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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

    America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

    It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.



  • It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.

    I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.

    Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.


  • The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.

    Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.

    It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.


  • The kind that rails on “anti authoritarianism”? Or do you have a charitable interpretation of “authoritarianism” that is somehow compatible with democracy?

    I also fail to see what any of that has to do with capitalism, which I have neither defended nor mentioned yet you brought up.

    Goddam arguing with tankies and their endless litany of non-sequiturs is such a pointless exercise.



  • Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can’t be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

    This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn’t fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.


  • I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

    What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

    Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.


  • Villains are stereotypically older fat queer bald men (e.g. Vladimir Harkonnen). These are all factors people have little-to-no control over.

    Media will sometimes subvert those expectations, but most of the time the iconography matters more to the filmmaker than decency. It’s quite fucked up the insecurities these portrayals breed, no amount of positive affirmation will make up for the fact that some natural body types are fundamentally associated with villainy in the Western visual canon.


    • Greenfield (new) nuclear’s LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables’ intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven’t seen a study on that).
    • Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
      Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

    The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).


  • The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.

    I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

    You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.






  • I mean, bad programming sucks regardless of the “paradigm” (and vice-versa, mostly). But as someone whose job it often is to sift through production logs hunting for an issue in someone else’s component, at least I have a chance with OOP, because its behavior is normally predictable at compile time. So with the source and the backtrace I can pretty reasonably map the code path, even if the spaghetti is 300 calls deep.

    Now where shit really hits the fan is OOP with dependency injection. Now I’m back to square 1 grepping through 15 libraries because my LSP has no idea where the member comes from. Ugh.


  • Anyone who praises FP is either a student, works primarily in academia, or otherwise never had to look at a deep stack trace in their life.

    Every time a production system spits out a backtrace that’s just 15 event loop calls into a random callback, I lose 6 months life expectancy. Then I go look at the source, and the “go to definition” of my LSP never works because WHY WOULD IT, IT’S ALL FUNCTIONAL hapi.register CALLS

    I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it. I support UBI because the people pushing functional programming in real production systems should be reassigned to gardening duties.


  • Another long term goal of the EU is to promote peace and democracy across Europe.

    Allowing Orbàn to further democratic backsliding at home and undermining of the EU’s democratic processes and missions goes contrary to that goal, and the usual withholding of EU funding isn’t a sentence at all to a quasi-dictator who revels in the fact that reduced funding means more social misery means easy elections for a populist who blames every problem on the EU.

    Kicking out Hungary is a solution of last resort and we aren’t there yet, but in a system where Member States could turn totalitarian (and as Sovereign states we have no legal means to force out a dictator), exclusion must be on the table if we are to uphold our democratic values.