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  • 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Reddit would become just another instance with no API control

    Being that large of an instance gives a lot of api control all by itself. Theoretically Chrome is just another browser and member of WHATWG. in practice, if they implement something it immediately becomes a de facto standard. Reddit would be the same.

    I wouldn’t bet on Huffman’s exit doing anything of consequence either. Reddit is now under the control of investors who want a return. One way or another, monetisation of users will increase.




  • The bigotry is on the same level, but I think JK Rowling is actively militant on a far different level compared to Orson Scott Card. Just looking at their twitter for example, OSC tweets maybe once a month and 9/10 times it’s about a book signing or other such promotion. JK Rowling’s feed is a constant flow of hatred on trans people. She tries very hard to make sure you are reminded of her bigotry every single time you hear anything about her.

    The reach is different too. OSC has some 16k followers. Rowling has 15 million. It’s natural for her to attract a much higher degree of disdain.


  • is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.

    He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.

    If you browse through it’s not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.

    He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There’s a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean “yes.” He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).

    To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it’s only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.


  • Your individual tastes are subjective. I was arguing that the quality difference of a mcdonalds burger and a restaurant burger is not as big a chasm as OP made out.

    I agree that they are basically the same meat from the same cows, but in my opinion there is still a big quality difference due mainly to preparation. A McDonald’s beef patty is too thin, too homogeneous, and overcooked. The lack of flavour is the result of optimizing for cooking speed.

    If you are willing to wait 5-15 minutes for your burger to be cooked you can achieve dramatically better results from the same cow.



  • Airplane mechanics are held responsible for their failures, should we throw that out the window and when they forget to tighten down a bolt that drops a plane just say whelp, better luck next time, lets get George some more training and hope he follows the procedures that are in place to prevent that from ever happening again.

    You are joking, but that’s almost exactly what happens. Aircraft investigations are universally conducted on the basis of not assigning blame, but figuring out how to prevent this in the future.

    The point is that airplane mechanics generally do not forget to tighten bolts out of pure evil intent. They are for the most part just ordinary humans who can be expected to behave as such. Therefore when an error occurs it is a failure of the system, not them personally. Replacing them with another human who makes human mistakes doesn’t fix anything.

    In this case we ask the same thing: what happened that caused things to go so wrong on this set, and what can we change to prevent that from happening again? I’m quite certain that putting this person in jail is not the answer to that question.



  • The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:

    1. Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
    2. That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

    Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.

    It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

    Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.


  • Pretty much the perfect form factor in my opinion. Put the back seat down when you need to transport cargo, up for people. Really practical. If you want to do camping trips or road trips where you need to move four people with cargo, you can get one with a towing hook.

    The one thing it’s not great at in my experience is transporting babies around. There’s just not quite enough space for the car seat, stroller, two parents and assorted diapers and stuff. We can make it work, but it’s quite uncomfortable.