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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • “There is no future without electrification. But just electrification will not get us there,”

    Daniel Posen is an associate professor in U of T’s department of civil and mineral engineering, and the Canada Research Chair in system-scale environmental impacts of energy and transport technologies. He agrees electrification is vital. But relying solely on electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions from transportation may not be enough, especially if we want to do it in time to stop a catastrophic two-degree rise in global temperatures.

    The article you link contradicts you, it clearly suggests that adoption of EVs reduce carbon emissions, but we still need to do more (e.g. ACTUALLY HAVE PUBLIC TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE) to prevent a climate catastrophe.


  • Paid VPNs are dirt cheap worldwide… If you can already afford a PC capable of playing HD2, you can afford a few bucks a year for a reputable VPN.

    You have actual clueless first-worlder logic

    If 60 to 160 USD per year is “dirt cheap” to you, you have absolutely no place to speak. Hundreds of dollars over the course of 5 years just to circumvent stupid geolocation restrictions and nothing else – about the same cost to twice the cost of a low-to-mid range gaming PC BTW – is not affordable to most people. How do you compare basically throwing away hundreds of USD yearly opposed to a one-time purchase of an important utility in the modern age? How do you view that as cheap for people in countries where that could be a large chunk or most of their salary? Are people not allowed to buy expensive things for themselves rarely and actually enjoy them without having an unnecessary subscription expense tacked on just because they were born in a poorer county?

    How would you feel if I told you there were a “fuck you” fee of 10% of the cost of your house every year just because you’re American or Canadian or British or some shit, on top of your income & property taxes? I mean you’re a homeowner so you can obviously afford it.


  • A lot of the time it’s about being lucky enough be able to have or form connections with rich stupid people. Those kinds are a lot more willing to throw insane amounts of money at someone/some company they vaguely know to do things they know nothing of but hear a lot about.

    Or just working at a company that’s well-known in the area and deals with clients very intimately while the product is being created.

    Sometimes charging more for the same service makes them want it more, to them it means it’s premium programming (as opposed to the off-brand wish dot com programming). But sometimes they demand disgracefully cheap yet world-class service and throw a tantrum when they can’t pay you $5 an hour for a full rebranded recreation of the Amazon web service.










  • I don’t work on any widely-used languages (I’ve made my own but not anything important) but I do think the designers of Zig and Rust have very good reasons for using semicolons – I read some reasons from the Rust devs themselves somewhere but I can’t remember them other than it vaguely being about how Rust is expression-based and intended to be lightweight and how whitespace significance can create confusion around how to read and write certain things and bla bla bla…

    but my personal opinion, what I generally I would imagine it’s for other than readability, is because the code can look a lot cleaner when an expression returned from a block is just the expression, and not expression plus some token like return. It’s especially nice in long closures or extremely short and simple blocks. I would rather consistently have to write expressions broadly like let a = { b + c }; rather than let a = { return b + c }. The semicolon has significance as a “result discarder” so expressions can be the default, so it’s on the surface a lot more functional-friendly.

    Also this is more specific but I hate the way WS languages generally handle quotes


  • That said, with how few expressions are return values, I do wonder why semicolons are the default rather than adding a special character to indicate return values.

    you mean like return/break/etc.?

    because Rust was designed to remind you of functional programming despite not being very functional, and because semicolons allow way better syntax rules in Rust and are generally pretty vital for good, readable lowish-level code. it also allows Rust programmers to use newlines/indents and stuff to pretty up their code a lot without littering it with random \ and |> and begin end and such everywhere, which, given how dense Rust code can be and how much it uses iterators and weird trait magic, is a big plus for readability


  • Depends on the language. I’m not gonna find shit to copy-paste for what I’m doing in Scala 3 or F#, but in Rust or C++ I’ll frequently Google an issue I can’t figure out and someone will have some fancy black magic hacker solution with super-iterators and turbofishies and weird type inference that I couldn’t think of myself and just throw it in my code with some minor modifications :)


  • force@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldTalking to normies about privacy:
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    6 months ago

    Okay then, I’ll ask you this. What can you demonstrate that you have prevented extremely large corporations or the government from doing with your information by replacing some of your services with “privacy-focused” services? Do you really think that, say, the NSA and Amazon don’t know you better than you know yourself regardless of your efforts? What do you think is prevented by using some isolated services while you still, no doubt, have most of your data being collected and used by other things?

    Could you prove that your life would be any different if, for example, every single piece of information Meta has about you that you don’t know they have were wiped off of their servers? Or that anyone here’s life would be different?

    The only thing I could imagine you could demonstrate is that targetted ads could be “worse”. Which is a non-answer, many peoples’ ads are completely inaccurate regardless, and ads aren’t such a good metric to base the government’s or Nvidia’s or whoever’s access to your data off of.

    Fact of the matter is is that, unless you’re mega-Amish, your efforts to prevent powerful entities from collecting your data are meaningless, they don’t work well, and without strong privacy laws it will forever be that way unless everyone suddenly agrees to only use FOSS user-friendly products and all the ISPs are replaced by good guys. I guess some people here have spent thousands of dollars and hours in an attempt to keep their privacy in their own hands in spite of that, so they have to convince themselves it does work… I don’t blame them, government corruption & corporatism has made me desparate before too.


  • force@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldTalking to normies about privacy:
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    6 months ago

    Much of the obsession internet people have over ““privacy”” is just a feel-good-about-themselves thing, rather than actually protecting themselves from their data being collected and used. If you’re posting on the internet, yes that includes Lemmy, there’s almost no doubt that any government and world-destroying corporation would have easy access to everything about you in an instant, even if you go out of your way to try to use services “focused on privacy”. You aren’t protecting yourself from anything by not using Google/Microsoft/etc. products.

    There is no “chipping away bit-by-bit” when it comes to this, it’s pretty much meaningless unless you’re nearly completely off the grid, to the point where you don’t even use modern technology. The worst you’re gonna do otherwise is fuck up targetted ads, but that’s not very hard to do considering Google apparently thought I was a pregnant woman looking for leather boots and beauty products when I still had ads on YouTube.

    I wish people would admit it’s really not about their privacy. Say it’s because FOSS services are better (because they are), say it’s so you don’t get spam from shitty sites you gave your email to, say it’s so you can fit in in your niche online communities, whatever. But 99.99% of people in “privacy” communities haven’t even put a dent in the data being collected from them by large entities, hell most people in these communities think VPNs will protect them from anything at all other than their parents or boss not noticing them being on porn sites (VPNs can help with privacy, but only under specific conditions that most people aren’t meeting)…