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GreenWatermelon

575 karma · joined June 19, 2020

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GreenWatermelon··on Should I choose Ada, SPARK, or Rust over C/C++? (2024)
Java also has (In my experience) a higher concentration of inept developers who seem to have never heard of guard conditiona and early returns, and prefer instead to wrap everything in if conditions, pushing the actual logic into deeper nesting levels. Pyramids of doom all over.
GreenWatermelon··on How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized
Overcoming this cycle requires the cooperation of both sides, or at the very least that both sides stop fucking with one another.

Israel, the stronger entity, should've been the one to abstain first and attempt to understand and forgive, instead they kept building illegal settlements and driving more and more people out there homes. Israel made sure the embers stayed hot, and I can't think of any reason for that aside from hoping those hot embers produce a flame that justifies genocide and completely eradicating the Palestinian population.

GreenWatermelon··on How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized
Yes, the current leaders are the result of Natenyahu's previous harvest.

There is no shortage of articles on the internet detailing how Israel is the one responsible for propping up Hamas.

And the current leaders of Iran are the fruits of what the USA/CIA sowed by toppling a popular democracy and replacing it with a despotic monarchy.

GreenWatermelon··on How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized
What Israel is doing is essentially sowing the seeds for a new crop of leaders hell-bent on destroying Israel. Children who saw ghe carnage Israel is inflicting will grow up to join Hamas and Hezbollah, and the cycle repeats.
GreenWatermelon··on A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron
Smelting random rocks (with fairly distinct appearances) sounds like a very logical thing to do. I would say it's a natural human impulse to experiment with random stuff and see what happens, that's curiosity.

What sound highly improbable is someone having access to this obviously different ore (used as a flux) but never thinking of smelting it.

GreenWatermelon··on A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron
One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid. Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today.

With regards to metals, I have no doubt someone, be it a kid apprentice or a master smelter, experimented with melting different rocks to see what comes out. After all, if you already know that different rocks spew out different metals (copper, tin, etc..) it logically follows that there may be more.

And then someone, be it the same person or a different person entirely, would've surely conducted experiments. After all, you already have Tin, Copper, and Bronze which combines both of them; all with different properties. Of course someone will want to know how this new shiny metal the smelter spewed out fares compared with other existing ones.

Then some smith will want to try making something with that metal, new things are exciting. Many people here are familiar with the desire to try out a new Programming language or framework just for the sake of it, and a Bronze age smith is no different. Then someone will give that mee Iron sword/knife/axe a try , duel a friend, ruin their bronze weapon, and said friend will be like "holy shit I want an iron sword too it's way too good" and bam you got a meme.

GreenWatermelon··on F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree
Fossify Gallery os a drop in replacement with no risk of data siphoning.
GreenWatermelon··on Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
And he completely apologized when it turned out he was wrong and made a hasty judgement, 5 hours later.

And a single instance of something is hardly a pattern.

GreenWatermelon··on Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
Such a blatantly biased and dishonest article.

In addition to what others said about TFA, This part jumped out to me:

> Specifically, I was sent this commit replacing references to Homebrew from late July. As evidence of Homebrew's authorship was being erased and obscured, no additional acknowledgement was added to credit Homebrew for having created and maintained Portable Ruby since 2016.

A paragraph later the author writes

> In fairness to Andre, the rv-ruby repo continues to retain a copy of Homebrew's LICENSE.txt which names "Homebrew contributors" as the copyright holder. Andre also later added an explicit acknowledgement to the README, but that attribution came more than a month later, and (I'm told) only after he was directly asked to credit the original project.

"In fairness" my ass. How can the author leverage a claim of authorship being erased, when the license is sitting there, untouched, for over a year?

And when someone told Andre to credit the original project... He simply did? Seemingly without any issues. In what universe is this an example of "obscuring authorship"?

Of course, putting this section right after the section where Andre mistakingly accused google of copying code without perserving the original license, leads you to think Andre is a hypocrite, when in fact there were over 7 years between the two "events". The storytelling is doubly dishonest because as Andre kept the original license intact, rendering all implicit claims of hypocrisy void.

In short, this article is borderline defamation.

GreenWatermelon··on Why I'm not rushing to take sides in the RubyGems fiasco
I felt the exact same as you while reading the article.

I started reading with an open mind, got a bit confused by the "dongle" joke, which the author doesn't remember but somehow it should be inappropriate. It's equivalent to saying "I think he said something bad 10 years ago but I'm bit really sure"

Then there's the part about "leverage control" to extort heroku, which was a blatant misrepresentation of events and shows a clear Agenda.

Not taking sides my ass. I can only conclude the author's reputation, as being ine of the nicest persons in the community, was earned through similar manipulation.

And since the entire article is a "take my word" type of story, the blatant bias already displayed casta a shadow of doubt over the veracity of any other claims it makes, leading me to conclude the opposite: André is actually a nice and likable person, and has good principles.

GreenWatermelon··on Helium Browser
I think you're conflating the Engine, Gecko, with the browser, Firefox. The Browser, Firefox, is easy to fork, judging by the multitudes of soft forks a la Libre Wolf, Zen, etc...

The Engine, Gecko, however, is hard to fork since it's tightly coupled to the browser itself.

I also think that when the parent mentioned "forking Gecko", it might be in the sense of extracting the engine and putting a new browser on top of it, just like other Webkit based browsers e.g. Orion and Gnome Web.

