LPThinker

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Cities are centuries older than cars though. Cars are the new thing. And yet it's true that cars are an obvious QoL improvement for anyone in a rural area, and no reasonable person is suggesting that people in rural areas shouldn't drive cars.

The real issue is that Americans (among others) have decided they want all the convenience and amenities of living in a city (sewer, water, energy, convenient access to most goods and services, etc.), but they want to pretend they live in a rural area, with no density whatsoever. This has resulted in the suburban sprawl that is financially ruinous and requires cars to be able to go anywhere and do anything, which creates traffic, which we solve by building bigger roads and pushing things farther apart, creating more traffic.

Thus, the answer really is that if you want city amenities, you need to live in a city. It doesn't have to be as dense as New York. Not Just Bikes just posted a great video about the smallish town of Bergen in Norway that is not a super dense urban hellscape, it is medium density with human-centric development.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Congratulations, you've illustrated the difference between syntax and semantics. But any competent compiler also handles semantics (just in a separate phase of compilation), because that's necessary for any useful conversion to machine code, not to mention optimizations.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

repairable and upgradable*

I know it's an absolutely banal nitpick, but I think it's unfortunately a revelation in the current laptop market that ~90% of a laptop stays good for a really really long time, and the other 10% can be upgraded piecemeal as the need arises. Obviously this was never news to the Desktop world, but laptop manufacturers got away with claiming this was impossible for laptops in the name of efficiency and portability.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

If you're in any of these states:

  • Alaska
  • Arizona
  • California
  • Connecticut
  • Florida
  • Idaho
  • Illinois
  • Kansas
  • Maine
  • Maryland
  • Massachusetts
  • Nevada
  • New Hampshire
  • New Jersey
  • New Mexico
  • New York
  • North Carolina
  • Oregon
  • Pennsylvania
  • South Dakota
  • Tennessee
  • Texas
  • Washington state
  • Wisconsin
  • Wyoming

You can use the IRS' new Direct File service. It's what we should've had ages ago, letting citizens file their taxes directly without a for-profit middle man. There are still a couple of scenarios they don't support, since it's still in development and is only in it's second year of use, but in my experience it's already competent and helpful.

And, as a bonus, you don't have to give any money to Intuit/TurboTax to keep lobbying the government to make our tax code as arcane as possible so that people need their services to file taxes.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

I'm a bit confused, it sounds like Yale will no longer offer CS50, but unless I'm misunderstanding, won't Harvard still be producing the course?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I broadly agree.

However, "Existing maintainers have every right to push back where they see fit" is tenuous when the Linux project as a whole has already (exhaustively) discussed and debated this exact question alongside all the other questions about adding Rust, and the explicit declared direction is that Rust should become an increasingly large part of the Linux kernel.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (9 children)

This is valid if your city doesn't have dedicated bike infrastructure that gets plowed. Snow can be hardly an inconvenience at all if bike infrastructure is treated with equal importance as car infrastructure.

Oh the Urbanity! on Youtube has a really realistic take on this in Montreal: https://youtu.be/sokHu9bhpn8?si=C_2WD0WKDMKLVXIO

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

In what sense are they "siding" with the corporations? If anything, this seems like a step in the right direction, to add some modicum of open governance to the Chromium project in a fashion that is clearly not corpo-dominated.

Also, it's not like this is the Linux Foundation saying "we only support Chromium", after all they also run the Servo project.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Source? Like obviously none of us on this platform appreciate manifest v3, but it's obvious that's a corporate push, and exactly the thing this new organization might help mitigate.

On the other hand, the Chromium team has been pumping out all kinds of day-to-day platform improvements for the last 5 years at least. I'm thinking of CSS ergonomics and more robust HTML that make web devs less JS-dependent. The kinds of down-in-the-weeds work that gave us CSS grid, all the useful new CSS pseudoselectors, the command attribute for buttons, etc. etc.

I'm not a web maximalist, and I would love to see a simpler web/browser prosper, but I just don't think it's realistic.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I think anyone is welcome to try this, but the core ethos of the web is backwards compatibility. To my unending irritation, even non-standard behaviors/APIs like WebUSB have become critical for sites to function.

The last time we actually dropped a feature, it was Flash, and that took a decade and there is still tons of effectively dead/permanently lost content because of it.

Creating a browser that only implements a subset of the standards is fine for very niche usecases but I don't expect it to ever overtake the major browsers. We'll see how Ladybird fares as it's compatibility increases.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (13 children)

Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it as someone who has left Chromium behind personally, Chromium is kind of the only choice. I think people outside the browser implementation world underestimate the sheer scale and complexity of the modern browser stack and what goes into maintaining compatibility with web standards, much less advancing them.

We've reached the point where Chromium is essentially the de-facto web standard because Chromium engineers do the lions' share of feature testing and development, because Chromium receives the lions' share of funding.

Igalia, an OSS consultancy that does a lot of fairly-funded independent browser development, has lots of material about this. For example, the recent chat between Igalia members and someone from Open Web Advocacy about what to do if the anitrust ruling against Google jeopardize's Chromium's funding, and the options are pretty dire.

Edit: After reading the article, I think this is a really good sign. Bringing together the immediate stakeholders in Chromium's development and funding bodes well for the possibility of stewarding Chromium in a less Google-dependent, profit-motivated, ad-centric direction. There's unfortunately a lot of uncertainty about how this will all shake out, but it's possible that Chromium could become a truly independent project and move back in the direction of user value instead of user-hostile shareholder value.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Microsoft produces a plethora of good learning materials if you're struggling with the basics or specific concepts. I recommend their C# for Beginners course to get a good overview of real C#.

Once you have a good handle on the basics, I would echo others' advice that having some kind of project or goal to work towards is the surest path to learning, because you have external motivation to use what you're learning and look up things as you need them. Is there some reason you chose C# specifically as your next language, maybe for game dev, web dev, or Windows apps?

 

Really intriguing article about a SQL syntax extension that has apparently already been trialed at Google.

As someone who works with SQL for hours every week, this makes me hopeful for potential improvements, although the likelihood of any changes to SQL arriving in my sector before I retire seems slim.

20
State of HTML 2023 (2023.stateofhtml.com)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15433712

State of HTML 2023

Results of the State of HTML 2023 Survey are out.

19
State of HTML 2023 (2023.stateofhtml.com)
 

Results of the State of HTML 2023 Survey are out.

 

I found this an extremely realistic, thoughtful perspective on why unions are gaining momentum and how we can continue to win back power for ourselves and our communities.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14246943

I found this talk really helpful in understanding the broader context of open source's recent difficulties (see xz vulnerability, Redis license change, etc.)

I am one of the people who has immensely enjoyed using open source at a personal level (and have done a tiny bit of contributing). I've seen and read a lot about burn out in open source and the difficulties of independent open source maintainers trying to make a living off their work while companies make billions using that work and only ever interact with the maintainer to demand more unpaid labor. But I've never seriously considered how we got to this point or what it might take to move to a more sustainable world of thriving, fair open source.

 

I found this talk really helpful in understanding the broader context of open source's recent difficulties (see xz vulnerability, Redis license change, etc.)

I am one of the people who has immensely enjoyed using open source at a personal level (and have done a tiny bit of contributing). I've seen and read a lot about burn out in open source and the difficulties of independent open source maintainers trying to make a living off their work while companies make billions using that work and only ever interact with the maintainer to demand more unpaid labor. But I've never seriously considered how we got to this point or what it might take to move to a more sustainable world of thriving, fair open source.

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