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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Most people I’ve heard from said that it wasn’t nearly as bad as they were expecting, but that this made the overall experience worse, because it wasn’t bad enough to be entertainingly bad. A friend described it as being so mediocre and bland that their head was constantly filled with the question “why was this even made?”. All of the live action adaptations have felt pretty pointless, but this one seems to be steeped in “inexplicable disdain towards the original work”, whilst having nothing new and interesting to say to warrant said disdain.

    All this to say that it’s probably not worth your time









  • Okay, but consider that the ultra-rich technofascists are a group that has had a disproportionate impact on the continued pillaging of the climate. They aren’t just opportunists wanting to make the most of the fragments of society that will remain after climate disaster, but people who have been working to bring that scenario into fruition because it’s profitable in the short term whilst positioning them to take even more power.

    I cannot emphasise enough that they want this, and that this ideology goes further back than the current wave of them. The reality of climate change is unfathomably dire, but I hope you understand why it’s necessary to resist these people as part of whatever climate resilience we can build. I’ll probably be dead before shit really hits the fan, climate-wise, so my goal is to do whatever I can to support the people who come after me. If those techno-assholes are allowed to inherit the fragments of society, the entire planet is even more fucked



  • (tangent to your question because someone already answered) I think that courtroom stenographers (people who type up what’s said) use special chording keyboards. I’ve also been to a few events where there has been someone transcribing things in real time for accessibility purposes, and they also use a cool looking chording keyboard. It takes some learning, but the max typing speed is way faster than any conventional keyboard could manage — which is why skilled people use them for transcribing stuff

    A brand that I’m aware of that does them is Charachorder.


  • There are quite a few misconceptions in this comment. For example, “Well I guess everyone’s a little on the spectrum.” is a comment that frustrates many autistic people because it misunderstands what the “spectrum” in ASD means, and is usually said in a way that diminishes the lived reality of autistic people. I realise that you weren’t making that statement, merely pointing to the existence of people who make this argument. Nonetheless, I want to emphasise that this sentiment is not representative of autism.

    I do think that with the increasing awareness of autism in the popular consciousness, there is a risk that our understanding of autism may be hampered by stereotypes. I have seen diagnosed autistic people feeling like their struggles were invalid because they didn’t nearly fit into the popular conception of what an autistic person looks like. I believe that autism is probably still a useful category, in terms of helping people find the support they need to live fulfilling lives, but that we need to be mindful of how category labels can cause harm if misunderstood or misapplied.



  • I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’m from the UK, and whilst things are less politically dire here than the US, it’s still pretty grim. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem reluctant to actually meaningfully tax the rich, even as the working class (and to a lesser extent, the middle class) are being squeezed by a cost of living crisis and general hopelessness. Parties like Reform are taking the racist “things are bad because we have too many immigrants” and I’ve recently realised that I need to stop resenting people for being taken in by that rhetoric; people are desperate and there aren’t people in the mainstream pushing for alternatives (besides Reform). These people have a lot in common with me, such as recognising that we’re being fucked but the system, but we just disagree on the solution. It’s hard, but ultimately necessary to be able to be in solidarity with people like Reform’ voters



  • Recently, I recommended to a friend that basic vim/vi is worth learning because it’s a baseline that you can always trust will be there across different Linux systems.

    They asked me what I used most on my home system, and the answer was emacs, but I was very clear that I was not recommending it. It’s a particular kind of person who finds themselves at home in emacs, and for everyone besides those people, selling them on emacs would feel like persuading them to do hard drugs.




  • (n.b. I am neither a rust, nor C developer so I am writing outside my own direct experience)

    One of the arguments brought up on the kernel.org thread was that if there were changes to the C side of the API, how would this avoid breaking all the rust bindings? The reply to this was that like with any big change in the Linux kernel that affects multiple systems with multiple different teams involved, that it would require a coordinated and collaborative approach — i.e. it’s not like the rust side of things would only start working on responding to a breaking change once that change has broken the rust bindings. This response (and many of the responses to it) seemed reasonable to me.

    However, in order for that collaboration to work, there are going to have to be C developers speaking to rust developers, because the rust developers who need to repair the bindings will need to understand some of what’s being proposed, and thus they’ll need to understand some level of C, and vice versa. So in practice, it seems nigh on impossible for the long term, ongoing maintenance of this code to be entirely a task for the rust devs (but I think this is taking an abnormally flexible reading of “maintenance” — communicating with other people is just part and parcel of working on such a huge project, imo)

    Some people have an ideological opposition to there being two different programming languages in the Linux kernel full stop. This is part of why the main thing that rust has been used for so far are drivers, which are fairly self enclosed. Christoph Hellwig even used the word “cancer” to describe a slow creep towards a codebase of two languages. I get the sense that in his view, this change that’s being proposed could be the beginning of the end if it leads to continued prevalence of rust in Linux.

    I haven’t written enough production code to have much of an opinion, but my impression is that people who are concerned are valid (because I do have more than enough experience with messy, fragmented codebases), but that their opposition is too strong. A framework that comes to mind is how risk assessments (like are done for scientific research) outline risks that often cannot be fully eliminated but can be reduced and mitigated via discussing them in the context of a risk assessment. Using rust in Linux at all hasn’t been a decision taken lightly, and further use of it would need ongoing participation from multiple relevant parties, but that’s just the price of progress sometimes.