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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • But how does the Rust compiler do that? What does it actually check? Could I write a compiler in C that does this check on a piece of Rust code?

    C is so simplictic, that if I can write a piece of functionality in C, I must understand its inner workings fully. Not just how to use the feature, but how the feature works under the hood.

    It is often pointless to actually implement the feature in C, since the feature already has a good implementation (see the Rust compiler for the memory safety). But understanding these features, and being able to mentally think about what it takes in C to implement them, is still helpfull for gaining an understanding of the feature.




  • I have this experience with a certain type of pedestrian traffic light “button”.

    I quote button, because nothing physically moves when you press it. I’m not sure if it registers pressure or heat, but you don’t even feel anything move when you press it.

    Usually when you press the button, a red text lights up on the button, telling you to wait. This text gives you feedback that the button registered your press, and the traffic light will schedule a green light for you.

    However, sometimes you didn’t press hard enough, and the text doesn’t light up. Simple solution: press harder.

    But there is a scenario where it doesn’t matter how hard you press, the button won’t light up. You keep staring at it, while slamming the damn thing with the fury of a Hulk wealding Mjolnir. Still, nothing lights up. The reason: the light instantly went green, so it never needed to light up the text telling you to wait. And all that time slamming your fist on the button, could have been spend crossing the intersection. Instead you have been standing there, looking like a drunk person having a fistfight with an inanimate object.


  • Sleepy cats can be quite derpy. I once had an unannounced visitor come in via the catflap. The catflap was there from the previous homeowner. What neither I nor this cat knew, was that the catflap was set to entry-only mode. Poor guy got locked up in my kitchen overnight.

    So when I strolled into my kitchen in the morning we looked at eachother, both with the question in our eyes: who the hell are you? So I offered my finger for sniffing, and when approved I slowly petted the sleepyhead. But when I turned around for 5 second to grab my phone, his brain woke up, and suddenly he remembered the trouble he was in, and pannicked. I was suddenly super scary. It took some convincing that the kitchen door was opened to outside, that I wasn’t going to harm him, and that he was free to leave.




  • There are so many issues with this. Unsolvable issues.

    The first that I saw was basing income on grades. This means that the person who determines whether you fail or pass, also determines how much money you get. I don’t think there is any good teacher out there that wants that responsibillity. So fuck that. Grades are for determining whether you pass or fail. The government should not use them for their own needs. If they so desperately want that, then let them make their own tests and grade these themselves.

    The second is fixing income. If I do better than my peers, I want to be recognized for that. Otherwise, why would I put in the effort? Maybe this works for super simple jobs, like fruit picker on a farm. But anywhere where cognitive skills are required, you need to incentivise people to excel.

    And that was still talking about jobs where you spend a fixed amount of time working. There are also many jobs, where it makes wayyy more sense to pay directly for delivered performance. For example: how do you fix the salary of a sex worker? Does that mean you fix the pay rate for the customers? Demand for certain people certainly won’t be equal, so how do you fix that?

    What about overtime? What about working during holidays/weekends? What about nightshifts? Etc.

    Then there is the issues of different personal survival needs. No single set of 3 meals a day will be both allergy-safe for everyone and nutricious enough to survive for everyone. Some people live fine without a microwave, others can’t live without it. Etc. Just giving people money removes the responsibility of determining what exactly is required for survival.

    Then there is the issue of labor shortages. Take the Dutch childcare system for example. For many years now, the government has had the idea of lowering the prices significantly. But they can’t, because the number of licensed caretakers is already not enough to fullfill demand right now, and lowering prices would skyrocket demand.

    The whole point of UBI is to let the market figure out many of the solutions to these problems. Keep it simple for the government, and only regulate when and where it actually helps.



  • I remember a javascript library where the was a function that returned, according to the documentation, “a color”. Did it return an object with 3 fields? Were those fields RGB or some other color scheme? Is it a string encoding a color? What format is that string? None of these questions could be answered without just running the code, and analyzing the object you got back.




  • Do you mean that programming languages are hard to read/write, or that the languages themselves are poorly designed?

    In the former case, I invite you to read machine code. Not assembly, but straight machine code. Just zeros and ones as far as the editor can see. Any popular language is better than that.

    In the latter case, I invite you to look at the design of an arbitrary natural language. Weird grammer rules, regional differences, loan words that don’t fit in, etc. No programmming language is worse than that. Although I would argue that Javascript has all of those problems too in some degree.






  • I doubt they do mich different than you do with their OS.

    People are more motivated by feelings than actual logic. The person you are responding to even states that Ubuntu “feels good to use”. That is some car advertisement level of feeling based reasoning.

    Another thing is that people really hate it when things change. Especially a UI change. Every change in the Windows UI has been met with disgust. And if there is one thing different between linux distros, it’s where they place all the buttons, menus, etc. So people prefer to stay with the distro they know.