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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • No, blame the streaming companies. Dynamic range is a known standard. All they need is:

    • a “louder dialogue” toggle switch to amplify the center channel in the downmixing settings (Kodi, many TVs, and all dedicated receivers can already do this FYI for this exact reason)
    • a “night mode” toggle switch that turns on an audio compressor (my 20 year-old receiver has that feature – it’s hardly rocket science; I believe YouTube calls it “stabilized audio”).

    Upsides:

    • preserves high dynamic range mix for audiophiles
    • works with already released movies (!!!)
    • improves the life of people with tinny speakers, strict loudness requirements, or hearing impairments

    Downsides:

    • Can’t feel superior to audio engineers who are doing their jobs, I guess?
    • Streaming companies need to reinvest a few thousand dollars out of the billions they are making to add those two buttons



  • Also Trump literally illegally kidnapped a head of state to the U.S. And we’re supposed to pretend the first thing they did was not simply… Move the murderer somewhere out of state where they couldn’t reach him even if they tried (which they won’t because no blue state has the balls to meaningfully stand up to Trump)?

    I mean, realistically that guy could twerk in front of the Minnesota Capitol with some ICE buddies to back him up and giant sign saying “I did it” and Minnesota still wouldn’t do shit.

    “State’s rights” are exactly like the “2A rights”. They only serve conservatives, whom the law protects but does not bind.

    This is not just me being salty BTW. I am trying to get across the point to anyone reading this that if your plan to bring back U.S. Democracy relies on the Constitution playing in your favor, you’ve already lost.


  • No-one is immune from propaganda. And those awful books promote quite a few bad messages. Well firstly they promote criminally bad writing. But besides that, they work very hard to make a lot of oppressive power structures sound cool, whimsical, and aspiring to the uncritical reader. From the police institution to the prison complex to the famously abusive English boarding school system to the literal ethnostate to slavery somehow, and I haven’t gone over the half of it.

    It truly feels like every other bit worldbuilding that Rowling put in sounds whimsical on the surface but makes you go “wait, the implications are truly terrible!” when you think about it for more than two seconds. Except she clearly did not think most of it through; she literally just thought “race of jewish caricatures who want nothing out of life besides being bankers” is good and whimsical worldbuilding… And somehow got away with it.

    It’s impossible to quantify or prove but these books have had the most cultural impact out of any modern book franchise, and I don’t see how the systemic normalization of so many awful things to uncritical children and teenagers can balance out the joy and whimsy that people got out of them (especially when there is so much better written teen/YA fiction out there).

    Shifting the Overton Window in the way that those books did is some insidious type shit that actually does matter quite a bit more than most people realize. New hot take: I think the bigots are correct to get big mad at Queer representation in media because it moves the Overton Window the other way and that actually impacts bigots long-term. In a very real sense a trans actor in a movie is a concrete and real step towards the de-legitimization of bigoted views. And HP is very much doing the opposite of that every time it touches on any kind of social subject.


  • The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).

    I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?


  • What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.

    Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.

    Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.



  • Ideally you’d use the docker executor with a dind service instead of docker commands in the shell. You’ll have better isolation (e.g. no conflicts from open port forwards) and better forward-compatibility (the pipeline won’t break every time a major upgrade is applied to the runner because the docker - especially compose - CLI is unstable).


  • For gitlab this is only correct with a shell executor which is to be avoided in the general case in favor of a docker or k8s executor for isolation&repeatability.

    Those you can actually run locally with gitlab-runner, but then you won’t have all your gitlab instance’s CI variables so it’s a PITA if you need a CI token which you probably do if you actually make decent use of gitlab’s features.

    In most cases I just end up committing my changes to avoid the headache. :!git commit --amend --no-edit && git push -f goes pretty dang fast and 60 % of the time third time’s the charm.


  • Few Celtic roots*

    For instance char comes from the Celtic carros.

    Furthermore French has a strong Frankish influence, hence the name of the language and its relative distance from Italian Spanish or Portuguese which are more directly descended from Latin. But also many other influences. French has a surprising amount of Arabic vocabulary for example, and not just from recent immigration/colonisation.


  • Either way if you ignore regional languages you’re not doing linguistics. And the author could not even get it right for national languages, if we even accept that arbitrarily picking one makes any sense.

    This map is a masterclass in what not to do and it almost feels like intentional engagement farming.


