unflxw

Hi Kris. Thank you for reaching out in this way. I am sorry about what I said, and especially so about how I said it.

My undoubtedly harsh words intended to disqualify a line of thinking that I saw as logically dishonest and ethically dubious. Regardless, I overreached and turned it into a personal attack, which was not what I intended.

I've had enough of this terrible fucking website, and the terrible fucking people in it, even if there are also plenty of wonderful, insightful people in it, worth participating in conversation with.

The latter, to answer the previously stated question, are why I have participated here, even if it means having to share a space with people who do not feel the slightest tinge of doubt, self-awareness or embarrassment whilst crowning themselves "actual intellectuals".

This website brings the worst on me, and it brings the worst in others. Everyone here acts like they're so fucking smart, saying the most inane shit to each other, pretending each comment is a philosophy treaty, and patting each other on the back for it. I'm sure we're all really nice people when you meet us in person, even if we're unbearable shitheads in here.

And in trying to counter the hypocrisy, the self-reinforcing bubble of fake intellectualism, I too became part of it and turned into one of the unbearable shitheads. What a waste of time.

> I'm an actual intellectual

It is literally impossible to make fun of this website. It is, truly, beyond parody. I think that I'm being hyperbolic in saying shit like "everyone in this website believes they're the smartest person alive", and five minutes later I get a reply with a dimly-lit picture of a Mensa certificate. Every single time.

> Besides, assuming that you are a human being, I can find plenty of images of those holding guns. Are you a murderer too then?

What an absolutely deranged sentence to read. A new low, even for this cursed pseudo-intellectual wasteland of a website.

I refuse to believe that you can't tell the difference between a human being, with autonomy and free will, and a robot with a mounted automatic gun on its back, designed and deployed with the express intention and the exclusive purpose of killing human beings. "But you can take pictures of both". Wow.

What a cheap blanket dismissal. Regardless of the affiliation of the site (which I neither know nor care) it links to sources that can be trusted:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/percepto-to-create-fleet-of-ro... https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/

That doesn't mean that the people working to _improve_ PHP are doing anything wrong. Sisyphean, perhaps.

That's very interesting. I currently live in Barcelona, and most people would be very surprised to see Rodalies held up as any sort of platonic ideal of anything. Though it is true that it could be a great transit network, given the necessary investment in its maintenance and improvement. Perhaps in two or three more decades.

Aren't the diagonals also being built? Primarily, if I recall correctly, by reusing existing passenger rails corridors and connecting their services instead of terminating them at the main stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Central_Diameters

There's no rule that says that something can't be both practical and good.

And it's not like it's no longer possible to write quote-unquote "bad" PHP -- if nothing else, PHP is backwards-compatible to a fault.

Agreed. I'd say the source of the problem is the lack of real third places. I like to call this "the abolition of society", but I'm a bit dramatic.

While the internet is certainly addictive, I'd assume that most people who, like me, waste their lives online, do so primarily because no real alternative is available.

> We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc.

Humans are social beings. We are motivated to do things through our peers doing things. What you describe is probably really nice for people who enjoy exercise and spending time in nature. But for social beings, what you are describing is absolute isolation from society.

I would posit that a big part of what glues the kids to the screen is that the screen is a window to the real world. When they look into the screen, they have an endless stream of other people, expressing opinions, doing things, existing in society. When they look outside, there's no society, there's no people. It's just trees.

My impression is that Node.js has to be dragged kicking and screaming into any modern JavaScript development practices, and each time, they try to support as little of it as possible as they can get away with.

They have only last year actually rolled out a release that uses ESM modules by default, when the bulk of the community has adopted TypeScript and moved on to using ESM imports (even if they are importing CJS modules under the hood)

They were really late to async/await, and even more so to promises. The chaotic situation where each dependency bundled its own promise library remained in Node.js years after browsers shipped built-in promises. And it still hasn't trickled down to their standard library, most of which is still callback-based and needs to be "promisified" manually. Even their support for fetch, which is eight years old at this point, is still marked as experimental.

Not all tourists are Americans. I would expect the average person scammed by these ATMs is an European citizen from a different country.

I agree the map kinda sucks, because most of the island of Mallorca is a tourist trap at this point. But you can see how the interior's population centers, like Inca, Sa Pobla and Manacor, have none.

For a better example, as one of the replies to the tweet suggests, check using Google Maps around Barcelona. You can see sixteen of them crowded around Sagrada Familia, for example, and barely any in the mostly-residential neighbourhoods further north.

I agree, but that's a very generous description of what Mozilla is doing. I'd say they're less "developing a competitive browser" and more "keeping an uncompetitive browser on life support to continue to profit off it".

I'd argue that the EFF is the main organization fighting for the open web.

Some minor product manager in Cupertino, two quarters from now: "As we can see in this graph, thanks to the improvements to Feedback Assistant over the past couple years, we've reduced our products' bug rate to nearly zero percent!"

To be clear, I meant "nonsensical and unrealisable" in that there's no realistic, long-term sustainable way to greater public services without greater taxation. Nonsensical as public policy for them to advocate for. I didn't mean that it wouldn't make sense for their pockets to want that, all else equal.

