this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.

I have spent the last 10 years of my career writing open source scientific software

ignorance is one thing, but it’s a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time

this is fine until you need autotools which is worse than cmake

it’s still mostly red hat even for arm, though Cray (who still supply a lot of machines here in the UK) ship a horribly butchered version of SLES

typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding

irrelevant to the thread, but it actually took only 3 years for clement atlee’s government to create the UK’s national health service

the vast majority of the internet is shit, it’s a slurry of Content from content farms designed to top google search results or go viral on social media. if all that were to disappear then the internet would absolutely become a better place

updating packages in kde neon is like playing russian roulette, it’s worse than pop os in my experience

pointers are fine, but when you learn about the preprocessor and templates and 75% of the STL it goes negative again

c++ templates are such a busted implementation of generics that if I didn’t have context I’d assume they were bad on purpose like malbolge

I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt

after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.

I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable

my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad

I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.

I love kde, I love the file picker, I love window management, I love dolphin, I love the panels, I love Kate, etc… but every time I have to switch to a new tty to restart kwin, part of my soul dies

when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be

I worked for an engineering company that used them almost exclusively and now I won’t shut the fuck up about pozidriv l. everyone thinks I’m insane

in my opinion this is very straightforward. the people working directly on power, water and materials don’t have any control over how those things are used and often don’t/can’t know what they’re being used for. however, at some point, a decision is made - for example, someone at the company that makes the steel alloy decides to sell it to raytheon - and so whoever made that decision is responsible.

and yes, if you work on a weapon safety system, you are working on an essential part of that weapon and so are responsible for its use

i mean, i probably wouldn’t resent you for mopping the floors at BAE. but if you actually design or build the missiles, yes, that is unethical

a lot of people are using the example of ukraine to say ‘sometimes the missiles are for the greater good’, and while i would agree with that specific example, you don’t have control over where your missiles go. russian tank, yemeni refugee, etc

i also think saying ‘the parts will be made anyway’ is kind of a dodge, the question isn’t whether the parts will be made, it’s whether you will make them

Hopefully I’m not too late to say this: I would strongly caution against buying a Fairphone. My mum got a new Fairphone 3 in early 2021. Earlier this year, just after the phone went out of warranty, the USB-C port stopped working. The replacement bottom module was out of stock, it’s been out of stock for months, and the forums are full of people complaining that it’s been mostly out of stock since 2021. Fairphone claimed that they would have stock back by the end of August, and as of today, that is not true. This phone was supposed to have spare parts available through to 2025.

I love XLR and mini-XLR. Durable connector, nice locking mechanism, satisfying click. Also very easy to wire yourself.