commodoreboxer

"Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something."

7z is an archive format. You have to extract it first. PSX games will usually be an iso, a bin, or bin and cue files.

I agree with you. I was just pointing out that the idea of advertisement funding a free Internet is already a lie in the first place.

I am 100% anti advertisement, for the record. It is disgusting and non-consensual, and nobody should tolerate it.

That's the rub. You do pay for it. By the intention and definition of the business, advertisement eventually extracts money from you. It wouldn't be profitable otherwise. The fact that it happens more subtly and enables them to extract money from you in ways that you don't notice doesn't change the fact that it's still paid for.

An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so that you don't feel like you're paying for it. Advertisement is not free money, and it can not be free money. It's for-profit.

So with advertisement, you're still paying for the Internet. We don't have a free Internet. We have an Internet built around businesses that make their entire business around psychological manipulation and extracting money from people without being noticed. The fact that people still push the myth that advertisement enables a free Internet like ad companies are somehow a public service shows how good they are at manipulation.

Most importantly, advertisement is a business. It's not charity and it's not a publicly owned resource. It doesn't keep the Internet free, because it makes a boat load of money doing what it does. It doesn't take an expert understanding of economics to see that any belief that advertisement allows for a free Internet is smoke and mirrors. The money comes from somewhere, notably from you.

Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.

Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.

I'm pretty AI pessimistic, but I still found the more optimistic AI story refreshing and nice. A reminder that new technology is actually supposed to make our lives better, not just funnel a lot of money from a lot of people to a small number of share holders (ie. "create value").

It's extremely believable that the downfall of some public good like Abelique would be primarily sales and marketing getting in and trying to steer it and advertise for profit, and it being otherwise gamed. It's so hard for something to just be good for everybody; somebody always wants to maximize their own benefit, even at the expense of everybody else (relevant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862865).

> You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.

That's a great way to put it. I'm going to start using that one.

Tangent: I'm a programmer at a small company, which has three programmers total. I make a decent wage, but one that's significantly smaller than I could make at a larger company. I often get questions from people who can't believe that I'm not jumping at these other opportunities, but I make nearly six figures, my team and bosses trust me, I have nearly unlimited flexibility to choose what I work on and shape my software the way I feel is best, and I get to work full remote and basically make my own hours, giving me all the time I want with my family. It would take an incredible raise to give this up just for better pay.

An agony-per-dollar ratio is a perfect way to frame the calculation, and it factors into so many places in life. Many forget that it's not just optimizing for the most revenue possible, but a balance of maximizing revenue and quality of life, and often getting diminishing returns when pushing hard on the former.

What is the frequency? I haven't read much on it.

Honestly, I'm not sure the frequency needs to be extraordinarily high. The ability to get rid of the "but think of all the jobs that will be lost" argument lets us get rid of swaths of bullshit jobs that don't need to exist, or even actually harmful jobs. It's been a constant roadblock to greater automation.

The US has a strong culture of treating prisons as punishment rather than rehabilitation, so the thought of wrongful convictions becomes extremely uncomfortable, as you have to deal with the idea that you are participating in a culture that punishes innocent people for things they didn't do.

The people responsible for the actual convictions often become denialists (a huge number of people who have convicted people solely on this outdated science now deny all new evidence that implies some of the convictions may have been unjust) and others who want prisons to be punishment rather than rehabilitation tend to dismiss the thoughts of all the innocent people whose lives they were okay with being stolen.

> Bewildered, Eaton tried to grasp what she had just read: The judge was penalizing them because everyone — the state, the defense, the witnesses — agreed that the Mazes committed no crime.

This is especially upsetting. I don't understand how so many people can be so averse to new understandings and new science. The shaken baby conversation is extremely frustrating, because many of the people responsible for the past convictions that are now being shown to be based on faulty understandings still refuse to accept that it may have been wrong. Even worse, they frame it as a political issue or a culture war, rather than just more understanding and the progress of science. It's a weird, stubborn, obstinate conservatism for its own sake and it confuses me. Is it a defense mechanism or something, to protect yourself from having to confront the idea that you may have unjustly imprisoned many innocent grieving parents for life?

The new science is wrong if it makes my own actions in the past wrong. The lack of impartiality and consideration from a judge is disturbing.

Imagine finding a piece of art you like, but finding a minor anatomy flaw. When you point it out, the artist says they aren't going to fix it, because the piece is finished, and it would be impossible for them to do it, you point out that other artists have touched up their finished pieces, and they tell you to do it yourself, then.

Why is the artist obligated to do the work you think they should do? Why, if they don't do this work, should they be obligated to not release their work publicly?

FOSS is not an obligation to do everything that every user wants you to do. It's not an obligation to even communicate with those users. In fact, it comes explicitly with no warranty, even for fitness for any purpose.

