This reminded me of an old joke:

Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other "I'll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit". To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.

A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he'll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.

Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they've accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.

The two economists look rather taken aback. "Well sure," they say, "but we've grown the economy by two million dollars!"

Yeah, I've been really disappointed in Lemmy's response to sync. I thought this community was supposed to be technically minded but in every thread on Sync, the top comment is repeating disinformation about tracking and there's tons of people tearing down the developer.

I get not wanting to use an App that has ads, but people are getting downright toxic over an App that no one is forcing them to use lol.

IMO this is mainly a way to communicate talking points to his supporters. They want to start a lot of talk about Biden's "election Interference" to make it feel like this is something both sides do but only Trump is getting charged for.

This is mostly about normalizing "impeachment" so that Trump's two impeachments don't look as bad. This is a classic Republican tactic: when your guy gets caught doing "thing" start slinging "thing" around at your enemies until it loses all meaning.

Similar tactic to co-opting "fake news", "woke", "feminism", and "critical race theory". All were terms that threatened to undermine the conservative ideology, and so were quickly hurled around as insults until their original meaning was completely distorted.

Compiled Rust is fast.

Compiling Rust is slow.

Also my understanding is that RustAnalyzer has to compile all Rust macros so it can check them properly. That's not something that a lot of static analysis tools do for things like C++ templates

You're being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

Yeah, actually moderating an online space with even modest activity is fucking hard and takes a shitton of time.

I think a lot of people underestimate the effort involved and quickly lose interest once it becomes apparent.

The cool thing about Voyager is that it has a record of information about Earth, etched in gold, with instructions on how to read the data it contains back.

Even once it powers down, it's still on a mission. If millions of years from now intelligent alien life ever encounters it, they will know who we were and that we existed.

It's our handprint on the cosmic wall.

Self driving cars could actually be kind of a good stepping stone to better public transit while making more efficient use of existing roadways. You hit a button to request a car, it drives you to wherever, you need to go, and then gets tasked to pick up the next person. Where you used to need 10 cars for 10 people, you now need one.

I agree with the other poster that you need to define what you even mean when you say free will. IMO, strict determinism is not incompatible with free will. It only provides the mechanism. I posted this in another thread where this came up:

The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.

In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.

In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.

One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.

Except.

We are looking at this through an implied assumption that the brain is some mechanism, separate from "us", which we are forced to think "through". That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.

But there is no deeper "self". We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it's statistical and we just have a baked "likelihood" of that response.

The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it's deterministic or not it's just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.

And often if you box yourself into an API before you start implementing, it comes out worse.

I always learn a lot about the problem space once I start coding, and use that knowledge to refine the API of my system as I work.

That's not true. You can run analysis on the App's activity. All the tracking calls go away when you upgrade. No need to trust the Dev.

IMO if the admins have obviously abandoned an instance it's worth de-federating regardless of activity level or political lean. It's a ticking time bomb for malicious links, spam, political trolling, and other bullshit.

I'm not saying there aren't downsides, just that it isn't a totally crazy strategy.

Much of the gaming-adjacent internet are teenagers. It will always feel cool to be against [popular thing]™ when you're still figuring out what your identity is as an individual.

I don't know, there's still a lot of needless hostility; it's just around different topics.

Lemmy skews even more heavily left than Reddit and it's still too small to attract organized political trolls, but topics like FOSS vs Paid open source vs closed source gets heated fast. Look at the Sync for Lemmy threads; it's a mess in there.

That's not an issue with FOSS vs proprietary, but with large corporations needing to be broken up.

FOSS isn't immune to that, its a known thing that large corporations can use their dominance of a market segment to infiltrate even totally open standards and make demands with the threat of leaving the standard (and therefore resigning it to becoming irrelevant).

This is especially true of web standards. Chromium is FOSS, yet Google can use its absolute dominance in the market place to force through changes to things like HTTP standards (also FOSS). My understanding is Microsoft and Google both have strong-armed stuff into C++ in the past as well

Thatsthejoke.jpeg.zip

I don't know. This would dovetail well with a bunch of studies that have found verbal and physical abuse of retail workers at an all time high since the pandemic. Similar studies have found the same thing for road rage.

There has always been some fraction of poorly behaved people, but that fraction seems to have become larger since the pandemic, whatever the actual mechanism that caused it is.

I actually don't think that's the case for languages. Most languages start out from a desire to do some specific thing better than other languages rather than do everything.