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azertyfun

@ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
210
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • El Salvador Abandons Bitcoin as Legal Tender After Failed Experiment

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  • I despise crypto, crypto-bros, and do not own a single unit of cryptocurrency. Crypto is not only impractical due to its fluidity but almost every crypto is deflationary by design which disincentivizes people from spending it.

    With that out of the way, the blockchain is certainly more resilient to a "fuck you" class solar flare than the regular economy. There are for sure a bunch of people with EMP-resistant copies of the blockchain (since every node has a copy). As soon as internet goes back up, so will the crypto-bros.

    Meanwhile cash makes up only a few percent of fiat currency and the rest is digital money in databases around the world's banks and financial institutions. Almost all cash flow is completely virtual and literally cancels out in accounting at the end of the day.If those databases get wiped, the global economy simply collapses and your paper money won't be worth shit-fuck. Admittedly neither will crypto since no-one actually uses it for anything other than exchanging it for fiat.

    One of crypto's major problems is that it actually behaves too much like cash. Every bitcoin is a non-fungible token, it's not tied to gold but might as well be; exchanging a bitcoin costs exorbitant amounts of crypto and real-world resources. Meanwhile if my bank wants to give me a big loan they merely change a number in their database. On a technical level they could give me a one trillion euro loan today if they wanted, although that would run afoul of many laws and immediately bankrupt them once I tried to actually spend that money in what would quickly turn out to be a one-man bank run.

  • Teams destroying relationships

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  • Having talked to people who were in charge of making some strategic decisions regarding a business messaging application...

    Slack/Discord is "too complex and confusing". Apparently the pile of unsorted chats, group chats, and meeting chats, are superior to Discord's threading model.

    Also corpos literally do not notice that teams is slow as molasses which is a big part of the friction. You could show them a perfect demonstration that Teams' UI is so much slower to react to anything (nevermind load the actual resource) than the competition and that they often have a 1000+ms audio RTT in meetings (not a hyperbole) and the business people would be like "yeah, I guess? Who cares?"

    Corporate types literally can't understand that bad audio and audio latency costs a huge percentage of revenue in lost productivity because everyone's constantly talking over each other and simultaneously being too afraid to speak because the audio delay makes it impossible to fit into a lull in the conversation and also everyone is in a competition for the tiniest shittiest mic with the worst noise canceling that somehow stacks on top of Teams' pretty bad noise cancelation such that their voice is being noise canceled and you're just left with like 1.2 kHz of actual range and somehow everyone seems fine to spend their entire day listening to that and aaaaaaaaa I have a headache and I want to die

    Then after work you get on a discord call with the mates and everyone is crystal clear with no noticeable latency, even the students on a secondhand 30 € gaming headset.

  • If All This Sounds Delusional, That’s Because It Is

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  • The Linux Kernel is actually hierarchical by design. Anyone can submit a patch, but it then has to go up the maintainer chain to Linus' final approval before landing mainline, but of course Linus doesn't review everything himself and implicitly trusts his maintainers.

    So part of the Rust drama a few months ago was accusations that despite the stated goal of rustifying some subsystems, the existing hierarchy is sometimes acting in bad faith and unwilling to learn the basics of Rust to talk ABI or generally accommodate the reasonable needs of Rust devs. Asahi Lina had an impressive writeup of her Rust contributions to the Apple Silicon GPU driver and the frequent, demotivating difficulties she had with maintainers refusing to learn anything that isn't C or to acknowledge errors like race conditions in their C code. Some insanely talented people are being kept at arm's length by the kernel community over petty turf wars that look very much like a symptom of institutional rot. Which isn't very surprising to me having met some unrelated but very highly opinionated (and sometimes very confidently incorrect) greybeards of similar ilk.

    I don't have a horse in that race or a solution to the kernel issues, but it's interesting to watch how at scale even kernel OSS devs fall into the same trappings as any institution with a hierarchy. We're all just human, and even when working for an organization with the most noble of goals we must keep an eye out for hierarchies and institutions and rules and processes.

  • Trump administration will offer all 2 million federal workers a buyout to resign

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  • “whatever power decides” is legal

    Not true. When Biden decided to cancel student debt, the court system said "no". The SCOTUS isn't subservient to "power" in general, it's subservient to powerful fascists. Big difference. Trump has spent a decade following the Nazi playbook and acquiring complete personal control over all branches of government and people don't seem to have fully realized that yet. That's why things are way worse this time around. When he started his first term the SCOTUS was conservative and corrupt but not yet fascist. This time it's fully loyalist. In case you forgot, he also had already placed a bunch of loyalists in key judicial roles that Biden didn't fire.

    He's made sure the law won't stop him, and now he's purging his enemies to make sure the institutions won't resist his unlawful orders. It's not a "both sides" issue, it's not even just a "the rich are winning" issue. They might get the green light to deport every union leader, but they'll be ruling over a kingdom of ashes and blood by the time this is over. Assuming the billionaires aren't caught up in the purge; plenty of that in autocratic regimes, oligarchs infighting is a great way to ensure loyalty because that makes them incapable of organizing to stage a coup.