Again, thank you for explaining your thoughts on it.

I appreciate your answer. It's hard to have these conversations online without it quickly devolving into a shouting match, hence my disclaimer.

Not that I have any intent to defend this abstract group of people, but I don't generally get the impression that wealthy people who advocate for a greater social security net do so without understanding that it would necessarily be funded by their taxes. If they do, though, it's certainly a nonsensical and unrealisable position.

That said, I don't get how this eleven-dimensional chess play to have the peasants pay for their healthcare costs during their retirement would be worth the effort. If that's their end goal, wouldn't it be much easier to advocate for less public services and less taxation on the rich, pocket the difference into their investment plans, and use _that_ to fund their private healthcare plans?

I see this sentiment expressed often, but I don't quite get it.

Is the implication that if you personally enjoy a high standard of living through capitalism, it is therefore hypocritical to advocate for everyone to enjoy a high standard of living through socialism? How come?

(I am asking this question in good faith. Note that at no point I am stating that socialism would or could actually achieve a high standard of living for everyone. I am neither interested in having that discussion or claiming that position. Please don't reply with a Wikipedia copy-paste about the great famine)

Perhaps it's not great to set the expectation that any specific approach to AI "is all you need"?

(or, in other words, "Is All You Need" Considered Harmful)

The public railway infrastructure is maintained by Adif [1], which is owned by the Spanish state.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructu...

While I hope that Spanish politics continue to be based in coalitions, this is a very recent phenomenon, with a two-party political system historically dominating the country's politics, a tradition that predates the democratic system itself. [1]

For what it's worth, I believe the plan is to keep most of the land that was purchased for HS2, as to make it possible for the project to be restarted at a later date.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turno

In Spain, there's usually no "density gradient" between the core of a city and its suburbs.

The core of the city is dense, the suburbs are equally dense, and the conurbation's edge is a street which has a five-story building on one side and farmland on the other. Outside the conurbation, it's primarily farmlands and forests, with even small towns following a similar pattern.

That is, the density of a given area is either somewhere in the thousands of people per square kilometer, or in single digits.

(Some cities do break this pattern to some extent, but it's mostly isolated phenomena, such as the suburbs of Madrid around the A-6, or the continuum of housing along the Costa del Sol)

In Spain, especially after the closures in the 80s [1], the traditional rail network, which was already chronically under-maintained, also became, with some exceptions, hopelessly disjointed. Many of the remaining operating routes can't meaningfully connect the territories they pass through with each other, only to Madrid.

As more and more of the main cities are brought into the high speed network, the traditional network is given less funding and less service, to the detriment of the smaller towns served by it. However, it is important to note that this trend was already underway before the high speed network was in place.

The remaining regional train between Barcelona and Madrid, for example, takes eight hours by the schedule (nine or ten in real life) while the high speed trains take three hours or less.

Occasionally, some services survive that use the high speed network for most of the trip, then switch to the traditional network for the last leg of the trip.

[1]: https://nitter.net/pablomarinas_/status/1361406780757200898

Note that any combination of two of the three "dimensions" does constitute an independent system. That is, given that q + r + s = 0, then q + r = -s, so you could use only (q, r) as your coordinates (and indeed that's likely how you'd canonically refer to them)

The "third coordinate" is only for convenience when working with the three main axes of an hexagonal grid. Without it, the three directions of your grid are {+q, +r, -q-r}, which introduces an ugly asymmetry for one of the three axes.

This is really neat!

I made a space-filling curve:

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[FR]]FRR]]RRRRRRF]]FFFFFFFRR]]RRRRRRFFFFFFFFF]]FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFRR]]RRRRRRFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF]]FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFRR]]

It's not very interesting by itself (it just fills the whole screen with white) but you get cool-looking visualisations of its fractal-like structure by putting "C" at different points of the opening brackets.

> "Over time, this vicious cycle may convince us we don’t matter to anyone and that we’re unworthy of love."

This is going to sound snotty, but arguments were made for people who sort of knew what they were doing. You probably shouldn't be touching the comments box if you don't know what it does. These thoughts were written assuming a basic understanding of the language they were written on.

> This is going to sound snotty

The word you’re looking for is “condescending”.

Regardless, there is no argument about software freedom to be made here.

You’re allowed, be it open or close source, to write and publish software that defies common, well-established conventions.

You can pretend that it’s some sort of first amendment right to do so if you like, and attempt to deflect your unwillingness to write software that behaves properly as incompetence on the users’ end.

But whether anyone will be convinced by that is a separate question, and those who aren’t convinced certainly have the right to tell you, in turn, that your software sucks. This does not inflige on your rights to write broken software.

To be clear, the keywords to tick the boxes are all still there, just presented in the context in which you use them, which adds additional meaning. My CV has them in bold so that the HR person won't miss them on a quick scan.

That said, if you optimise your CV for success in recruitment processes where no one understands what you're talking about, you will get jobs at places where no one knows what they're talking about.