masterspace

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

masterspace ,

If you have a point to make about why Valves is not abusing it's monopoly position make it. Otherwise no one wants to hear your dumb 'but the free market is always right' statement.

masterspace , (edited )

It's also [the face my cat makes when he's found a good box.

masterspace ,

Who the fuck cares what the economic analysis is?

Fighting climate change is going to hurt economically, either do an analysis comparing the current plan to an alternative one, or don't bother doing it.

Publishing an analysis that says 'the carbon tax hurts the economy' just gives dumbass conservatives something to bitch and complain about.

Regardless, compare whatever painful number is there to the trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that severe climate change will cost us and you'll see that the plan still makes sense.

I don't understand how conservatives can be so fucking stupid that they don't understand that our entire planet and biosphere crumbling and dying beneath us will cost the economy.

masterspace ,

Don't forget to block them so that you never hear an opposing view again!

masterspace ,

Go home OP, you're drunk.

And give us your keys, you've had too much minimalism to drive.

masterspace ,

That's Tupac's hologram, the real Tupac is Asian.

NorthWestWind , to Showerthoughts
@NorthWestWind@wetdry.world avatar

Philosophy is just applied existential crisis

@showerthoughts

masterspace , (edited )

The problem with philosophy in terms of understanding the bigger questions in life is that advanced physics (edit: and neuroscience, chemistry, math/stats, etc) has answered many questions that were previously in the realm of philosophy, and you can't really understand what's possible in reality / what constraints there are on abstract philosophy without understanding advanced physics and science.

Of course the problem with advanced physics is that it takes so much time and effort to learn and understand thoroughly that you often end up as a not great communicator to the average person.

Or, to be cheeky: physics aims to take the largest and most complicated concepts in the universe and explain them in the simplest possible language, and philosophy is the opposite.

masterspace ,

Philosophers literally invented formal logic to help them answer questions. Yes they are trying to answer questions and constrain the possible answer space where they can't.

masterspace ,

I would argue that it absolutely applies to both existentialism and epistemology. Epistemologists frequently concern themselves with questions about the limits of human knowledge and understanding without actually going there themselves.

masterspace ,

Sure, but at a fundamental level philosophers are not just sitting there asking questions with no purpose. They're still seeking new understanding and information which is a form of answering questions.

masterspace ,

Much like how martial arts is no longer as useful for self defence in a world with handguns, but instead makes for very good exercise and social connections, and is just fun.

Except that a key difference is that no one gives out PhDs for martial arts. Yes you can get a black belt, signalling that you are as skilled as the top tier martial artists (I assume, I don't do martial arts), but you cannot write a peer reviewed paper and get a PhD on karate because that would require learning something new about it and publishing it.

Philosophy in how the common person relates to it may just be as a mental kata that helps to improve their cognition and emotional regulation, but philosophy as a profession and academic discipline is still very much concerned with trying to answer questions and find ways of constraining the infinite to relevant possible answers.

masterspace ,

The point I'm making is that philosophers are trying to answer questions and if they weren't they wouldn't be getting PhDs, since a PhD is not given for just knowing a lot about Philosophy, but for discovering something new in the field.

masterspace ,

Yes there are pros and cons to both, but that does not mean they are the same or equal.

Renting inherently adds an extra middleman to the process, (someone still has to buy it), who is incentivized to rent-seek and drain everyone from as much of their money as possible.

Renting really only works in scenarios where you have a bunch of different rental companies to drive down costs, but now you're starting to get back to the original problem of duplicating everything.

masterspace , (edited )

In North America you don't see many home improvement stores downtown where people are most likely to rent.

Most Lowe's, Home Depots, etc do have tool rental options, but they're located out in the burbs where land is cheap and everyone has space to store tools.

masterspace ,

This is a terrible summary, it feels like you just summarized the first 3 paragraphs.

masterspace ,

Renting stuff makes sense, but there are still lots of inherent problems with tool libraries and the like.

