As a scientist who has ended up gradually becoming more of a programmer, I battled through the SICP after seeing the cult following it has. It’s a weird, but good book, and I couldn’t imagine a book like that using anything other than Lisp

“this is a big Butt”

Nice.

Yeah, it scares me too. Though it does give me some comfort to exist in communities like this, where people are well informed of the kind of fuckery done by big tech and other asshole corporations, and thus are not surprised by this kind of news. Although it’s pretty grim that we all recognise how fucked things are, it’s within communities like this that I often find my will to live be bolstered.

Maybe it’s to do with the average political inclination of folks here, or maybe it’s just that Lemmy has a high concentration of creative, nerdy people who find joy in making or sharing cool stuff. Or maybe I’m just so burnt out that I’m desperate to construct and/or clutch onto anything remotely meaningful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Regardless I find it reassuring to see so many people trying their damnedest to forge something good — not in ignorance of the world being on fire, but precisely because we need good reasons to live now more than ever.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish I could put my head in the sand and find some bliss in the ignorance of it all. I don’t really want that though. Real hope is built on a comprehensive understanding of the problems we face, with a hearty dash of some potentially irrational defiance.

Good start

Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

None of us are free until all of us are free. AI is nothing new, just more of the same forces trying to crush more of us into a permanent lower class.

There have been some wins from GDPR, but it’s woefully under enforced. I became very familiar with the GDPR when I did an internship in the regulatory risk department of a big bank when everyone was frantically trying to rebuild shit to ensure compliance. I think it’s a damn good piece of legislation, and it’s a shame to see it doing so much less than it could be.

I really like the automatic cruise control on my fairly new Honda Jazz. I’ve found that it has a net positive effect on my attention to the road, because I become less fatigued from the small, brief slowdowns that I might encounter on a motorway. There was actually an instance where I narrowly avoided a crash while using this system because of how quickly I acted when a potentially dangerous situation developed into an active crash; I felt like I was more alert than I would’ve otherwise been after a day of driving

However, I do not like the lane-keeping system, especially combined with the automatic cruise control. I remember testing it when I was on a clear but fairly curved section of the motorway, with my hands completely off the wheel (but hovering over the wheel, ready to take control again if necessary). I was horrified by how effectively it took me round the bend — effectively enough to be dangerous. There is a warning beep if you spend too long without your hands on the wheel at all for a while, but this was just something I did while testing it. I’ve not used it since, because I was confident that, unlike the automatic cruise control used on its own, this would diminish my attention and leave me unable to properly respond to an exceptional circumstances.

There are people who speak up, but it’s definitely not a sizeable demographic. Even before the genocide started, Israelis who protested Israel’s human rights abuses and wars faced a heckton of suppression. A friend of a friend was hospitalised after being severely beaten by right wing counter protesters at an anti-genocide demonstration. Far from taking action to stop it, the police (as they were watching it happen) laughed at her and said she deserved it.

Children are taught from a young age of the necessity of Zionism, and that they are fundamentally superior to Palestinians and other Arabs, who are inherently violent and dangerous. They twist the knife of the generational trauma of the holocaust, because scared and hurt people are easier to manipulate to hate.

Compulsory military service in the IDF is another powerful tool used to shape Israeli’s opinions; There’s been a lot of research on how the military has a shockingly strong effectiveness at shifting the views of those who serve in it, leading to galvanisation of an us-vs-them way of thinking. People who refuse compulsory service are routinely imprisoned, sometimes for longer than their term of service would be.

Press freedoms are heavily restricted. A friend who was studying in Israel in the late 2010s was astounded by how homogenous the media landscape was, especially in terms of news. There are some organisations that do good work, but they themselves have documented how difficult it is to be a journalist in Israel who isn’t willing to be a propaganda mouthpiece. +972mag is one of the few publications in this space , and they do some absolutely incredible journalism, so check them out if you’d like to be able to get an insight into some of the on-the-ground politics in Israel. Their editorial team includes both Israelis and Palestinians, and much (if not all) of their work is available in both English and Hebrew — because even if there aren’t many in Israel inclined to listen, they want to get their work out to as many people as possible

“I mean, we’ll have to handle it, we won’t have a choice.”

A lot of people won’t handle it though. I’m too disabled to work, so even if I had been old enough to be working during the dot-com era and the '08 crash, I still wouldn’t have had a job to lose.

However, I have had my benefits temporarily removed due to various bureaucratic bullshit, and there have been multiple points where things got bad enough that I’m honestly surprised I’m still here to write this comment. And it sucks to know that for all the trauma and disadvantage I face, I am one of the lucky ones.

That’s what’s so grim people being pushed to their limit — when we don’t have the luxury of choices, then it’s easy to get drawn towards choosing “the bad ending” so to speak. Even during difficult times where I’ve not been at risk of making that particular choice myself, I nonetheless found it comforting to fantasise about, as the escape lever that no-one could take away from me.

I deeply and sincerely love whoever made this image

There are worker protection regulations for temperature in the UK, which account for both excessive cold and heat. However, whereas there is an explicitly stated minimum temperature for indoor workplaces (16°C, or 13°C if the work involves rigorous physical exertion), there is no stated upper bound, only that employers must ensure the safety of their workers with respect to heat stress, by maintaining a “reasonable” temperature at work.

