FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?
I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.
Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.
And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.
By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.
It's "not on the way", really. It is explicitly designed not to be democratic in any meaningful sense from the very beginning. It is not even a secret: the council work is intentionally opaque so that the actual people responsible for all this horrible stuff cannot be held accountable by the public. This is explicitly stated to be a feature, justified that it helps it all be more technocratic and less populist.
Seriously, the only reason why it takes place IMO is just that nobody ever cares to think for a moment how decisions are made in the EU, so everyone is somewhat indifferent and there's no mass attention to the fact, that the general public ability to affect EU decision is near zero, far, far less than USA or Russia and probably even China.
No, I did try to type, but nothing happened. I seem to remember I did check that I had English layout turned on, but maybe I actually didn't. Really cannot guess any better than that what might have been the problem.
Anyway, doesn't matter, it was totally my mistake, everything works for me as well as for everyone else.
I'm totally fine with the way it works, because, well, it's a game, losing should be losing. I mean, I kinda want to continue, but I'm glad I'm not allowed to. I didn't make it. There will be another chance tomorrow.
But I'd like to propose allowing keyboard input. Losing because of your mouse skills in a pattern recognition game is annoying.
To be fair, the courts in USA apparently have a different definition of tracking than all normal people do. Speaking of car movements, Flock claims this isn't tracking people based on some legalese mumbojumbo. Obviously, this and GPs claims are absolutely ridiculous if you speak English, but are apparently true in american legalese doublespeak.
This is all great, but, really, "Open" in "Openprinter" is enough of a sales pitch, because we all know what's the problem with all other printers. I don't need to scroll through all these pretty pictures of hands and tables to get me ready to hear the main thing. Even if I am ready to believe that you can deliver (which is a big if), the only things I am interested in are "how much" and "when do you promise it". And when I scroll all the way through and click on crowdfunding link, it turns out that "This project is launching soon".
What's even the point of this landing page in this state?
Well, but that's kinda the point, isn't it? You know that other mechanisms are possible, but you opted out for a user systemd file. I know that too, and I also just use systemd for that. Because the alternative doesn't look much easier. I guess it makes sense that they try to discourage it now, because for serious deployment it isn't the best option. But when I install Podman on my laptop, I really wish the systemd configs would be added automatically without me even knowing.
I mean, really, if we keep in mind that formally these are 2 totally unrelated projects, it's hard to complain. Yes, it's almost seamless. But since when installing Podman everyone thinks roughly "I am installing a newer better Docker version", and we all already have a few dozens of custom Docker containers running, it's hard no to wish it was even more seamless and backwards-compatible. I remember the transition process wasn't nearly as smooth as I hoped, and every small glitch is kinda stressful, because you know that currently all of it "somehow works", and if something breaks you probably won't even notice right away.
But if you are gonna extract and open-source the whole self-contained tool, why not just do that and then install in whatever project like you install any other 3rd party tool?
I get it that there are use-cases for this, but it's surprising to learn that apparently use-case space is big enough for it to invite a creation of a dedicated tool. I mean that the fact you need it is a bit shameful on its own, no? Usually, when you need to reuse the code between the projects, you try to extract it as a separate library / module. The copying between repos is just a lazy solution, because "ain't nobody got time for that".
Even though the premise sounds true (kind of, sort of), everything about the post makes me question it. And it's not just that Stroustrup is among the last men I'd trust about syntax design, every example in the post just feels wrong.
Python walrus operator wasn't opposed by "teachers and beginners", because it's "harder to learn". Quite the opposite, it was opposed by purist old-timers, because for 20 years the absence of stuff like that was considered a feature and "the Python way". I don't think I pass as a beginner, but while I personally am not opposed to that operator, I totally get what's their problem with it. I think, that := is explicit enough, but addition-assignment was a native feature of most C-like languages which usage was actively discouraged by most teams, at least unless it really makes the concrete situation much more readable. Which the example in the post hardly does.
Rust ? operator isn't some example of terse Perl-like syntax, it's very intuitive and by no way it's any harder to grasp for a beginner, than the explicit match. In fact, it's probably the opposite, since it really matches the surface behavior. It only appeared after the explicit syntax, because it's really just syntactic sugar in Rust's case, and the language primitives are Ok/Err and pattern matching, not the "?" operator.
And I don't even know TLA+, but I could guess what "Good" example does, because it's basically plain English / standard math notation. The explicit "procedural" version is much less clear (mostly, because of the unfamiliar syntax).
Are these even real countries at this point? Also, it's not even about privacy, AFAIK pretty much any country will try to protect you from accessing something they don't like you to access, and in most cases it's some half-assed attempt to do so, like your ISP's default DNS directing you to some warning page instead of actually opening the website you were going to open. So changing your ISPs DNS to something like 8.8.8.8, while it doesn't necessarily increase privacy, is the first major step to improve your browsing experience.
But there never really was a moat in LLM?.. I mean, I don't know where you stand, but my perception is that we all kinda knew that the whole time since 2017, and really knew that since DeepSeek. What they really care about is:
1. Customer acquisition.
2. Cheap(er) electricity/hardware.
So it's really surprising to me that them making their own chip surprises anyone at all. The electricity thing is already kinda being taken care of by earlier strategic alliances with some other evil people, the chip is a natural next step.
Really enjoyed the article, even though it's not a new topic to me, but still it was very interesting, very nicely written and I still managed to pick up a couple of new details.
To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.
> But I do agree with your point, these days, I hope we're better about studying the potential dangers of current technologies we use.
Sorry, but this is just pure "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" vibe to me. I mean, you've just brought up a perfect example yourself! What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to still hope that this time it's not like that?
I don't wanna start the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing and whatnot, and surely you shouldn't avoid ultrasound just because of irrational fear of some yet undiscovered side-effects, but it's really amazing, how people tell fun stories about how common was the narrative about major war being very unlikely in "modern days" (because who would dare to do that with this kind of technology!) right before WW1, and then conclude with firmly believing that these days (after WW2) it sure won't happen, because humans are not that dumb. And my point is, that perhaps it indeed might have been a bit less likely, if people didn't believe that it is so unlikely to keep stepping on the same rake.
Doesn't even matter if the story is real, because there are definitely a thousand cases like that which are real, but it annoys me to no end that actual people spend their actual finite life time reacting to posts and issue tickets created by an LLM agent running on some idiot's behalf. Some measly $6531 loss isn't a proper punishment for that, they should lose much, much more.
You believe. So it applies to projects you maintain. It doesn't mean it applies to project I maintain, or anybody else maintains. So this shouldn't be any more default than any other mode. And probably less default, since people generally developed other conceptions about "defaults" of etiquette in open source projects over the last 15 years.