They're great for a carpet shampooer or chainsaw you need once a year, but if you actually want to fix and build stuff around the home then booking a tool, taking perfect measurements, hauling your stuff over to a tool library, building it, hauling everything back home to check it, is simply an infeasibly onerous process. The instant you make a mistake and need a different tool, or check a measurement, etc, you're wasting hours of time, which is most often the biggest limiter for home projects anyways.

You also don't get to learn on the same tool and build up instincts and understanding of how it behaves.

masterspace ,

Libraries are non profits, everyone who works there just gets paid a wage, no one makes more money if libraries make more money.

Or from a systemic standpoint, the library system is effectively separate from the capitalist system we use for distributing everything else. In capitalism if you have no competition you raise prices so you get richer, so functioning capitalism requires multiple copies of everything and a lot of redundancy all actively competing. The library being non-profit sidesteps that effect.

masterspace ,

I'm conflating a tool library and a maker space but the same issues apply to both. Either way, for home projects you end up with a whole lot of extra transportation.

masterspace ,

It provides its method isn't good enough to provide value then and it's just a waste of compute time.

masterspace ,

Cool beans bro, learn how to read a full comment and you'd see the part where it doesn't matter since theyre basically the same and have the same drawbacks.

masterspace ,

You cut the first piece, realize you actually need a different type of saw for the next cut, it's booked out, now your project is indefinitely delayed.

They are similar because in both cases you are sacrificing resiliency (multiple copies of a resource), for efficiency (a singular shared copy).

A tool library is still a great idea / resource for when you're doing a project and need one weird tool that youll never use again, but most people who do any real amount of DIY over their lives will want their own set of tools that cover most of the bases.

masterspace ,

Counterpoint: You go to the store to buy the saw you think you'll need, come home, cut the first piece -- boom, same realization. Same time-sink to go back to the store. I don't think that's a concern unique to tool libs.

Yes, except that when your buying tools, that only happens once. The next project that happens you have that tool sitting there waiting for you.

Well, yeah. We're talking more expensive things that you only need for one project, or maybe a couple of times. Not the screwdriver set that you use for everything from box-cutting to adjusting the screws on your cabinet doors when they seem wonky.

By basic DIY tools I don't just mean screw driver, I mean probably something along the lines of: screwdriver set, socket set, hammer, wrench set, drill / driver, circular saw, multitool, jigsaw, tape measures, clamps, level, plus basic painting tools, basic drywalling tools, basic electrical tools.

masterspace ,

From reading more about the documentary, it sounds like some veterans explicitly said a massacre didn't happen, but then again that's one of those things where even one unforced admission to something that damning is pretty sus in itself.

masterspace ,

And Canada as a whole has a massive real estate affordability crisis, with Toronto housing being exceptionally unaffordable relative to real wages.

masterspace ,

I feel like Sony did a Sony here.

I'm old enough to remember when Sony shipped 22 million malware infested CDs because they were worried about Napster.

masterspace ,

Yes we do. FPGAs and memristors can both recreate those effects at the hardware level. The problem is scaling them and their necessary number of interconnections to the number of neurons in the human brain, on top of getting their base wiring and connections close to how our genetics build and wires our base brains.

masterspace , (edited )

Probably because this came out 16 years ago, before HomeAssistant even existed, it will still maintain wifi support for checking and controlling with your phone even after they cut off the cloud connection, and all their new products do have a local API and can still be used with HomeAssistant or whatever other local home automation server you have.

If You Hate Density, Maybe Don’t Live in A City (Oh the Urbanity!) ( www.youtube.com )

When you argue for housing reform to legalize denser development in our cities, you quickly learn that some people hate density. Like, really hate density, with visceral disgust and contempt for any development pattern that involves buildings being tall or close together.

masterspace ,

Lol bro, no. Not at all.

You know how you can start to dislike density? Spend some time in downtown Toronto midwinter and notice that east west streets literally do not get sun at street level, all day long.