  • Same, and I’m not well-versed into the neurology of it all but I think it’s something way worse than the symptoms of ADHD.

    Five seconds is well within my attention span. I forget everything the minute I open a door or open a new tab, but this ain’t that. I can watch something in silence, my brain distracts itself, that’s kind of the whole problem. This though? This is about promising an impending dopamine hit to a restless junkie who was about to scroll down for a quicker hit.

    No, scratch that. This is about the video editor constructing a strawman of that restless junkie, pandering to that, followed by a (proto-)fascist algorithm eeking out every last bit of video retention from its users for maximum profit. Even if 95 % of users don’t actually need the countdown to keep watching, and the 5 % remaining really should not be using that app for their mental well-being, the algorithm will mercilessly incentivize creators to put in the countdown.

    Since legislating algorithmic attention-hoarding doesn’t sem likely to hit the political docket anytime soon, the only winning move is not to play.


  • In my local experience, these are actually just profoundly incompetent. Hanlon’s razor.

    They tailgate because they are actually incapable of maintaining a following distance (you know the kind, when the road is empty they alternate between mashing the gas and driving well under the speed limit, and somehow if you’re a passenger they’re totally unaware that they are doing it even if they are not distracted, how it is possible to be this bad at gauging speed and distance I do not understand but these people do exist).

    Then as their malfunctioning brain randomly processes that they want to go faster, they overtake, and since the lane is clear they mash the gas.

    Then when they are done and they merge back, their brain performs a hard reset and they somehow drive slower than before they passed you. They do not notice. You pass them, and they are not looking distracted; the only explanation is that their brain is doing the simpsons-monkey-cymbals.gif.


    1. Buy more dishes so you can go longer between washes
    2. Buy a half-height dishwasher. They exist, I owned one that lived on the floor of my bathroom.

    I live alone and I fill up my full size dishwashers every few days. If you don’t eat ordered/preprocessed food you can also just chuck pots and pans in the bottom rack.

    Dishwashers use a lot less water than hand-washing. Even if there’s a little bit of room left, it’s still a net positive. There’s no reason for anyone to hand-wash unless they live in a tiny NYC broom closet or exclusively eat take-out in disposable containers.


  • For systems programming it makes the most sense out of the languages you mentioned. Languages requiring a runtime (Java/Python) do not fill the bill for system tools IMO. Golang is more arguable, but its memory safety comes through GC which many systems programmers aren’t fans of for a variety of technical and personal reasons.

    Rust is meant to be what C++ would be if it were designed today by opiniated system developers and didn’t have to be backwards-compatible.

    Those are the technical arguments I would use in a corporate setting.

    All that aside, there’s personal preference, and my point is that for FOSS projects that matters too. Rust is fun in a brain-teasy kind of way in the same way that writing C is fun, but without nearly as many footguns. Golang is practical but arguably not as fun. That’s the same logic that draws many programmers to write Haskell projects.

    The story of the Fish shell illustrates it quite well; the project gained a lot of development attention and contributions when they decided to rewrite from C++ to Rust, where they achieved a stable release with feature-parity a few months ago. It would have been a remarkably dumb decision for a private company to make, but makes perfect sense when you are trying to attract free talent.


  • The counterpoint is that, especially with FOSS that does not receive much (if any) corporate backing, developer retention and interest is an important factor.

    If I’m donating some of my free time to a FOSS project I’d rather not slug through awful build systems, arcane mailing lists, and memory unsafe languages which may or may not use halfway decent - often homebrew - manual memory management patterns. If the project is written in Rust, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the code will be easily readable, compilable, and safer to modify.




  • On maybe the third day of my first programming job, a colleague pulled me aside and said “don’t give me ‘shoulds’ and ‘probablys’. You need to sound confident so I can know to trust what you’re saying”.

    That guy was a bit of a dickhead in general but there’s a lot of truth there. To the question “what’s the expected impact of this change?”, “None.” is a good answer. “Well it should work…” is not useful feedback and a good Operations Manager will rightfully reject the change.

    Of course it is better to be hesitant than falsely confident, but far too many (software) engineers hide behind indecisive language to dodge the necessary hard work of validating their hunches. If you didn’t test your shit fully, just say so. If you’re right, say it. Personal ego doesn’t belong in an engineering discussion.