The developer is a poor communicator, but how anybody can be defending those annoying, entitled, lazy users is beyond me.

Not "magically", but more reasonably and without forcing your entire program into a different state, breaking any ability for libraries to work with a huge range of functionality consistently. C locale handling is basically impossible to work with robustly, even before you get into how it can't be effectively used at all in a thread safe way.

A lot of the best things we have in the modern world are "socialism". Libraries and parks are socialist. Socialism isn't a dirty word, nor is it an argument or a criticism.

With that precision and size, you can only cover the years from 1678 to 2262, which strongly limits your ability to represent historical dates and times.

C++ and Java do make you cast null/nullptr, if you need to resolve an ambiguous overload based on pointer type.

That's a convenient generator for pull requests, sure, but a pull request is still a human mechanism, not a git mechanism. The "pull request" itself is still just a message requesting a pull, not some concept that git (either the commands or on-disk representation) is specifically aware of.

To that point, GitHub still does not use git-request-pull or even pulls to implement PRs, so the name is still not correct there. GitLab's naming is more accurate.

"pull request" isn't really native to git. "pull" is. A pull request is literally sending somebody a message and requesting that they pull a branch from your fork and merge it. A "pull request" in GitHub doesn't really do a pull under the covers at all.

"pull request" is a more recognizable term, but "merge request" is more technically accurate for what GitHub and GitLab do.

And is it really jumping through hoops to just name it something different? I usually think of that phrase as implying something more arduous.

RGME is simply fantastic. His Pokemon cry and sprite encoding is so well done. He did a charity Livestream once where he spent 4 hours decoding a Pokemon sprite by hand. I didn't watch it, because that's too much a time investment for me, but I still find it incredible.

I do, and I haven't.

I'd be shocked if that were universal over that time, given that even formal language has undergone many changes in attitude. Over hundreds of years, I bet that in many times and places it has not considered it a problem, particularly given its use in the King James Bible.

It's definitely more clunky for complex object graphs. Making a useful directed graph with cycles is pretty annoying. Not impossible my any means (I'm currently working on a Rust project for audio graphs that allows cycles), but not nearly as easy as a GC language would make it.

That sounds flawed to me. A large block list will disproportionately warn you about projects that are more open to any external contribution in general. Guilt by association is a weird standard for FOSS contributions. I certainly don't review the external lives of contributors on my repositories.

I'd drop the "long-lived" and "short-lived" from the first two points. Rust is great for long lived programs, and is extremely clunky for managing any kind of object graph in general. The lifetime of the program has little to do with it, so I'm confused by those qualifiers. I've written plenty of Rust software that has run uninterrupted for years.

I've seen way more people complaining about Rust evangelism and toxicity than I've seen of Rust evangelism or toxicity itself, especially here on HN. Even "Rewrite it in Rust" is something I've mostly only ever seen as a denigrating joke (and usually in response to a project choosing to be rewritten in Rust, not even to calls to rewrite something in Rust). I'm starting to wonder if the Rust toxicity and evangelism are more meme than reality.

It was also used in the King James Bible, published in 1611.

"They" as a gender neutral singular pronoun has never been bad grammar, and has been accepted in common use for many hundreds of years.

How is that related? What does it have to do with Rust? If anything, I'd say it shows that social media (and microblogging platforms like Twitter and Mastodon in particular) tend to be politically charged, toxic, and dogmatic.

I don't agree at all. That's like saying the world is only beautiful because it will one day be consumed by the sun. I love my life, and it isn't because I'm going to die.

The amount of energy is truly absurd. I dont chug a 16 oz bottle of water every time I answer a question.

I've been playing with it recently, and I find unless there are very clear patterns in surrounding code or on the Internet, it does quite terribly. Even for well-seasoned libraries like V8 and libuv, it can't reliably not make up APIs that don't exist and it very regularly spits out nonsense code. Sometimes it writes code that works and does the wrong thing, it can't reliably make good decisions around undefined behavior. The worst is when I've asked for it to refactor code, and it actually subtly changes the behavior in the process.

I imagine it's great for CRUD apps and generating unit tests, but for anything reliable where I work, it's not even close to being useful at all, let alone a game changer. It's a shame, because it's not like I really enjoy fiddling with memory buffers and painstakingly avoiding UB, but I still have to do it (I love Rust, but it's not an option for me because I have to support AIX. V8 in Rust also sounds like a nightmare, to be honest. It's a very C++ API).

In my Lua/cbor use, what I did was use a custom tag (I think the ID was 0x7AB1E, for "TABLE") with an array type composed of a sub array and map. The array contains the array elements of the table up to the first nil, and the map contains the rest. Worked well enough for my use.