I honestly cannot fathom how so many people think runaway density and a race for everyone to live in tiny cramped shoebox apartments is a good thing.

Yes, we need to overall increase our average density to be more sustainable, that didn't mean tearing down streetcar suburbs in Toronto and replacing them with endless walls of condos. That meant turning the in-city suburbs and actual suburbs into streetcar suburbs, but nope, race to the bottom instead.

masterspace ,

People do not live in Downtown Toronto.

LMFAO, don't look at a census my guy.

Residential density looks more like Montreal's walkup residential buildings.

I love those buildings, but lol no, not in Toronto it doesn't, unless you can point me to all the developers building Montreal style walkups instead of 60 story glass rectangles? Seriously, go ahead and link me to how many Montreal style walkup units are under construction right now. 1? 0? Now look out your window and you'll count how many glass rectangles you see under construction.

Even if you could point out an example of density done poorly, you would have to ignore all the examples of density done well for it to be meaningful.

Not only did I already, but it is flat out laughable that you can't think of an example of density done badly. On top of that, no, one good example of density doesn't mean that density is good, all I have to show is that the density being actually built here is shitty and unpleasant and that proves that the density being built here is shitty and unpleasant. It's not complicated.

Here's to the 4 story multiplex law 🍻, though it's still a race to the bottom. On average if you were in the 50th percentile of income 30 years ago, you would be able to own a house with a backyard and greenspace, today, you can own a tiny condo with no outdoor access, next to a park that's 3m square with soil about 6in deep. It is more sustainable overall, but a shittier quality of life for individuals. We of course, have the land to have both, but that would have required building more transit and real cities in the region 20 years ago instead of just continuously investing in Toronto and nowhere else.

masterspace ,

This is like saying that Atheists shouldn't fear death because they know it will just be blank nothingness that they won't perceive.

Fear of death doesn't come from the logical part of our brains.

masterspace ,

There is no loss to you if you don't experience it.

masterspace ,

Lmao, no.

Go work a job in a different industry before thinking you have it so tough.

Programmers make more money, have more vacation and free time, and consequently typically have stabler lives, than literally every single other professional industry.

masterspace ,

I don't understand how we're all using git and it's not just some backend utility that we all use a sane wrapper for instead.

Everytime you want to do anything with git it's a weird series or arcane nonsense commands and then someone cuts in saying "oh yeah but that will destroy x y and z, you have to use this other arcane nonsense command that also sounds nothing like you're trying to do" and you sit there having no idea why either of them even kind of accomplish what you want.

masterspace ,

It’s because git is a complex tool to solve complex problems. If you’re one hacker working alone, RCS will do an acceptable job. As soon as you add a second hacker, things change and RCS will quickly show its limitations. FOSS version control went through CVS and SVN before finally arriving at git, and there are good reasons we made each of those transitions. For that matter, CVS and SVN had plenty of arcane stuff to fix weird scenarios, too, and in my subjective experience, git doesn’t pile on appreciably more.

Yes it is a complex tool that can solve complex problems, but me as a typical developer, I am not doing anything complex with it, and the CLI surface area that's exposed to me is by and large nonsense and does not meet me where I'm at or with the commands or naming I would expect.

I mean NPM is also a complex tool, but the CLI surface area of NPM is "npm install".

masterspace ,

So basic, well documented, easily understandable commands like git add, git commit, git push, git branch, and git checkout should have you covered.

You mean: git add -A, git commit -m "xxx", git push or git push -u origin --set-upstream, etc. etc. etc. I get that there's probably a reason for it's complexity, but it doesn't change the fact that it doesn't just have a steep learning curve, it's flat out remarkably user unfriendly sometimes.

masterspace ,

git add with no arguments outputs a message telling you to specify a path.

Yes, but a more sensible default would be -A since that is how most developers use it most of the time.

git commit with no arguments drops you into a text editor with instructions on how to write a commit message.

