It’s not like an average person would be unable to use their laptop and some media player, regardless of which OS they use; the fact that I use a weird-ass player doesn’t mean it’s the only option available on a laptop. It just seems pointless to get another gadget to do the same thing you can do on a gadget you own (assuming you have a laptop, of course.)

Generally mpv

An old hand-me-down 1080p TV and my laptop

I guess those devices make more sense if you don’t have a laptop. I only have a laptop (well, that and a Steam Deck which counts as mobile Linux I guess) so I just plonk it into the HDMI port

🥁

I may be an anomalous IT professional, but despite being a coder and generally a ginormous nerd, I’ve never really understood why people buy “smart” devices. This isn’t a criticism; I honestly just don’t understand why they’re popular. The amount of convenience they provide really doesn’t seem like it’s worth it at all, to me

… what

Algorithm-free

I’m not sure you understand what an algorithm is. They’re simply a sequence of steps you apply to get some end result, comparable to eg. a recipe in baking.

Lemmy still has multiple ways for you to choose how posts are sorted; “hot”, “active”, “new” etc. Each of those is an algorithmic sorting, and there’s literally no other option except to have an algorithm that is used to determine which posts you see

edit: I think many people who think Lemmy is “algorithm-free” may mean that it has a transparent algorithm for post selection. It’s still an algorithm, but we can all go look at source code and documentation to be able to know exactly how it works – with eg. Facebook the exact workings of the post sorting algorithm is secret

Don’t shove things into your orifices.

BUT I HUNGER

penisii

It’s “penopodes”

Edit: also actually penes (pēnēs)

I’ll be treating the freebie as a limited collectable in a video game

Ah so you’ll be using it impulsively on the first thing that crosses your mind, only to regret what you did just moments afterwards?

and never use it fearing that I’ll waste it

Oh I see

Conservatives generally have an astonishing skill at coming up with the weirdest bullshit to justify their hate of anyone progressive.

Are you trying to convince yourself or the person you’re replying to?

IBM sold machines to the original Nazis, so I guess this time around they at least want to keep up the appearance of giving a shit where their money comes from

Because no way could I dislike modern PHP. Maybe you just have low standards when it comes to programming languages?

I’m not sure which thought is scarier: that you don’t know what you’re signing up for, or that you do know and you enjoy fixing undecidable formatting fuckups manually

Bit unfair to compare them to the Ferengi.

At least the Ferengi have redeeming qualities

That’s a good point about the synergies, something like eg. a type system that’s expressive enough to be Turing-complete is going to have some effects. You’re right that it might just feel like a “kitchen sink language” due to complexity of the features it has, but then again I suppose it’s sort of one and the same where a language’s complexity comes from.

But it’s no Swift, at least; now that language really does have everything and the kitchen sink.

Semantic whitespace problems can easily be literally impossible to solve automatically. One of the dumbest fucking ideas anybody ever came up with in computing and its inventor if anyone belongs in YAML Hell. As a fuckup it’s not quite as bad as null, but that ain’t exactly a high bar

The guy in the blog says mb (millibits)

a) does anybody actualy use that? How many people reading this thread can say they’ve actually seen that in real use or used it?

b) I’m fairly convinced you knew what was meant because it’s not like it’s uncommon to use a minuscule m for “mega” in colloquial usage

Weird performative pedantry or a joke that flew over my head? I give about a 0.5 probability for both

I mean, wouldn’t it essentially have to be storing every possible move (well, state) for as many rounds as you want for the player to be able to play at most? And I’m not sure he can take advantage of the fact that you can end up in the same state from multiple other states, which would remove a lot of the redundant ones

There’s a special place in hell for the inventor of semantically significant whitespace.

YAML itself is one of the circles of hell. You have to copy-paste YAML from web etc sources with dubious formatting for all eternity, and the editor doesn’t have YAML support. Also you can only use Python

It already feels like Twitter.

Still full of Nazis then, I take it?

It was an analogy for how something infinite doesn’t necessarily contain everything you can think of, not meant to be taken absolutely literally (hence the word “analogy” there). Also I got this from some physicist so I didn’t pull it out of my own butt, I’ll try find a source

I think it’s the PHP, makes people doubt your soul’s status that you’d subject yourself willingly to it

“Sufficiently powerful” is a bit of an understatement when it comes to Scala. Honestly may have a bit too many features for my taste, it’s not a small language

I’ve been meaning to give F# a go but I never seem to get around to it. Seems like an interesting language

INTERCAL

Captain Buzzkill here, but an infinite number of universes wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that every possible scenario happens.

As an analogy, there’s an infinite amount of integers, but you’re not going to find 1.5 in them.

