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cyanmagenta

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cyanmagenta
·2 months ago·discuss
You make some good points, but here are some counterpoints:

There is an existing infrastructure for ticketing by license plate, payment processing, collection, etc.

You’re describing changes to the law, which require a bunch of procedural hurdles. It’s much easier for the DMV to just promulgate new rules that tap into existing infrastructure, as they did here.

Also, how is the government supposed to assess whether these violations are intentional or not? Tickets are strict liability (you get the ticket if you do it regardless of intent, reasons, etc.) because it is easy to administer.
cyanmagenta
·2 months ago·discuss
The answer to all of these should be moving a stick over the equality sign to change it to an inequality sign.
cyanmagenta
·3 months ago·discuss
According to Google Translate: “A man who loves text files and wears a peculiar hat announces a plan to have sex with the weather.”

Hope this helps.
cyanmagenta
·4 months ago·discuss
Forgive the naivety, but what graphical Linux apps are people trying to run that don’t have native MacOS builds? In my experience, Linux GUIs are generally written in Qt or GTK, both of which are multi-platform.

I don’t doubt that they exist, I’m just struggling to think of a popular example.
cyanmagenta
·6 months ago·discuss
Yes, that is why I said “local database (sqlite, or a traditional database over a unix socket on the same machine).”

This isn’t an sqlite-specific point, although sqlite often runs faster on a single machine because local sockets have some overhead.
cyanmagenta
·6 months ago·discuss
There is some risk that, if you design your website to use a local database (sqlite, or a traditional database over a unix socket on the same machine), then switching later to a networked database is harder. In other words, once you design a system to do 200 queries per page, you’d essentially have to redesign the whole thing to switch later.

It seems like it mostly comes down to how likely it is that the site will grow large enough to need a networked database. And people probably wildly overestimate this. HackerNews, for example, runs on a single computer.
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
I view stuff like this kind of like code that fits into a bootloader or whatever. It’s really more of the technical challenge than to actually solve a problem. The result is much better if you just run a script on your hand-coded file to add syntax highlighting as DOM elements. Still, love seeing stuff like this.
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
> water rights per acre

Is that actually taken into account in a taking? I haven’t thought about this stuff in decades, and I know there is some weirdness with regulatory takings.

Another way to frame the question: if the government just changes the water rights per acre, does that itself trigger the takings clause?
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
There is a network effect with programming languages. Once you get popular, more people write libraries and guides for that language, which in turn makes it even more popular.

If you were czar of the universe and could start from scratch, could a better scripting language be created? Sure. But that’s not the fact pattern, and Python isn’t bad enough at what it does to warrant starting over.
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
Reminds me of that Wu-Tang album [1] that only sold one copy (to Martin Shkreli).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
Monetary damages generally accumulate during the pendency of litigation. Also, it seems unlikely that this would take 5 years to resolve—Apple would presumably just reactivate the account and argue the case is moot now. I mean, maybe they want to establish precedent here to avoid opening the floodgates to this type of litigation, but more likely they’d just settle this one out quickly and quietly and fight the issue when they had better facts. OP’s story is pretty persuasive.
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
I am having trouble understanding the distinction you’re trying to make here. The computer has the same pixel information that humans do and can spend its time analyzing it in any way it wants. My four-year-old can count the legs of the dog (and then say “that’s silly!”), whereas LLMs have an existential crisis because five-legged-dogs aren’t sufficiently represented in the training data. I guess you can call that perception if you want, but I’m comfortable saying that my kid is smarter than LLMs when it comes to this specific exercise.
cyanmagenta
·7 months ago·discuss
> I've never experienced a slow down

You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?
cyanmagenta
·8 months ago·discuss
I love all the unexpected twists in this. And it’s very beautifully written and sobering.

> the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else

That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation.

> he wasted his entire life, my mom said

In some ways, she did too by listening to her mother and not just getting divorced as she had wanted to. But I recognize that going against your family’s core beliefs is easier said than done.
cyanmagenta
·8 months ago·discuss
If we want to make the math analogy, C++ seems more like the language of math (basic algebra, the notion of proofs, etc.) that everyone uses, and the compartmentalization comes when you start to apply it to specific fields (number theory, etc.). That same concept exists in the C++ community: the people who care about stuff like asynchronous networking libraries aren’t usually the people who care about SIMD math libraries, and vice versa.

I also wonder if most junior C++ programmers can shortcut a bit by just using common patterns. Articles like these I’ve always thought were geared more toward experienced programmers who are intellectually curious about the inner workings of the language.
cyanmagenta
·8 months ago·discuss
Took me a sec to understand you meant comma as “decimal point” :)
cyanmagenta
·10 months ago·discuss
Right, but you aren’t limited to one DNS call. You could have the javascript resolve multiple text records, then combine them together.

You could even do this over UDP if you really wanted, just merging a bunch of 1200-byte records together
cyanmagenta
·10 months ago·discuss
The cap for record size is 64KB, but you can have an arbitrary number of records, so larger images should be possible by combining multiple TXT record responses into one.
cyanmagenta
·10 months ago·discuss
> once you have children, owning your home is a very welcome level of stability

I think this is the biggest factor if it applies. If we want to be utilitarian about it, the benefit to your kids of having the same school to attend, same neighbors to play with, same room to call their own and paint the walls as they desire, etc. just dwarfs everything else. Kids just do well in stable, predictable home environments.
cyanmagenta
·10 months ago·discuss
Fairly sure it requires you to have your own copy of Windows; it doesn’t provide one for you. Otherwise it would be a massive licensing violation / piracy. If you look at similar projects like WinApps, that’s how they work.