anglocentrist bullshit
something that still aggravates me to no end is when I spent a long time being told that handling Unicode text is hard, and that encoding things as ASCII is so much easier that it's worth disregarding all but one of the world's languages, etc., etc., but then I actually read Unicode documentation and found out that all of these people were both wrong and bad
sure, representing every possible language in the world is a difficult problem, but Unicode has literally solved all of those problems for you and documented every last one of them as part of the standard
there are documented standards on how to do case-insensitive matching, normalising text so that things that look the same actually are the same, and normalising harder so that even some things that aren't the same get folded together. it has documentation on avoiding look-alike characters for phishing attacks, and combining left-to-right and right-to-left scripts together and rendering it all properly. it has documented algorithms to tell you how to split apart graphical characters, words, and even sentences in a way that mostly works across languages
like, sure, it's a hard problem to solve, but they have solved it and told you how. and it works for every language in the world we've encoded so far, and will continue to work for the ones we've yet to encode. you just have to read the docs
like, sure, there are some things that aren't perfect. a lot of folks mostly disregard Unicode's advice on what characters can be used in variable names in programming languages in favour of broader, less complex restrictions. and while you could technically allow full Unicode support in passwords, people still don't want to risk locking folks out
and don't get me started about how they fucked up when unifying all variations of chinese characters into one giant mess instead of keeping those local variations
but overall, it's the best we've got and we have told people explicitly how to use it. so if you see something that fails to consider right-to-left text mixing in with content, or that fails to equate ß and SS in case-insensitive search, remember that it's not because it's a hard problem, but that someone chose not to solve it
re: anarchism
@whreq I'm pretty sure the original was more concise, but I'm failing to reproduce it accurately :)
anarchism
Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of this advice (I forgot where I saw it) that "who are informants?" is the wrong question to ask, and the correct question is "who are contributing to a healthy movement and who are disregarding other people's safety and well-being, regardless of their intentions?"
@zkat I'm not convinced that this is a problem, to be honest. That it's possible to install dependencies cross-repository does not mean that there cannot be policies to restrict it; it would not be fundamentally different from a security perspective from how it is today, except that the whole ecosystem would not be beholden to a singular for-profit registry operator with a dubious security track record anymore (because cross-registry interoperability would break the network effect).
Speaking more personally, I'm also less concerned about organizational needs, and more about community needs, and then particularly the tools for having a genuine distributed commons (where eg. manual scope configuration is not a viable solution).
@zkat How so?
@squeakypancakes If nothing else, it's a pretty quick indicator on which communities are probably toxic, I guess...
@pseudoramble (Notably, these are *normal* traffic lights, not a special installation; it is just a mode that they can operate in)
@pseudoramble I know of one intersection in Dordrecht, Netherlands that has something similar in the late hours of the day; vehicle light is always green, but when you press the pedestrian crossing button, it immediately goes orange-red for cars (unless there are *currently* cars driving through) and gives you a pedestrian green cycle.
I've also occasionally observed the inverse mode; permanently green for pedestrians, only giving cars a brief cycle when they appear. I don't know what was the trigger for that mode.
"If you do business with billion dollar entities, do not under any circumstances sell anything to them cheaply." -- @bert_hubert
@zkat Those are some pretty good results for orogene, nice :)
This is probably tangential and rambly, but what I would love to see some day is a JS package manager that can do cross-source installations; ie. packages can depend on packages on another registry (but not outright import-from-URL because of the linkrot problem).
Worked on a design for this a long time ago, but ended up slightly stuck on the interoperability with stock npm; best workaround we could find with semver preservation would be to have every registry operate a fake git server, since that seemed to be the only way to make npm do auto-updated cross-registry installs... but that would probably wreck these performance scores in how slow it is 🙂
Loss leader is supposed to be used where you need a certain amount of volume to become profitable, and loss leader gets you there faster.
But underpricing can also be used to squeeze out competitors so you become a monopoly and then charge monopoly rents. Rent-seeking is what all capitalist corporations will do if there isn't sufficient competition in a market as a countervailing force.
Guess which version most VC-funded tech companies were doing?
lewd reference
you can get silicone lubricant both in mechanical version and sex version, and now i’m pondering the differences in the vibes of the labels on either version. it’s like deodorant “for men” and “for women”, except here it’s hinge and fuck.
@zkat Ah, hm, I'm not sure then...
@anji Oh, bonus issue: I believe there's a non-linear relationship between wear-and-tear and vehicle weight, and so the recent-ish trend of useless and heavy un-pickups is exacerbating the road quality issues in the US even further
@helle Sleep well, hopefully!
I do appreciate some of my comrades beginning to understand that antisemitism is also a problem in left-wing spaces. All I can say is the sooner you act the easier this will be.
The Nazi bar analogy applies here. If you wait too long to kick these bigots out of your movement, it'll be their values that define the movement not yours.
subtoot, political
I should probably clarify: "here" means my geographical location, the Netherlands. Although I've seen similar behaviour on fedi as well, it's not what I'm currently referring to!
@anji The car dependency is actually the biggest factor why! It means a significantly higher use (proportional to population) and therefore significantly more wear and tear, thus way more expensive to maintain and resurface constantly, and the result is worse roads.
I think it was Not Just Bikes who had a pretty good set of videos on how a lot of US places are functionally bankrupt due to these sorts of costs. The easiest way to make your roads nicer to drive on is to only use them when they're actually needed...
In the process of moving to @joepie91. This account will stay active for the foreseeable future! But please also follow the other one.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
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Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.