As a scientist who has ended up gradually becoming more of a programmer, I battled through the SICP after seeing the cult following it has. It’s a weird, but good book, and I couldn’t imagine a book like that using anything other than Lisp

“this is a big Butt”

Nice.

Yeah, it scares me too. Though it does give me some comfort to exist in communities like this, where people are well informed of the kind of fuckery done by big tech and other asshole corporations, and thus are not surprised by this kind of news. Although it’s pretty grim that we all recognise how fucked things are, it’s within communities like this that I often find my will to live be bolstered.

Maybe it’s to do with the average political inclination of folks here, or maybe it’s just that Lemmy has a high concentration of creative, nerdy people who find joy in making or sharing cool stuff. Or maybe I’m just so burnt out that I’m desperate to construct and/or clutch onto anything remotely meaningful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Regardless I find it reassuring to see so many people trying their damnedest to forge something good — not in ignorance of the world being on fire, but precisely because we need good reasons to live now more than ever.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that I wish I could put my head in the sand and find some bliss in the ignorance of it all. I don’t really want that though. Real hope is built on a comprehensive understanding of the problems we face, with a hearty dash of some potentially irrational defiance.

Good start

Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

I’d love to mind my own business, but I’m currently melting in a historic heatwave caused by assholes billionaires and petrochemical executives continually adding gasoline to the fire that is the climate crisis

Yay, teamwork!

Good kitty

None of us are free until all of us are free. AI is nothing new, just more of the same forces trying to crush more of us into a permanent lower class.

There have been some wins from GDPR, but it’s woefully under enforced. I became very familiar with the GDPR when I did an internship in the regulatory risk department of a big bank when everyone was frantically trying to rebuild shit to ensure compliance. I think it’s a damn good piece of legislation, and it’s a shame to see it doing so much less than it could be.

I really like the automatic cruise control on my fairly new Honda Jazz. I’ve found that it has a net positive effect on my attention to the road, because I become less fatigued from the small, brief slowdowns that I might encounter on a motorway. There was actually an instance where I narrowly avoided a crash while using this system because of how quickly I acted when a potentially dangerous situation developed into an active crash; I felt like I was more alert than I would’ve otherwise been after a day of driving

However, I do not like the lane-keeping system, especially combined with the automatic cruise control. I remember testing it when I was on a clear but fairly curved section of the motorway, with my hands completely off the wheel (but hovering over the wheel, ready to take control again if necessary). I was horrified by how effectively it took me round the bend — effectively enough to be dangerous. There is a warning beep if you spend too long without your hands on the wheel at all for a while, but this was just something I did while testing it. I’ve not used it since, because I was confident that, unlike the automatic cruise control used on its own, this would diminish my attention and leave me unable to properly respond to an exceptional circumstances.

“I mean, we’ll have to handle it, we won’t have a choice.”

A lot of people won’t handle it though. I’m too disabled to work, so even if I had been old enough to be working during the dot-com era and the '08 crash, I still wouldn’t have had a job to lose.

However, I have had my benefits temporarily removed due to various bureaucratic bullshit, and there have been multiple points where things got bad enough that I’m honestly surprised I’m still here to write this comment. And it sucks to know that for all the trauma and disadvantage I face, I am one of the lucky ones.

That’s what’s so grim people being pushed to their limit — when we don’t have the luxury of choices, then it’s easy to get drawn towards choosing “the bad ending” so to speak. Even during difficult times where I’ve not been at risk of making that particular choice myself, I nonetheless found it comforting to fantasise about, as the escape lever that no-one could take away from me.

I watched it for the first time only two weeks ago. It was an incredible watch.

I’m really glad I watched it, because it gave me a much more human view of Iran and its people. Satrapi is just one person, of course, so the perspective that Persepolis is only the perspective of one person (though I think that this is why it’s such a strong and compelling piece of art). However, watching it helped me to ground the grief I feel at the plight of the Iranian people in something more concrete and compassionate than a nebulous sense of geopolitical dread.

It’d probably still count as littering, which would be fineable, I imagine

Not only are cashews healthy for them, they also go nuts for them (pun not intended, but I am delighted to have made an accidental pun). I forgot to mention “unsalted” in my comment, so I’m glad you mentioned it

I once had a crow friend who would knock on my window if I was late coming out to give them their seeds. It was just the one crow that was bold enough to do this. Sometimes he’d do it way earlier than usual, and I am 100% confident that he wasn’t mistaken, just being a cheeky asshole and trying his luck. I miss that asshole bird.

Seconding the crow effigy idea (well, I didn’t do it with an effigy, I just left them a couple of shiny stuff).

For me, what I did was sit on my doorstep for a while, to get them used to the sight of me. And then I made sure they saw me leaving the shiny thing. I wasn’t forbidden from feeding them, so I also let them see me putting out some seeds.

Although feeding them is prohibited, the crow effigy idea person said to have a few cashews or similar in the little nesty thing, and I agree that this would be likely be necessary to draw them over at first.

If you’re okay with bending the rules a tad, if the sitting outside thing works and you’re able to not scare them away, then leaving behind just a cashew or two in your wake (if the crows are nearby) could help them to begin to associate you with good stuff.

Though if they’re dive bombing you, it might be challenging to come back from that

E-ink screen is easier on the eyes, and also helps the battery to last for way longer than a phone would. Some people also appreciate having the compartmentalisation of a separate device that’s just for reading — fewer distractions.

My phone is pretty heavy, and reading on it can hurt my hand after a while, especially as there isn’t an ergonomic way to turn pages (the app I use can have it so the volume buttons turn the page, but they’re not positioned well to do that).

I’m shocked that this isn’t required by default on new builds.

A friend of mine who cares a heckton about repairability swears by her duality kettle. She’s had it for over 10 years, and has done at least one major repair. It’s super expensive though (when I looked, I found one for £80 on sale, but alas, that was too dear for me)