The fact that Ask Jeeves isn’t an AI-only search engine is just beyond me. It was laughable that someone thought to personify a search engine 25 years ago, but now is pretty much the right time for that.

More than zero, which is too many for my taste.

It’s a needle in a haystack, but that’s a really valuable needle. It might actually be worth it.

As someone who just picked through the Zig docs (take this with a mountain of salt), Zig has a few things going for it:

• spec is simple and closer to C in scope
• modern language design, toolchain, and overall ergonomics
• Go-like struct & interface system
• 1st-class C interoperability

Go foists co-routines on you and the runtime, and Rust has the borrow checker. Both of these things deeply impact language design, standard libraries, and the overall developer experience. So Zig might actually be a “more modern C” in many ways which makes it a contender. That said, it’s not a 1:1 comparsion since it lacks everything else that C++ does: you’d have to re-envision your software designs as something other than OOP if that’s what you’re used to.

I was gonna say: “Yes, but also, no.”

This is basically why we abandoned the abstract “global warming” for the abstract-er “climate change”. Some places are just going to see amplified extremes throughout the year rather than fewer seasons.

**For some reason Lemmy is adding a ‘25’ between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn’t be there, just fyi.

The URL as shown is actually valid. No worries there.

The value 25 happens to be hexidecimal for a percent sign. The percent symbol is reserved in URLs for encoding special characters (e.g. %20 is a space), so a bare percent sign must be represented by %25. Lemmy must be parsing your URL and normalizing it for the rest of us.

Welcome to the top of the sigmoid curve.

If you were wondering what 1999 felt like WRT to the internet, well, here we are. The Matrix was still fresh in everyone’s mind and a lot of online tech innovation kinda plateaued, followed by some “market adjustments.”

I was gonna say. It’s this exactly. Plus a nice feature of Fediverse stuff is that it can scale down to hobby levels if needed. Venture funded commercial services abhor this and will compromise all kinds of things (e.g. morals, ethics) to keep going at whatever scale they’re at.

This gives me hope. It’s like we’re all finally learning how to moderate forums in this ridiculous climate.

No idea. Maybe they’ll keep it like the Gadsden Flag holdout libertarians? “We were here first” and all that.

Honestly, I was thinking about the people out there with tattoos. There has to be at least one.

For me, the cherry on top is how the “InfoWars” name is still completely apt, for completely different reasons.

I think there’s always going to be that group of people. Another example: folks that didn’t notice that The Colbert Report was satire.

That also sounds like the kind of prank that Cards Against Humanity would pull if they had access to as much cash. I love this so much.

The key phrase to remember here is: Price Discrimination.

Stores already possess the technology to track anyone’s shopping experience through loyalty cards. The “discounts” you get are really just a tax on everyone that doesn’t participate, and the benefits to the company for having your data are worth potentially losing business from un-tracked customers. That’s how valuable your data is.

So why aren’t we seeing per-customer targeting? This is not to suggest that businesses are benign here, but rather, just cautious about outright per-customer discounts and other price manipulation. Custom coupons are kinda/sorta a part of this. IMO, the door is still wide-open to find ways palatable to the customer (and courts) while dialing everyone in.

In that context, all cameras do is make the system practically impossible to dodge. Considering how much stores value that kind of information, it makes sense they’d invest to capture 100% of their retail activity.

I’m inclined to agree. I think the best path through would be to focus on laws that benefit multiple minor players that have a seat at the table.

Antitrust laws in general are a good example. These function at the direct expense of big monopolies, but are exactly what companies need if they want in on what was monopolized. And in the case of breaking a monopoly down, the resulting “baby” companies given more power, growth opportunity, hiring opportunities (job growth) and money making potential than the parent. This can also spur economic growth for all the fat cats out there by creating many new investment and hiring potentials. Overall, if you can get past the monopoly itself (read: take the ball away from your billionaire of choice), everyone else involved stands to benefit.

There may be other strategies, but I can’t think of any right now. I think the key is to tip the scale in favor of more favorable outcomes, then repeat that a few more times, achieving incremental progress along the way. Doctorow outlines the ideal end state for all this, but it’s up to everyone else to figure out how to get there.

While I don’t like the idea of embracing capital to improve things, the whole system is currently run this way. Standing with other monied interests that are aligned with the same goal might be the only way to go.

Just yesterday, Mrs. Warp Core was trying to enroll with an online service. The self-service email confirmation link refused to function correctly in Firefox on a desktop operating system (Windows in this case). It worked flawlessly on Firefox+iOS. Said link also shuttled the user straight off to the phone app.

I’ll add that nearly ever other aspect of their public facing web, including the online chat support, worked flawlessly everywhere I tried it. This all just reeked of hostile design.

When asked about why this is, I simply said:

The browser provides good security and choice for the user. Apps provide good security and control for the vendor.

Java itself is kind of blissful in how restricted and straightforward it is.

Java programs, however, tend to be very large and sprawling code-bases built on even bigger mountains of shared libraries. This is a product of the language’s simplicity, the design decisions present in the standard library, and how the Java community chooses to solve problems as a group (e.g. “dependency injection”). This presents a big learning challenge to people encountering Java projects on the job: there’s a huge amount of stuff to take in. Were Java a spoken language it would be as if everyone talked in a highly formal and elaborate prose all the time.

People tend to conflate these two learning tasks (language vs practice), lumping it all together as “Java is complicated.”

$0.02: Java is the only technology stack where I have encountered a logging plugin designed to filter out common libraries in stack traces. The call depth on J2EE architecture is so incredibly deep at times, this is almost essential to make sense of errors in any reasonable amount of time. JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, Rust, ASP, C++, C#, every other language and framework I have used professionally has had a much shallower call stack by comparison. IMO, this is a direct consequence of the sheer volume of code present in professional Java solutions, and the complexity that Java engineers must learn to handle.

Some articles showing the knock-on effects of this phenomenon:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11865307/how-to-expand-size-of-java-stack-trace-to-see-bottom-of-stack-triggering-a-sta
• https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/16g30jx/can_java_errors_stack_traces_be_longer/
• https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Java-Spring-Framework-produce-gigantic-unreadable-stack-traces
• https://community.splunk.com/t5/Splunk-Dev/What-are-the-best-extraction-methods-for-Java-Stacktrace-Errors/m-p/380397
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65436457/springboot-stack-trace-logging-filter-only-from-my-packages

Yes, but “Proto Indo-European” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. /s

Thank you!

I firmly believe this is how we wound up with tabs as a feature in the first place.