Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@dcreager That seems to have been the most useful one so far, thanks! It does seem to explain part of what I'm wondering about, but I'm having to make some inferences here as it mostly talks about Mutex/RwLock - do Cell and RefCell exist for the same reason of "doing runtime instead of compile-time checking"? And if so, and they are just not thread-safe, why would you ever use the not-thread-safe ones?

@raito Hmm, this seems a bit too dense/abstract for me - it seems to be *about* interior mutability, but doesn't seem to explain how eg. Rust ended on the Cell/RefCell abstractions, or exactly what the difference is with your standard mutable/immutable references.

The problem I keep running into is that everyone says "you can't mutate a thing to which you have a shared reference, for safety reasons, but if you put it in a Cell/RefCell then you can" and it is entirely unclear to me why it's suddenly okay in a Cell/RefCell and how it ensures safety in that case, and if it's so easy, why that isn't just default behaviour for references, and so on.

@modulux Yep, I did read that, but unfortunately it doesn't really talk about the "why does it exist", so I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it in context - and I don't really want to just "add it whenever the compiler complains" either, I need a mental model to reason about where it's appropriate, basically.

@modulux@node.isonomia.net Yep, I did read that, but unfortunately it doesn't really talk about the "why does it exist", so I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it in context - and I don't really want to just "add it whenever the compiler complains" either, I need a mental model to reason about where it's appropriate, basically.

(I am aware of the Rust book. It doesn't click with me.)

@aeva I don't know about other places, but in NL, the government has made a big effort to *make* the right choices (around COVID) hard... putting up constant hoops everywhere to everything

@eevee It's infuriating how so much security discourse is just either "this is not perfect, yeet it into the sun" or "nothing matters to anyone and using plaintext Facebook Messenger should be good enough for anyone".

Like, it's possible to recognize that something is broken and disclosure is handled poorly, *and* also recognize that there are many other factors in the choices people make

@futurebird There's one place where I find it pleasant to use, and that's the snooze 'button' of my alarm clock - basically the entire top curve of the thing is a giant capacitive 'button', which also doubles as a nightlight toggle when double-tapped, and I can successfully use it half-asleep without looking!

I'm not sure it would be possible to have such a large physical button without having it be super unreliable (needing to press it at a particular angle etc.), and it also requires a lot less pressure to have it be capacitive. But this is admittedly a very specialized purpose.

If you've noticed me suddenly disappearing from social channels for a while every so often, that's step 3.

So many people wish to talk to me. A lot of them with the best of intentions. But I ultimately get so little out of many of these conversations. They are often very one-sided.

Sure, it often inspires people to change their minds. But it doesn't usually inspire them to start *doing* something. It doesn't usually inspire them to offer to collaborate. It rarely inspires them to take the initiative on something. So what good are those conversations to a better world, really?

In some cases, this can be explained by spoons shortages, autistic burnout, and so on. In many other cases, people simply do not feel the impetus to do anything. Sure, I can get along with them conversationally, but they are not 'my people', for lack of a better phrase.

I don't think this is what I really want to be spending my time on. I don't want to always be the person driving an effort, pushing the conversation forward, suggesting things to do. It brings me nothing but work and frustration.

I need people, preferably in the Netherlands, who I can rely on to want to actively improve society. Who are also willing to pull the cart themselves, instead of just expecting me to do it. I don't care that much about *what* exactly they want to build, as long as it is on anarchist or equivalent principles.

I need someone who I can talk to and collaborate with, and be left with more energy and spoons than I had going in.

@cephie (One of those implications being "preparing for a disaster is a good thing but not with a shotgun approach like this")

@cephie I mean, isn't it essentially just computer-toucher preppers, with all of the issues that that implies?

My mood tends to cycle through a few distinct phases, over and over again:
1. Desire for solitude, working on projects.
2. Feeling like social interaction, let's go seek it out!
3. Once again rediscovering that I just do not feel comfortable with most people, and the only community I've found that I feel comfortable with beyond my partners, is one or more countries away.
4. Back to step 1, but now with a longing for people I cannot find to actually build stuff with.

Steps 3 and 4 are where the loneliness and depression hit, where I realize again how I just do not have a local support network, and I cannot find them either, even though the right people *must* exist here too.

Like, I want people around me who are strongly politically conscious *and* willing to self-reflect *and* have the ambition/desire and ability to actually build up new things. Those three properties seem impossible to satisfy together.

There's the anarchists, but they're largely apathetic around here. There's the non-anarchist leftists, but they are generally ableist and racist. Neither of these groups are very good at reflecting on their own behaviour.

Then there are the people who are politically conscious *and* self-reflecting and constructive... but who are usually stuck working an exhausting job and so can't spare time to work on anything else.

Then there are the tech people, who I *should* be able to collaborate with a lot, given the large overlap in skillset. But oh boy, let's not get started about the tech people.

It sometimes just feels like there's nobody here, in this entire goddamn country, who I could actually get along with well enough to make things happen together.

And like. They *must* exist. Somewhere. But *where*?!