Git commit with no arguments drops you into vim, less a text editor and more a cruel joke of figuring out how to exit it.

Again, I recognize that git has a steep learning curve, but you chose just about the worst possible examples to try and prove that point lol.

Git has a steep learning curve not because it's necessary but because it chose defaults that made sense to the person programming it, not to the developer using it and interacting with it.

It is great software and obviously better than most other version control systems, but it still has asinine defaults and it's cli surface is over complicated. When I worked at a MAANG company and had to learn their proprietary version control system my first thought was "this is dumb, why wouldn't you just use git like everyone else", then I went back to Git and realized how much easier and more sensible their system was.

masterspace ,

No it wouldn't. You'd have git beginners committing IDE configs and secrets left and right if -A was the default behavior.

No, you wouldn't because no one is a git beginner, they're a software developer beginner who need to use git. In that scenario, you are almost always using repos that are created by someone else or by some framework with precreated git ignores.

You know what else it could do? Say "hey, youve said add with no files selected, press enter to add all changed files"

Esc, :, q. Sure it's a funny internet meme to say vim is impossible to quit out of, but any self-respecting software developer should know how, and if you don't, you have google. If you think this is hard, no wonder you struggle with git.

Dumping people into an archaic cli program that doesn't follow the universal conventions for exiting a cli program, all for the the goal of entering 150 characters of text that can be captured through the CLI with one prompt, is bad CLI design.

There is no reason to ever dump the user to an external editor unless they specifically request it, yet git does, knowing full well that that means VIM in many cases.

And no, a self respecting software developer wouldn't tolerate standards breaking, user unfriendly software and would change their default away from VIM.

Git's authors were the first users. The team that started the linux kernel project created it and used it because no other version control tool in existence at that time suited their needs. The subtle implication that you, as a user of git, know better than the authors, who were the original users, is laughable.

Lmao, the idea that we should hero worship every decision Linus Torvalds ever made is the only thing laughable here.

masterspace ,

This is awful article. I'd be curious to read about any role Steinem had with the CIA but this article has jack shit in it other than weird vague accusations based on one of her organizations receiving funding from the CIA at some point.

masterspace ,

It overall seems like a good article but this is why I kind of hate Ed Zirtron's reporting:

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation

Overall the reporting is interesting, but weird comments like this show his naked disdain for everyone and everything in the tech industry which does not make him a particularly trustworthy source.

Like "oh my god, how dare a company choose an arbitrary alert system based on a quirky influential engineer's practices, what crazy psychos!"

If he sees the code yellow tank top thing as some crazy ridiculous thing that no company should do, then I can't really trust his interpretation of the rest of the emails and documents etc.

Later in the article, he boils everything down to literally "Heroes vs Villains", and maybe in this case both of them are archetypal representations of those roles, but based on his appearances on behind the bastards it feels more like he always needs to boil everything down to black and white, good vs evil, bastard vs non bastard, with nothing in between, which again, makes it hard to trust his overall interpretations of what he's read.

masterspace ,

Yeah, I mean that's kinda of the whole conceit of Behind the Bastards, the host is explicitly and inherently calling everyone they cover a bastard by default, but if you listen to Ed Zirtron's appearances, he always just immediately wants to boil them down to a bastard as the root cause of their actions, when the literal entire point of that show is to examine what factors and backgrounds turn someone into a bastard.

Or again, I just can't understand why he would be flabbergasted by a company naming their alert system after an early engineers' tank top colour. Does he think all quirkiness and whisky should be outlawed from the workplace?

