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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

    What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.



  • No-one “needs” anyone but economics aren’t a zero-sum game and both the EU and the US benefited enormously from our economic and military ties, and cutting those ties will be painful and the faster it happens the more painful it will be.

    If we employ the economic nukes against the US right now, we will lose most digital payment systems for a few weeks as countries and bunks rush to implement Wero and the digital Euro, and we will face strong gas shortages as we currently rely on the US to make up for Russia’s. Europe and NA would immediately enter into a deep recession.

    The payment systems are a hugely understated threat but are being worked on actively. The fossil fuels aren’t understated but we also lack short-term solutions as electrification takes time (but also we aren’t doing nearly enough).

    However it is true that the EU is profoundly neoliberal and that ideology is very ill-equipped to deal with a fragmented world order in which free trade is no longer the default. Those assumptions are being challenged, however the far-right seems primed to bring about the populist “solution” of turning Europe into a bunch of mini-Russias.


  • Are we already forgetting that trump invaded Venezuela for oil, then the oil companies said “excuse me but we can’t profitably exploit their notoriously shitty oil”?

    Part of being a literal Nazi is that the o.g. Nazis got themselves stuck in an increasing number of military quagmires not because they had to but because they refused to do consider the obvious peaceful solutions for their problems. The war machine had to be fed even at the cost of their own self-destruction.

    Except this time they have a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping all civilization and somehow people aren’t freaking out nearly enough about that.





  • 1 kg of radioactive isotopes blasted into the atmosphere as a byproduct of coal combustion: i sleep

    1 ton of PTFEs blasted into the water table as a byproduct of making slick cooking pans: i sleep

    untold tons of carcinogens dumped out the exhaust of automobiles within our cities: i sleep

    1 kg of nuclear waste safely sealed in a bright yellow barrel: i scream and kick and seethe

    If you think nuclear waste is the biggest challenge we face as a species regarding waste management, your stance is profoundly misinformed and inconsistent. The only reason we’re talking about it is that it has “nuclear” in the name and it is highly visible because we capture it all, which is ironically the one thing that makes it safer than all the other pollutants out there.


  • Netanyahu did not show up at the border unannounced saying “let me through or else”. He got permission ahead of time. Had he not gotten permission, he would have had to find another country who did or gone around. Especially for Greece and Italy which don’t really stand in his way, the Mediterranean is right there!

    Even assuming that Netanyahu calls the bluff and flies through, there are a lot of options ahead of all-out war. For instance sending jets to “intercept” his plane and escort him out saying “he refused to follow orders to land and we did not deem it worth it to escalate the situation”. It’s not like his airliner is armed or anything. But it would send a very different diplomatic message.

    For France in particular, this is far from the first time he flies over its territory unimpeded. This is not a matter of military concerns, this is pro-Israel Macron taking a stance to show support for his ally. He’s not been very outspoken on Gaza because the domestic political situation is very delicate and anything he says can only weaken his support further, but his personal stance is hardly a secret and the military interceptors are under his full control.




  • I don’t disagree with the point being made but I think the author is underselling the value of opentelemetry tracing here.

    OTEL tracing is not mere plumbing. The SDKs are opinionated and do provide very useful context out of the box (related spans/requests, thrown exceptions, built-in support for common libraries). The data model is easy to use and contextful by default.

    It’s more useful if the application developer properly sets attributes as demonstrated, but even a half-assed tracing implementation is still an incredibly valuable addition to logging for production use.


  • My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

    I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.



  • For systems programming it makes the most sense out of the languages you mentioned. Languages requiring a runtime (Java/Python) do not fill the bill for system tools IMO. Golang is more arguable, but its memory safety comes through GC which many systems programmers aren’t fans of for a variety of technical and personal reasons.

    Rust is meant to be what C++ would be if it were designed today by opiniated system developers and didn’t have to be backwards-compatible.

    Those are the technical arguments I would use in a corporate setting.

    All that aside, there’s personal preference, and my point is that for FOSS projects that matters too. Rust is fun in a brain-teasy kind of way in the same way that writing C is fun, but without nearly as many footguns. Golang is practical but arguably not as fun. That’s the same logic that draws many programmers to write Haskell projects.

    The story of the Fish shell illustrates it quite well; the project gained a lot of development attention and contributions when they decided to rewrite from C++ to Rust, where they achieved a stable release with feature-parity a few months ago. It would have been a remarkably dumb decision for a private company to make, but makes perfect sense when you are trying to attract free talent.


  • The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.

    If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.



  • Technology Connections and Hank Green have been shouting this for a while, but that whole issue is way overblown. Some first gen EVs around 2010 had issues, but every major manufacturer since then has way exceeded expectations on battery lifetime thanks to advanced BMS and thermal controls. Car batteries don’t just rapidly degrade out of the blue, the tech has nothing in common with what’s in your phone. But public sentiment has not caught up because most people think Li-Ion = smartphone = dead after 2-5 years, so second hand EVs are way undervalued. Which is great for buyers.

    It’s not like you can’t easily total a second-hand ICE by mechanical failure. Just ask anyone who own(ed) a puretech engine. If you went by manufacturer recommendations, the fucking thing might just eat your timing belt one day and grenade itself. And there’s no way a full engine swap on a 5-10 year old economy car is economically viable.

    There’s always something that could go wrong when you buy a car. Unless you get comprehensive insurance and warranty, you need to accept the fact that losing the entire car to an accident, catastrophic mechanical failure, or theft is always a risk. If that’s too much anxiety to deal with, get a lease.