GreenWatermelon··on Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version
Steam literally has a section called Hardware Requirements under every game.
GreenWatermelon··on Always Invite Anna
`s` is a replace command, so parent is saying "substitute 'anymore' with 'ever' "
GreenWatermelon··on Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf]
I can't reply to the parent any more because it's flagged, so I'll reply to you, because I need to get this out.

Overtime I gave him so much benefit of the doubt, and steelmanned his arguments because I really respected him as a Software Engineer and I aligned with him on his views in technology... But that blog post was the last straw. It's clear-as-day racism. No room for misinterpretation.

I was willing to overlook his remarks about DEI, Trump, Kirk, etc.... because there were nuggets of truth and genuine pain points.. but it turns out he was a racist, white supremacists all along. Sigh...

GreenWatermelon··on KDE is now my favorite desktop
Windows. Windows removed the task bar positioning feature in Windows 11.
GreenWatermelon··on We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that
And then people wonder why China is antagonistic towards the west.
GreenWatermelon··on I Am An AI Hater
I don't think that has changed? Everyone would still complain about someone Talking loudly in a public library or a movie theater.
GreenWatermelon··on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
In case you're genuinely confused, the reason for Anubis and similar tools is that AI-training-data-scraping crawlers are assholes, and strangle the living shit out of any webserver they touch, like a cloud of starving locusts descending upon a wheat field.

i.e. it's DDoS protection.

GreenWatermelon··on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
There isn't a hint of bad faith in the Parent's comment, it's just a sarcastic tongue-in-cheek way to say that it's not really cool to poison the fuck out of ourselves just because x material is kinda nice for y.
GreenWatermelon··on Long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution linked to increased risk of dementia
And horns. I fuckin hate horns. I swear car horn noises reach into the far ends if the universe, you can't escape them.
GreenWatermelon··on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny
Imagine a world in which Internet Explorer is the only browser around. That's what would happen without government intervention.

Regulations are literally the only thing slowing down the corporate dystopian future.

GreenWatermelon··on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny
Without regulations (which are laws) Dominant companies would just send gangsters to break up rival businesses. They still do that today, but through different strategies e.g. price dumping, where they operate at a loss in order to squash competition, then proceed to hike up prices and extort as much value as possible.
GreenWatermelon··on Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny
> the companies that died because acquiring them was too much of a hassle

So it was a shitty non-viable business

> the companies that died or never got funded / started because the investors couldn't see and exit path

More shitty non-viable business. Creating a company only to sell it and screw over your customers is evil.

Maybe those founders should try to make real businesses, instead of playing glorified rollette.

> the companies that got acquired piecemeal (Windsurf, Inflection), leaving the early employees with NOTHING simply to avoid the ire of anti-trust hawks at the FTC

Plain-old loop hole exploitation. Simple anit-competetive stealth aquihire that isn't called so. My conclusion is that the market needs more regulations.

Does your ideal market only contain 5 or mega-corps that control every aspect of our lives?

GreenWatermelon··on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness
This argument does not resonate with me.

I'm in my mid 20s, far from being a grumpt old man, and I used to frequent Facebook back in the early 2010s (remember all those games?)

What became clear is how the landscape is filled to the brim with scammers and grifters. These newer applications of technology are akin to cigarettes, or heroin, or opium. They're designed to inflict misfortune for profit.

Years ago my parents would chastise me for spending too much time othe computer/phone, now I'm the one begging them to uninstall those garbage applications from their phones.

Around me, more older people than younger ones are susceptible to lies and scams perpetrated by LLMs.

The younger generation around me (kids 10 to 17 yo) are falling for the same traps I fell for when I was their age, and people my age are stil falling for: addictive online games with scummy lootboxes (especially Fifa) and gacha games.

I believe there are more than enough studies detailing the extreme negative consequences of Instagram and/or tiktok usage, so much that we don't question that anymore, and treat it like ye olde tobacco addiction. It's addicting and fucks up your health but here yo stay.

GreenWatermelon··on Figma will IPO on July 31
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One of the greatest companies, Valve, is privately owned.

I also respect 37signals, which isn't publicly owned.

Those are the two companies that crop in my head when I think "Good company"

GreenWatermelon··on Vibe code is legacy code
Forever, until our cursed profession gets an official licensing body like other real Engineering professions. A Civil Enginnee can't sign on a prototype bridge design that then gets built and opened to the public, because any problem means potential jail time and possibly loss of licence.

There should be legal consequences for treating people's data with reckless abandon. It's normal for restaurants to be inspected. Commercial apps should also be inspected by independent bodies and fines must be paid if serious negligence is found. Imagine finding out that your favorite restaurant had a rat infestation on their storage room for a year.

And of someone gets food poisoning because the restaurant used expired ingredients, it gets heavily fined and possibly shuttered. This should also happen with software. If your root AWS user key is leaked in your frontend, your service deserves to be shuttered.

GreenWatermelon··on Figma will IPO on July 31
> green flags should we look at as hits that "this company is different"?

The only possible green flag os "Did not ipo"

GreenWatermelon··on Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
I think "natural" here would refer to genuine project rrquirequirements that will translte directly to value to customers e.g. customers demand x features in y time and we don't have enough manpower to handle it. This is natural, it's business survival.

Contrast with the Unnatural cause of "manager just wants a promotion at any cost" which, in a sense, is akin to Embezzlement. The manager worsens business prospects and contributes to organizational rot for their personal gain.

GreenWatermelon··on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth
I don't think hiAndrewQuinn was implying that they'd do so, rather, they (appropriately) assume that a for-profit would try to loophole their way out of any obligation, so they wanted to know how exactly the employees were protected.
GreenWatermelon··on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)
You gave the perfect description of an LLM.
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