• 0 Posts
  • 128 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.


  • Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something’s written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don’t know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can’t know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it’s only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn’t matter either way, but if it’s used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

    Also, it’s common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn’t expect to be slow (otherwise they’d have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.



  • I think it’s possible that loot boxes (and real-world equivalents like trading cards) don’t violate existing anti-child-gambling laws, but if so, that’s a flaw in those laws that needs to be fixed rather than an indication that they’re totally fine and should be allowed to exist in their current form. They cost money and give an unpredictable reward where different options have different perceived value, so they’re quite clearly gambling to anyone who defines it based on its characteristics rather than an individual territory’s specific legalese.



  • They stock things they make more profit on. If the margins on sugar water are much higher, then they don’t need to sell as much to make it worth stocking it instead of juice. If the margins are higher because consumers are unaware they’re being sold a cheaper-to-manufacture product for the same price because the packaging is deceptive to anyone who hasn’t been told they have to look or is in too much of a rush to have time to look, then shops end up full of sugar water that few consumers actually want.





  • Liberalism is a really broad family of conflicting political and moral philosophies, and it’s really just the capitalist with minimal regulation bit that’s consistently there in all the branches. Most of the time, people are only dealing with different branches of liberalism, and depending on the local politics, there might only be one major political party in a country calling themselves the liberals.

    Generally, leftists will talk about liberals and liberalism a lot because they’re living under some branch of liberalism, and they disagree to some extent with every branch of liberalism. Socialism, Communism and Anarchism are not Liberalism (and if you want to upset tankies and say it’s distinct from communism or upset other leftists and say it’s leftist Marxism-Leninism is not liberalism, too). Fascism and Conservatism are also not liberalism, but they’re not leftist, either, and to confuse things, lots of political parties calling themselves conservative around the world only want things that fit a definition of liberalism.

    I mentioned anarchism and what anarchists think in the previous post because you replied to a post with a screenshot where an anarchist mentioned libs and seemed to think it was ambiguous what he meant, when it’s deducible from the fact that he’s an anarchist.


  • It’s the outside-the-US meaning that anarchists would typically use, and the US-centric definition is effectively a subset of the general definition when viewed from a leftist perspective, as they’re both capitalist with minimal regulation, just in the US it’s got the added connotations of being less homophobic and racist etc. then the centre of the Overton window, whereas classic liberalism isn’t incompatible with racism and homophobia etc…


  • TOML’s design is based on the idea that INI was a good format. This was always going to cause problems, as INI was never good, and never a format. In reality, it was hundreds of different formats people decided to use the same file extension for, all with their own incompatible quirks and rarely any ability to identify which variant you were using and therefore which quirks would need to be worked around.

    The changes in the third panel were inevitable, as people have data with nested structure that they’re going to want to represent, and without significant whitespace, TOML was always going to need some kind of character to delimit nesting.





  • There was a while where it obviously met and exceeded the definition in the UN Genocide Convention, but a lot of people refused to acknowledge it might be a genocide because the UN had not yet declared it to be one. The UN is notoriously slow at that kind of thing, though, especially when a powerful country wants them to be slow.


  • If it’s the problem that I’ve seen people complain about in the past, it’s effectively the same as HTTPS ‘not supporting’ end to end encryption because it runs over IP and IP packets contain the IP address of where they need to go, so someone can see that two IP addresses are communicating, which is unavoidable as otherwise there’s nothing to say where the data needs to go, so no way for it to get there. Someone did a blog post a couple of years ago claiming Matrix was unsecure as encrypted messages had their destination homeserver in plaintext, but that doesn’t carry any information that isn’t implied by the fact that the message is being sent to that homeserver’s IP.