  • Trump administration will offer all 2 million federal workers a buyout to resign

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  • Says who? Under the US legal system, anything is legal if the SCOTUS agrees with it. If Trump declared himself Führer tomorrow they'd validate that as constitutional. At this point suing the US government for its blatantly unconstitutional acts is merely a delaying tactic.

    Americans must stop twiddling their thumbs while expecting Trump's DoJ/SCOTUS/congress to work for the American people and start resisting because the key institutions have already fallen to fascism.

  • Twenty-two Democratic-led states sue over Trump birthright citizenship order

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  • It's not a matter of "are they racist or not". It's a matter of "do they respect the rule of law or will they uphold any Trump decision no matter how unconstitutional".

    Given the breakneck speed at which you guys have descended into fascism I wouldn't bet very much on the first outcome.

  • Cloudflare Issue Can Leak Chat App Users' Broad Location

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  • On the one hand, deanonimization attacks are never entirely avoidable on unhardened targets and this one isn't particularly sophisticated and leaks relatively little information.

    On the other hand deanonimization attacks are always bad and it's a good reminder to people of the risks they are taking. This is also slightly non-obvious behavior, even if it makes sense to the technically competent, as something like an IP grabber normally requires user interaction such as clicking a link. It's also a vector that CF might be able to mitigate by patching the ability to query a given cache directly.

  • Elon Goes Full Sieg Heil In Clarifying Moment

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  • I want

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  • The algorithms used to "derank" swear-laden videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube are the exact same one used to derank "political" content and/or queer content.

    So yeah, it fucking pisses me off every time someone self-censors to appease the Algorithm, lending it more credibility.

    Not very high on our very long list of items on the Descent Into Fascism checklist, but it's on there.

  • Keep it simple

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  • Which versioning????

     yaml
        
somekey: yes

    Go right ahead and tell me what the YAML version is and what is the type of somekey is. Oh that's right, it's impossible, because the versioning is entirely up to the serializers for some godforsaken reason.

  • Keep it simple

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  • Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.

  • Accurate programming movie

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  • What? I'm not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google's internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.

    The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal "implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel".

    Also agile ≠ scrum. If you're managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you're following an ad-hoc agile process.

    I think what you're actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure's size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can't just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you're doing waterfall or scrum.

  • It's unnatural

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  • One of these literally shows a dead soldier in a field of flowers so, yeah.

    It's idle longing. I could give up my career, move to a deeply rural area, and break my back doing menial jobs until I die of health complications at 64. I won't, but it's nice to long for the imagined simplicity sometimes y'know?

    See also:

  • Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop

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  • Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of "youth these days"?

    The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren't capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

    The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it's same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that's not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

    Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck's horror show.

  • Apple pulls remaining Lightning-based devices from European stores

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  • They've also known about this deadline for years and were always allowed to switch to USB-C at literally any time before then (like they did years ago with the iPad Pro and Macbook).

    If any e-waste occurred, it is squarely because of Apple's utter pettiness.

  • Add ons

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  • Gnome is sleek but definitely not KISS, and the fact that plugins break after every update should be proof enough. Bash scripts will work for years or decades without any modification; that's the Unix philosophy. Yet write one .js extension for gnome and it will be obsolete by next year, even though devs point to the extension system to excuse themselves from implementing the most basic of features (at least they did ten years ago when I got fed up with their bullshit). And they don't implement the most basic features because their philosophy is not Unix's, but MacOS's (specifically in all the ways that MacOS is not Unix).

    People seem to find redeeming qualities to Gnome, and more power to them I guess. But "it is philosophically Unix" is just straight-up an incorrect statement.

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  • So is chocolate, yet no one complains about it.

    "Vanilla", for some reason, has come to mean "plain" in English. That is a specific linguistic quirk. It doesn't exist in my native language, and not coincidentally no-one who I share this native language with would think to give me shit because my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla, because it'd be just as nonsensical and out of the left field as making fun of someone for preferring chocolate flavor.

  • I voted for the leopards [Haus of Decline]

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  • Not quite; he supported Hitler, but represented a separate institution: the Church. A reminder that fascism rises not just as a consequence of legislative or executive shenanifans, but when civil institutions are complicit in it.

    It is certainly an interesting perspective. When reading the poem without context it's easy to think "I wasn't a Communist" is the perspective of a hypothetical participant, but it is entirely autobiographical and the callousness of the protagonist is painfully real.

    [...] what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40 million people, because that is what it is costing us now.

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  • The phonology of "moth" is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I'm sure linguists could pick apart). It's adjacent to "moist". That's the kind of name you give something you don't like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like "fly", a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

    Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it's just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

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  • I didn't even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

    Guess why? In French they are called "night butterflies". It's just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it's brown, duh.

    This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they're trying to give children nightmares?