Affordable and available housing has everything to do with homelessness though, it’s one of the best ways to actually keep people from becoming homeless in the first place. If more people can afford a place to live, less people will be homeless. Won’t fix all of it but a huge chunk anyhow

I have no idea if or how much old Eastern Bloc countries lied about the number of homeless. I wouldn’t be surprised at all, but I haven’t seen any studies or statistics about this so I can’t assume they were all lying or that the situation was universally worse than in Western countries.

That was well said. Recontextualization is exactly the thing; it’s not that I think the Soviet Union was absolute evil with zero redeeming features. They got more right during the early years although I’m not necessarily a huge fan of that period either, and to a large extent it was Stalin who fucked them up pretty severely with the frankly sociopathic system that the Union turned into.

Russian political culture has been outright brutal for a long time. Eg. these KGB-like secret police organizations have been around for a while and have invariably had brutal methods of dealing with politically displeasing individuals or just who-the-hell-ever in many cases. This, coupled with the cultural ethos that Russia and Russians – and specifically meaning ethnic Russians – are superior to anyone outside their borders and a tendency for imperialism, means that Russian rule has nearly invariably been a shitty time, with Finland being one of the few exceptions as we mostly faced little repression or cultural erasure compared to other Russian “colonies” and this was done intentionally; most of the Russian Emperors during our time as a Grand Duchy in some ways thought of Finland as way to show the European powers that they can run things in a “western” way, and to work as a kind of window to the West. For the last 20 or so years they did try to Russify us, which we – being stubborn fucks – did not take well. We also kept our previous Parliament for the most part even though even starting from Alexander I the Emperors wanted to have autocratic rule, but – again in parts thanks to us being stubborn fucks – it took something like 4 emperors for it to happen. Their other historical or the currently existing colonies (nobody seems to think of Russia as a colonialist empire because their colonies are inside contiguous borders) weren’t quite so lucky, as Russification and “Russian supremacy” has been the standard.

This political culture played a large part in the problems with the Union. It was nominally multicultural (and korenization was briefly a thing until they went back to Russification as usual) but it wasn’t exactly unclear who were ultimately in charge.

And before some smartass barges in asking me why it’s OK if the US/UK/France/whoever does this stuff: I don’t like imperialism any more regardless of who’s doing it.

I’m a leftist but I’m not much of a fan of the Soviet Union. I’m Finnish and middle-aged so I know a bunch of people who had to escape from there and I’ve heard first-hand stories about the shit that went on, and I’ve visited Soviet Estonia who got the short end of the stick with Russian imperialism compared to us. At least we stayed independent although had to grant a lot of power over eg. our foreign policy to the Russians – ie. Soviets, but it’s not like it wasn’t essentially a Russian project since they pretty quickly forgot about korenization and went for Russification instead – to keep them from invading (again…)

Interesting. How are things in the year 2033? Could you tell us about the technology you’re using to communicate with us?

More likely outcome: he takes a person in strange clothing appearing from thin air only to set his book on fire with a magical implement as clear proof of witchcraft existing and posing a huge danger. Get ready for turbo witch hunts on crack

Heh, an optimist here assuming Chrome will work with 8Gb RAM in 2033

I don’t think the hypothesis was supposed to have a benefit

No duh, they were built to be very affordable so you wouldn’t have as many homeless people. It’s incredible that you thought that answer was somehow insightful

Oh neat. That definitely qualifies under infinite curiosity.

But the anthropic principle doesn’t imply an intention either, though. Much the opposite: it’s all just dumb luck, but for us to be here right now observing it, some of that luck had to go a certain way (eg some physical constants had to get the values they have or matter wouldn’t exist etc).

In some ways this really isn’t even in question, an example being the apparent “fine-tuning” of physical constants so that there’s stable matter than can form more complex compounds, and that stars can exist, etc. That “fine-tuning” itself is pretty clear, ie we can calculate that if this or that constant was 0.000004% off then everything would go to shit.

But it’s only apparent tuning: it just boils down to the fact that those constants have to be the way they are, or we wouldn’t be able to be here as observers: if even one thing was slightly different then eg hydrogen would be the most complex chemical in the universe or something like that. Ain’t no observers emerging out of nearly perfectly homogenous hydrogen soup. Or a universe that collapsed into a singularity and disappeared into whatever the hell is on the other “end” of black holes a Planck time after the big bang, because instead of bonds being too hard to form they were too easy.

Now the AP just then takes that idea and runs off with it, with the strong principle ending up with the conclusion (and this is much simplified) that we’re the only ones out here due to the amount of “fine tuning” required, and the weak being less, well, chauvinistic 😁

Some people think that the “fine-tuning” of physical constants means the universe was made for us, when the truth is closer to the opposite of that, with us sort of being made for the universe. Again without intention or a Maker, but simply meaning that with these “universe settings / seed”, something similar to our current universe is what you get

edit: this Douglas Adams quote on rationalwiki is a great distillation of the AP but in a humorous way:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.