman is a psychopath that is only self interested.

    But even without plasmids the fact that the worlds elite were brought down to Rapture, yet (to quote an audio log) “we couldn’t all be captains of industry, someone had to scrub the toilets” bred a huge amount of resentment from people who felt scammed and now trapped down there. Just like in the real world the markets in BioShock rely completely on low level workers to be able to function, and yet punish them for being in that position.




  • Since you have expertise in this maybe you can answer this question for me.

    Do brick or stone roads last longer than asphalt or concrete roads?

    It seems to me like they should, given the higher hardness of the material and the presumably greater resistance to freeze/thaw cycles. I have also seen a few brick roads near me that I can only imagine have gone a very long time with no maintaince (as I think the government here would rather cover it in asphalt than try to work with the bricks). The ground underneath the bricks has shifted over time forming depressions in the path that car tires take, but it is still fine to drive over at low speeds, as the slopes are smooth unlike the holes that form in asphalt.

    I’ve tried googling this before but haven’t been able to find a straightforward answer as to how long a road like that can go between rounds of maintenance.


  • This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

    It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that’s easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.


  • FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:

    1. When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.

    2. The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.


  • I’m not a hunter, I’ve never shot a dear and I don’t think I ever will. I do go hiking though.

    Let’s say it comes across as “grey” for argument’s sake. But they CAN apparently distinguish all the shades of green and brown and that is why you are dressed like John Duty. Which means… they have a giant blob of “grey” moving around? Pretty sure that would stick out…

    When you hear the term “red-green color blindness”, do you think that red and green appear grey to those people while they can still see orange, yellow, and blue the same as everyone else? And that they go through their lives with these super high contrast grey objects everywhere?

    That’s not how eyes work. Color blindness means an inability to distinguish between shades of colors, not that they have some sort of selective filters that block those colors out, turn objects of that color invisible, or convert them to grey.

    Homie. Go spend even twenty minutes walking around a park in a mountain town. Deer don’t give a fuck.

    You think this because you live in a suburb where people feed them, “in a park”, or “bordering a forested area”. No unconditioned wild animal in the world, except maybe things that live on tiny islands with no predators, is chill with an unknown human sized animal standing next to it.

    When I hike I sometimes see deer as close as a hundred feet or so away, but if one started walking towards me I would consider that behavior so far out of the ken that I might think it has rabies or wasting disease.

    Understand that I’m not even arguing that shooting a deer is some sort of crazy achievement.






  • However, this fuckin’ half-in/half-out state has become the engine of a manifold of security issues, primarily bc nobody but nerds or industry specialists knows that much about it yet. That has led to rushed, busy, or just plain lazy devs and engineers to either keep IPv6 sockets listening, unguarded, or to just block them outright and redirect traffic to IPv4 anyway.

    Its kind of interesting to me how conservative the IT industry is with stuff like this.

    The industry loves to say “move fast and break things” or “innovate and disrupt”, but that generally only applies to things that can be shat out in a two week long Python project (or shat out in 2 weeks after publicly funded universities spent years figuring out the algorithm for you). For anything foundational, like CPU architecture, operating systems, or the basic assumptions about how UI should work, they’re terrified of change.


  • Oh? Is the orange man building nuclear plants and high speed rail at a rapid pace and for super cheap?

    No? Then can you explain to me why this comment is relevant at all? I’m aware that China has shitty policies in regards to some minorities, but are you insinuating that’s the reason they’re able to build infrastructure so quickly?

    No? Then who is being oppressed when companies are forced to “tow the line” and complete a project quickly instead of stopping to sue each other and/or the state constantly like they do in North American? Am I supposed to feel bad for Guangxi LiuGong Machinery Co? Is China Energy Engineering Corp Ltd crying in the corner?