Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/
Oliver Lowe
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
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2·8 months agoI honestly find it worrying that someone would think it’s some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it’s clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn’t exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.
I think “growth” is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.
Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I’m not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like “line go up” behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?
One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it’s a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).
The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up
What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.
Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn’t about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much “profit”!), it needed to be more.
To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!
Again: I’m not stating anything here as fact. I’m just absolutely dumbfounded as to why “line go up” is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it’s a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?
Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.
God yes this bothers and fascinates me.
Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.
I think it’s alluded to in the article:
They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.
Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.
When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?
Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.
Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).
Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).
There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.
The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(
Here’s the article’s source: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf
That report’s data is a survey they sent out to companies. Quantising “so… what do you think is gonna happen?” seems… shonky?
1·8 months agoThought that’s already supported? e.g. https://gitlab.com/diasporg/diaspora.atom
10·9 months agoBYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company
Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.
13·11 months agoDevil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or
ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382
More ideas if you’re interested at https://upspin.io
They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.
This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.
There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.
Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.
how can a writer be so ignorant.
They probably know exactly what they’re doing. Singling out Japan makes for a “better” headline to a mostly North American audience.
It’s also a bit of a clever headline. Compare the original headline and this one: “All major automakers continue to produce sports cars”. Both headlines could technically be true.
But the original headline lets you get away with stirring up some emotion e.g. “Japan alone is keeping the sportscar industry afloat, European, American manufacturers don’t care, sportscars are dying”. Life, death: strong words! It’s misleading and shitty journalism.
I wonder if their compositors would be laggy and bloated with features, too?
This was the provider I went with after self-hosting my mail for 7+ years on an OpenBSD VPS. I feel like Migadu is an honest and good-value service.
Each time your browser makes a request (such as updating the graphs), it’s submitting a new DNS query each time.
That would be surprising; most HTTP clients reuse network connections and connections are deliberately kept open to reduce the overhead of reopening a connection (including latency in doing a DNS lookup).
Then again, I’ve seen worse ;)
33·1 year agoWe can never know exactly. For me I always think about the (incidental) complexity of these huge apps like Instagram.
Somebody mentioned the phone overheating when watching Reels - those short videos. Here’s a made-up example (but I’ve written some software for video streaming services)…
Those videos are pretty short, and some people skip the clip even after less than 1 second. Instagram want that next video to be playing instantly (gotta get that dopamine hit ASAP!). A strategy you could take is have the app load the next, say, 5 possible videos in the background before you’ve even seen them. When the user swipes, that video is already playing. To make this even faster we could execute some recommendation decisions on-device rather than on some servers (over a relatively much slower 4G connection).
With all this complexity comes greater chance of some unexpected behaviour. Instead of loading 5 videos, maybe we accidentally load 100 and never clean up the old ones. Maybe after an OS update we need to change the way we mark a task as low priority.
Cool insight - thanks! All points even more to bad planning by the Instagram team as you said originally.
I guess I wouldn’t be particularly surprised. Apple put shitloads of R&D into power-efficiency. Can’t imagine the culture at Instagram/Meta is like that.
Slightly off-topic: I’m not too familiar with FreeBSD (I use OpenBSD), but others may be interested to know you may be able to configure wireguard interfaces without installing any packages. It probably just involves running some
ifconfigcommands at boot via some entries in/etc/rc.conf. See https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/network/
I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn’t so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.