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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • masterspace@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@programming.devJavaScript
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    8 days ago

    This is a really good interview, and does a good job highlighting Javascript’s biggest strength: it’s flexibility.

    “It was also an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it. Something that I think is important about it is that I knew there would be mistakes, and there would be gaps, so I made it very malleable as a language.”

    He cites the “discovery” of asm.js inside of JavaScript, calling it “another thing I’m particularly proud of in the last 10 years.” It uses the bitwise operators that were included in the original JavaScript which are now the basis for a statically-typed language with machine types for high-speed performance. “If it hadn’t been in there from 1995, it would’ve been hard to add later. And the fact that it was there all along meant we could do incredibly fast JavaScript.”

    He tells InfoWorld it’s “this very potent seed that was in the original JavaScript from the 10 days of May in 1995.” JavaScript’s 32-bit math operators (known as bitwise operators) trace their lineage all the way back to the C programming language — and to Java. This eventually led to WebAssembly — a way to convert instructions into a quickly-executable binary format for virtual machines — and the realization that with a JavaScript engine, “you can have two languages — the old language I did with the curly braces and the functions and the shift operators, and this new language which is a binary language, not meant for reading by humans or writing. But it can be generated by compilers and tools, and can be read by tools…”


  • Undoubtedly, but we still chose to come to Lemmy because we visited it and saw a bunch of people that we mostly agreed with on it.

    Think about how many Lemmy users block hexbear or lemmy.ml, or would spit in disgust when they visit gab or voat or something.

    Users prune those sources because they aren’t interested in hearing wildly toxic fringe ideas (or flat out being propagandized to), but it’s still fundamentally up to you as a user to decide what you consider rationale and worthy of discussion, and then going forward the content you see on here is only what’s shared by very like minded individuals.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think that Reddit and other corporate owned social media intentionally promotes rage bait and other distressing content, both in comments and posts, and that drives people to go even more nuts and become more polarized compared to a non-engagement driven algorithm like Lemmy’s, but even open and decentralized social media platforms create filter bubbles and information silos.


  • The internet inherently creates information silos, because of the nature of how it works.

    Cable TV, Newspapers, the Radio, etc. were all broad-cast networks, as in one person talks and that gets cast broadly to all listeners on the network.

    Channels provided some level of user choice in what they listened to, but not very much. At most they still picked between only a handful of different options.

    The internet fundamentally isn’t a broadcast network though, it’s a messaging network. When you publish a video on YouTube it isn’t broad cast to every one with an internet channel, instead, the users goes out and looks for the information they want and requests and YouTube sends it back to them.

    This inherently creates filter bubbles because the information you receive is based on your own existing preferences and requests, which creates a feedback loop the reinforces your opinions.


  • Yeah I currently use Printables just because I trust Prusa more than the others, but at the end of the day Prusa is still a private company that could change its policies and decide to fuck over all its users or sell out to a company that does.

    Thingiverse is just slow and crappy these days, Makers world defaults to locking everything down and not allowing remixes, so an open federated alternative would be great.





  • masterspace@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    15 days ago

    Question, is that how MacOS works?

    OS and security is one thing. Who you trust is another thing. On their mobile OSes, Apple artificially conflates the two to keep you listening to them out of fear of losing security, when they know damn well jts entirely possible to provide a secure OS that lets you choose to trust someone other than them for everything else.




  • You’re wrong in terms of long distance power lines being mostly copper, but this does seem a lot like fossil fuel propaganda.

    Motors, generators, and transformers can be built using aluminium; they’re just a bit bulkier and less efficient. Very common practice.

    What I mean is that the bulk of current copper wiring goes towards distribution and consumption, not generation.

    The big thing is that batteries really should be a last resort, behind demand response (using power when it is available, rather than storing it for later), long distance transmission, and public transport instead of private vehicles.

    This isn’t a big thing. This is a constant thing in every system. It’s the push and pull between efficiency and resiliency. More storage capacity is less efficient when things are going well, but is more resilient and adaptable when they’re not.


  • What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:

    Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.

    Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.

    “First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”

    Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be … just in renewable power plants?

    This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.




  • masterspace@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    17 days ago

    Please do us all a favour and go and read the Wikipedia article on anti-competitive behaviour and anti-competition laws before commenting.

    And just in case you lack the mental faculties to actually parse that Wikipedia article, the key lesson we’re looking for you to learn is that you do not need a a monopoly to behave anti-competitively, you just need market power, and to abuse it in a way that avoids fairly competing on the merits of your product.

    Apple forcing people to use their payment system for no reason other than it lets them make more money, is anti-competitive behaviour. They are not competing on the merits of the best payment system, they are using their dominant market share in phones to force people to use their payment system where they can charge whatever they want.

    Quite frankly, there are a huge number of examples in society of companies behaving anti-competitively. It’s largely what happens when you let business people run things, since they can organize your company structure and reporting to be efficient, and then they run out of ideas for legitimate ways to improve the company’s products.

    Anti-competitive tying is a long standing, textbook, example of anti-competitive behaviour, it’s just often not prevented in the US because US law basically requires you to have a full monopoly before anyone will do anything which is dumb as tits. It’d be like in hockey if the refs were only able to give you a penalty after all your opponents were too injured to play anymore.

    It also ignores other ways of gaining and abusing market power. Walmart is the textbook example of a monopsony, where there market power comes not from being the only store, but the only customer, they are famous for using their size to crush and control their suppliers in ways that are flat out illegal in most of the western world.

    At the end of the day, our economic system is based on the idea that people should compete to produce the best product or service, and then consumers will reward the best one with proportionally more resources based on which one is their preference (best, cheapest, etc.). That falls apart when you start using software to artificially tie every product to every other product. Suddenly AI can’t fairly compete to produce the speaker without also producing a phone, and watch, and laptop, and have everyone have a network of friends and family all also using those. It literally undermines the entirety of capitalism.