We honestly need an update to the regulations, because part of why there isn’t nearly as much guidance for excessive heat is that when the regulations were written, it was assumed that the only workplaces that would be at risk of excessive temperatures were places like bakeries and foundries. Although a kitchen like the one in the article obviously has plenty of equipment outputting additional heat, places like this getting too warm probably wasn’t conceived of when these regulations were written — and it’s only going to get worse.

Unfortunately, the word “reasonable” is pretty fluffy, and I can imagine some workplaces only shutting once workers start experiencing heat stress. And in some cases that I know of, some asshole employers will continue pushing employees past that point — the employees would no doubt succeed if they tried to take action against their employer at this point, because that’s clearly beyond what’s reasonable, but it’s much easier to prove “the temperature was this high” than it is to argue that the temperatures were unreasonable.

I learned a bunch of this from a friend who was concerned for her employees — she was complaining to me about how much work it took for her to figure out what constituted “reasonable” and how the lack of clearer regulations about excessive heat not only made it easier for asshole employers to exploit their workers, but also harder for employers like her to protect her workers (another friend, who was a manager but didn’t directly employ the people working under him concurred, because it took him a lot of arguing to convince the higher ups that AC was necessary in the office)

Privatisation, combined with a government that seems allergic to actually making there be any penalties for water companies’ fuck ups.

For instance, you mention the excess of rain that the UK receives — well another way the water companies keep fucking up is that when it rains, and the amount of water going down drains is too much for them to process, they end up discharging raw sewage into rivers, polluting many rivers that would otherwise be swimmable (last summer, I lived in a place near a river that was beautiful to swim in during hot weather, but before actually doing so, I checked an online map (from a charity doing data activism) to see if there were any points where sewage was typically discharged from, and if there had been recent instances of this. Turns out that one of the most popular swimming spots was downstream of one of these sewage points)

This is meant to be a thing that is only done in the most exceptional of circumstances, but it’s something that is done frequently, all over the countries, because it’s cheaper to do this than to actually improve water infrastructure. Water companies say “we had to do it because of exceptional levels of rain”, but when occasional bouts of exceptionally high levels of rain is the norm, that excuse is more full of shit than our rivers.

The catch is that it took threatening a strike to get to this concession, and even after they were projected to lose (I think) more than a billion a day. This isn’t a free gift out of nowhere, but a hard fought victory for the union

My best friend died of COVID. His loved ones weren’t able to be by his side in those last moments, for obvious reasons, and that left a wound that really disrupted my ability to grieve in the wake of his death. If I had been allowed to be there with him, I know that to actually do so would expose myself to a lot of risk, even though it was likely that we had been infected with the same strain of COVID (due to us being bubbled together and falling ill at the same time — me and his housemate had recovered by the time he died, but it would’ve still been risky for us to be there).

Despite this, I honestly don’t know whether I would have been able to stop myself from being there with him at the end. It’s easy to have disdain for people being foolish in this way, but I also have a lot of sympathy for people who make this choice — it’s not necessarily a case of people being unaware of the risk.

I feel like the ideal world would be if there could be collaboration between healthcare workers and members of a community to find a compromise solution that would allow burial practices to be preserved as much as possible, whilst also minimising risk of transmission. I imagine this might look like healthcare workers being involved in the process, rather than simply handing the body over to the family members as would happen if someone died from something other than an infectious disease. It seems like something that should be possible, in theory.

Of course, the problem is that healthcare workers and services are already stretched thin enough as it is, and I don’t imagine they’d have the capacity to even consider doing something like this. I was reading the other day that Trump’s cuts to things like USAID has really impacted the ability to respond to this epidemic

Yes but the problem is that people keep submitting the same bug again and again and again. Some bugs exist because they haven’t been spotted, but there’s a heckton of bugs that are known about, but no-one has been able to put forward a fix for them yet. Overloading people with duplicate reports just means that they have less time and brainspace available to spend on fixing bugs.

Duplicates don’t add anything to the conversation

Yes but the problem is that people keep submitting the same bug again and again and again. Some bugs exist because they haven’t been spotted, but there’s a heckton of bugs that are known about, but no-one has been able to put forward a fix for them yet. Overloading people with duplicate reports just means that they have less time and brainspace available to spend on fixing bugs.

Duplicates don’t add anything to the conversation

Yes but the problem is that people keep submitting the same bug again and again and again. Some bugs exist because they haven’t been spotted, but there’s a heckton of bugs that are known about, but no-one has been able to put forward a fix for them yet. Overloading people with duplicate reports just means that they have less time and brainspace available to spend on fixing bugs.

Duplicates don’t add anything to the conversation

Yes but the problem is that people keep submitting the same bug again and again and again. Some bugs exist because they haven’t been spotted, but there’s a heckton of bugs that are known about, but no-one has been able to put forward a fix for them yet. Overloading people with duplicate reports just means that they have less time and brainspace available to spend on fixing bugs.

Duplicates don’t add anything to the conversation