Yes, there's value in calling people bastards and scum and villains, but Ed Zirtron does it immediately, every time, which makes his judgement of them untrustworthy. There's the old adage that "if everything hurts when you poke it your finger is broken", in Ed's case given that everyone is always a bastard or a hero, it seems more plausible to me that he has some pathological need to boil everything down to simple binary systems.

masterspace ,

There's quirkiness and [whimsy?], and there's needless obfuscation. 'Code Yellow' meaning 'Code Red' is dumb. Like I get it, it probably started as an equivalent to 'Code Wayne' and subverting expectations is funny, but it's a punchline from an old adult swim show more than anything. I get that Google HQ isn't a Hospital or the military, but sometimes clarity is important. More now because they're actively doing contracts for governments and militaries, not a scrappy startup. They became a trusted resource and are now cannibalizing themselves for short term gains.

If someone at a company tells you "code yellow" do you stop what you're doing and follow your drilled into memory code yellow training from school, or do you say "hey, what does code yellow mean?". They're not obfuscating anything, they've just got a company procedure with a quirky name.

Shitting on that just shows that you are looking for things to shit on them for, rather than being a thoughtful critic pointing out valid flaws.

masterspace ,

I'd disagree - what this shows is only disdain for everyone who's fucking up technologies for the sake of profit.

Well you can disagree all you want but I don't see how you can read his snarky comments and think that.

His criticism of the code yellow is not because anyone involved in the code yellow procedure, invention, or naming deserves anything. He just hates everyone in tech so much that a whimsical name must be a bastard move, and not just people at their job trying to make the most of it.

I found it refreshing to read an accurate account of what pieces of shit work behind the scenes in the industry

Yeah, cause you're accepting his characterizations of everyone as bastards at face value despite not knowing them and despite knowing that Ed Zirtron thinks everyone is a bastard because it makes his world simpler. Yes it is "refreshing" to stop thinking about complex chains of actions and consequences and just think "he's an evil bastard man and it's all his fault".

masterspace ,

Furthermore, the people described are assholes by the evidence provided

No, far from it. Noone involved with the naming of the code yellow name has any evidence of bastardry presented at all.

masterspace ,

And WASM will absolutely never replace normal JS in the browser. It's a completely different use case. It's awesome and has a great niche, but it's not really intended for normal web page management use cases.

While I overall agree that JS / TS isn't likely to be replaced, Microsoft's Blazor project is interesting conceptually .... Write C# webpages and have it compile down to WASM for more performance than JS could offer.

US sues Apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones ( www.theverge.com )

The US Department of Justice and 16 state and district attorneys general accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ and states are accusing Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its iPhones.

masterspace ,

Biden appointed a bunch of pretty vehemently anti-monopoly people to power, this is just how long it actually takes them to conduct an investigation thorough enough to bring suit.

masterspace ,

PSA: Once this rolls out into the actual downloadable Windows builds, everyone should be able to do this by reinstalling Windows.

European Economic Area PCs

As noted above, some functionality is only available in the EEA. Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA. Once chosen in device setup, the region used for DMA compliance can only be changed by resetting the PC.

masterspace ,

Lol this is asinine.

America let their tech companies get too big to the point that they are all behaving ridiculously anti-competitively, and you think the solution is that the EU should have let their companies get so big that they behave anti-competitively?

This is the EU steeping in to clean up America's mess when it spills over to them.

How many people here have actually used XMPP?

With all the current discussion about the threat that Instagram Threads has on the Fediverse and that article about how Google Embrace Extend Extinguished XMPP, I was left very confused, since that was the first time I've heard that Gchat supported XMPP or what XMPP actually is, and I've had my personal Gmail since beta (no,...

masterspace ,

Thank you for posting some sanity.

People keep posting that dumb blog post about Google Talk being an extend, embrace, extinguish play when it's pretty obvious that Google Talk simply dwarved XMPP in terms of users. The lesson everyone here took from that is to not let any corporation near your niche protocol, when the real lesson they should've taken is that user's don't care about protocols and how open or virtuistic they are, they just want an app that's convenient to have a conversation with.

XMPP only lasted as long as it did because Google Talk kept it alive by supporting it, once they dropped it (and literally no one noticed) then XMPP died the death it would've died years earlier had Google not helped limp it along.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines