hot take but i think ISPs should return to giving every user a couple hundred megs of space on a public facing web server & encourage them to build little homepages. the corporatization of the web really hit overdrive when the persistent web presence of the average user stopped being a bunch of handwritten HTML and random files they wanted to share and instead became a profile template on a social media site
Fascinating charts about power generation by country (gift link).
Look, this is silly. Yes, we would need unfeasible amounts of new wiring to recreate a modern high energy economy powered only by (green) electricity. But we would also need completely unfeasible amounts of lots of other things – most particularly metals. We are going to have to learn to live WELL in a much lower energy world – and, actually, it isn't hard to see how we achieve this.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/25/race-to-get-uk-electricity-grid-ready-for-net-zero
@futurebird Could you not setup macros/text replacement? So typing a command like “!sqrt” would get turned into the square root symbol?
Public transport isn't supposed to make money. It's not even supposed to break even. It's supposed to lose money and to be financed and extended from general taxes because it gives back way more than mere money.
And all the politicians know this because they keep building and maintaining streets for free
how git cherry-pick and revert use 3-way merge https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/10/how-cherry-pick-and-revert-work/
@freemo that’s a pretty standard view on the matter in Europe. Most countries put the cut-off at 12, 13, or 14 weeks but, yes, socialised healthcare is not controversial
Disabled people should not be required to give their PIN to anyone - friend, stranger, or shop assistant - and probably wouldn't be protected by the banks if they did and were then robbed. This is ridiculous. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-67239870
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/04/tory-mps-blast-out-of-touch-sunak-as-he-woos-homeowners-in-kings-speech “Basically, a Conservative prime minister provided a platform for a conspiracist to say their children’s lives were going to be meaningless. It’s utterly breathtaking. Unbelievable crassness. Who thought this was a good idea?” — it’s just so incredibly sad that so many people can only imagine meaning in life through employment
REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)
Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.
@b0rk Not sure if it counts as a term, but I always get confused by “ours” and “theirs” and why it sometimes flips around
What does the #solarpunk #degrowth version of that magic moment look like?
Imagine for a minute that, instead of sitting in a centuries old building that has been converted in to an overpriced burger joint, I was sharing a meal with friends and strangers in a community kitchen.
Imagine, instead of a Spaceship owned by a billionaire, it was a high altitude weather balloon launched by local hobbiests.
Maybe, instead of real time high resolution video, we have to make do with high resolution photos or low-res video, until the high resolution footage can be recovered. Maybe we just have to wait until the footage is recovered.
Maybe, instead of a brand new pocket super computer I'm watching the transmissions trickle in over ad-hoc wireless connections on recycled and repurposed hardware.
Would it have been any less magical without the rent seeking? Without the ocean boiling?
There's a really interesting connection between stack-based programming (languages like #Forth, Kitten, and #Uiua) and combinatory calculus https://rlamacraft.uk/stackProgrammingAndCombinators.html
It's my general belief that when a book goes out of print and new copies are unavailable, the book should fall into the public domain.
If the publisher is no longer selling the book, then the publisher and author are no longer receiving income from it. There is really nothing left to protect, no benefit to the public in protecting a work that is unavailable. Don't want your book to fall into the PD? Make an ebook available perpetually.
(No, it's not practical. But it's nice to dream.)
"Britain’s ‘loneliest sheep’ marooned at foot of Scottish cliff for two years" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/27/britains-loneliest-sheep-marooned-at-foot-of-scottish-cliff-for-two-years
That despite writing code for over a decade, TIL that NaN is not just a numerical equivalent of null. It’s closer to a primitive form of Maybe/Optional, in the sense that arithmetic operators are designed to output NaN should any of their inputs be NaN thereby propagating the error state in a similar fashion to monadic composition.
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk