From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.
Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”
Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.
It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.
I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.
As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.
Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.
The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.
If I recall the order of events, that was after many months of peddling anti-vax ideas and getting anyone who would listen to him riled up at the prospect of there even being a pandemic. So I don’t think it’s much praise to note he tried, once, ineffectually, to push for people to get vaccinated, especially when he lets those booing him shut him down so easily.
That clip of him getting booed at the rally in August 2021, to me, especially shows why Trump deserves so much of the criticism. As president of the USA he was probably the individual with the most power and resources at his disposal to keep people from dying, from getting sick, from transmitting the disease. Not only did he actively make things worse for the first entire year of the pandemic being declared in the USA, when he finally does start telling people to get vaccinated it’s once he’s no longer in charge. On top of that, when he does it in the place with the lowest rate of vaccination in the entire country (according to this article published at the time: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-alabama-rally-after-telling-supporters-get-vaccinated-n1277404) he lets himself get booed into a soft, non-committal “I recommend you take it, but still you need to preserve your personal freedoms, also I took it so haha guys if it doesn’t work you’ll be the first to know!”.
Trump definitely deserves the most blame for repeatedly stoking the fire of an already bad situation. So much so that there are articles that exist titled “a timeline of how Trump failed to respond to the coronavirus” (https://www.vox.com/2020/6/8/21242003/trump-failed-coronavirus-response). Sure, if you want to be a bit pedantic, he’s not responsible for “all of it”. I don’t think anyone here is exactly claiming that either.
Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.
Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.
Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.
“What was Windows even doing for us?”
Beautiful 🥲
To be fair, weren’t Valve the first company to do that? People were really annoyed at having to install steam just to play some Half-Life.
Of course, that was only 1 launcher, no launcher-in-launcher shenanigans back then.
Aside from echoing @[email protected] and Doctorow’s statements about unionizing, I am aware of a few others who are trying things that I’d describe as complimentary to unions.
This is a panel titled “Why hasn’t Open Source Won?” where several of the speakers attempt to sketch out a framework wherein a programmer would have more decision over how their code is used: https://youtu.be/k3eycjekIAk . I’ll admit, I’m not the most impressed with where they get to in the limited time they have. Nevertheless, I think it’s a useful angle of consideration to have in the tool belt.
This is an org/foundation that is trying to walk the walk with regards to governing tech democratically: https://nivenly.org/ I haven’t kept up with any recent developments of theirs.
“I need some more [input] sanitizer for my eczema script, the console is red and inflamed whenever I check it.”
As we have seen in months past when Linux takes a sizable dip, it’s correlated to a rise in the Simplified Chinese use. In August the Simplified Chinese use further grew and helping out Windows at the cost to the Linux percentage.
So, the solution is clear: get all Simplified Chinese users to switch from Windows to Linux :D
Having just watched the lecture, the only classified info I can recognize is the capabilities of 80s era satellites.
Given that, I think it’s quite a shame that the whole thing is only now available. Rear Admiral Hopper seems to have been someone who deeply understood both computers and people. The prescriptions she gives regarding “systems of computers” and “management” vs “leadership”, to name just two, are spot-on. Her lecture is quite grounded in what I’d call “military thinking”, but that’s just because she’s in a room filled with people who are of that life. In my opinion, everything she talks about is applicable to communities and businesses.
The general gist of the entire ~90mins reminds me of Project Cybersyn in its perspective on how computers could serve society.
The idea is neat, and there is a certain precedent for the approach in .htaccess files and webserver path permissions.
Still, I worry about the added burden to keeping track of filenames when they get used as stringed keys in such a manner. More plainly: if I rename a file, I now have to go change every access declaration that mentions it. Sure, a quick grep will probably do the trick. But I don’t see a way to have tooling automate any part of it, either.
Do you perchance know if a similar manoeuver can be attempted to fix a mouse wheel click issue?
Get off of .world if you want to see a difference.
The size of that instance almost guarantees these kinds of dynamics will emerge, especially on a website run by volunteers and paid for by donations.
Stop complaining to other users; go be the change you wish to see.
Political violence has absolutely no place in a healthy society
But we aren’t in a healthy society. If anything, this shooting is proof of it. This isn’t an excuse. This is a claim that your arguments will fall on deaf ears.
I’m not cheering this (I would go as far as saying that I hate what happened), but I don’t think people who have/are doing so, are displaying abject character or intellectual dishonesty. I think they are misreading the current political context, and I think nothing good will come of this.
Trump has caused unknowable deaths from the policies put into place during his presidency, and with Project 2025 would (will?) cause even more.
Pacifism becomes extremism when it cares more about policing and shaming those who vent their frustration at the current state of things. “missed the exit ramp to utopia” is a hell of a way to convince people to listen to what you have to say with an open mind.
Political violence has been happening for years, and this is what gets us a mod post ? I would venture that I am just as disappointed in my fellow lemmings as you are, but frankly, this feels almost as tone-deaf and unhelpful as those calling for blood.
Now is the time for constructive advice. Bandying about “extremism” helps no cause but that of inaction.
You want a better society? Go outside and organize. Help people feel prepared for their future. Leave those calling for blood on an online forum to be picked up by the feds and law enforcement. Or talk to people like you care about them, not picking up after the mess they will make.
People are dying of hunger, of lack of shelter, of preventable diseases, of working 3 jobs without breaking even, and they just saw one of the rich fucks that spent 4 years making their lives worse dodge death and supercharge his followers. Now you expect them to calm down because someone online invokes “rational, independent thinkers”, after preemptively accusing them of downvoting a post that they have yet to read.
Shooting Trump is not how we get through this. Making this post with this tone is not how we get through this, either. I don’t have the answers beyond “find a better way to get your point across or you will just push away those you are trying to reach”. Hopefully I have not, myself, fallen into the same trap with this comment.
When you use Git locally and want to push to GitHub you need an access token.
I don’t understand; I can push to GitHub using https creds or an ssh key without creating access tokens.
An oldie but a goodie : https://csszengarden.com/
Microsoft is pivoting its company culture
Oh yes, the thing they’re well known for succeeding at.
Not necessarily cash, but definitely a bit of luck. Some lawyers, if they think a case is guaranteed to go your way, will do the work for free in exchange for receiving a portion of the damages the final judgement will award you. Even rarer, some lawyers care enough about some issues on a personal level that they’ll work for free, or reduced rates, on certain cases.
In this case, I’m not sure there are any damages whatsoever to award to OP - a “win” is forcing the company to abide by the GPL, not pay up money. The EFF and the FSF, as others have brought up, are probably the best bet to find lawyers that would work on this case for the outcome instead of the pay.
To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.