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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 3rd, 2024

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  • Electronics are an interesting case. In our capitalist global economy we use extortion and threats to secure rare earth metals so we can use them for critical green technology and warfare while also using them to pump out televisions and phones for people to buy to replace ones that work fine (or could be kept working fine if we avoided software bloat).

    Plastics are similar, they’re essential for medical applications but we also use our limited fossil fuel resources for cars and to wrap bananas at the store.

    You could ask the question of how we could afford to let capitalism distribute these resources.

    Working in the software industry I see tremendous waste, absurdly inefficient technologies being used because they’re cheap, etc.

    We could all work less, work on the more important things, and make better use of our resources if not for the unnecessary inefficiencies introduced by duplicating effort, hiding technological advances from one another. We should be moving towards a cooperative rather than competitive economy.



  • People forget that crashes are a debugging tool indicating an error. Silent errors can be much more dangerous. C and C++ in particular need to be careful not to overwrite random memory for example.

    Yes the consequences for JS failures are less severe and so JS can get away with it, but a crash is a way to know your program isn’t doing what you thought it was, properly.

    It just so happens that JS is used in contexts where nobody really cares, and errors aren’t a big deal, cheap and fast wins.








  • The problems with that feed which he touched on in the video are pretty significant. If you subscribe to channels that put out lots of content and ones that rarely do, it becomes much harder to use.

    One thing he didn’t mention is also that it’s not conducive to discovering and gradually catching up on the back catalogue of a new channel, which is something the home feed excels at.

    I’m sure YouTube prefers you use the home feed and has no plans to improve subscriptions, and there are real issues with it, so it’ll probably continue to decline.