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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2024

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  • This is kinda three different problems, or three effects from one problem:

    1. Being stuck in traffic has a negative impact on health, quality of life in general
    2. Being stuck in traffic has a monetary cost for deliveries and others who have travel as a significant part of their work, e.g. how easy it is for plumbers to get around to customers and warehouses and the like
    3. Being stuck in traffic can have terrible consequences for emergency services

    The solutions, of course, are a mix of negative incentives to drive like congestion and parking pricing, and positive incentives to not drive, like investing in transit, cycling, mixed use and at least a certain level of urban density to be able to support transit, services and not have biking and walking be unfeasible or undesirable because of long distances.



  • Yeah, the manpages for systemd are large but also informative. Most of us only use a small subset of the features—much like we never explored everything possible with separate init programs.

    Having used Linux on the desktop for some two decades and worked as a Linux sysadmin for a good while I don’t miss the init scripts. My impression is more that a certain cohort wants to pretend that service management is easy by ignoring large amounts of it. It’s easy to write a bad init script that breaks when you really need it, or be out of your depth with more complex cases.

    Not to mention the whole conformity by convention thing. Systemd unit files are descriptive and predictable by their nature. So-called init scripts didn’t really have to be scripts, they just usually were, and their arguments and output and behaviour was also unenforced—there’s nothing really stopping you from writing a compiled program that self-daemonizes and place the binary with the init scripts rather than in /bin. Ultimately people who make programs also have to be good at writing init programs with that setup.

    So we’d have people doing dumb shit themselves and getting angry at others doing dumb shit. PHP was also pretty popular and full of dumb shit. Lots of “worse is better” to go around.

    Ultimately it’s more of the stuff covered in Bryan Cantrill’s Platform as a reflection of values. Some of us value predictability and correctness, others feel it’s a straitjacket. There’s no way of pleasing everyone with the same platform.

    And currently the people who want to distribute their own riced-out init programs in bash, perl, php, node.js and so on are SOL. (They can still use them on their own machines.)


  • By that logic we would still be using horses since technically we don’t -need- cars.

    Most of us would be using our feet and transit (and possibly bikes); both our households and our economies would be better off financially and bodily if car use was restricted to goods hauling and some few other uses (not to mention the environment). Mass motorism has turned out to be mostly a way to enrich the auto industry, not our societies, with North America as a warning to the rest of us. (See !fuckcars@lemmy.world for more.)

    There are plenty of times where humanity has chased the latest fad without considering the costs & benefits properly. The amount of energy and hardware being blown away on LLMs are another example; same goes for creepto and NFTs.

    That said, having a look around for various applications, including terminals, is generally good. If someone finds something that covers their needs but with lower costs, that’s good. And if they find something with a shiny new bell or whistle at exorbitant cost, eh, maybe think twice before choosing it.





  • And very old. Part of the sales pitch for the COmmon Business-Protected Language was that anyone could learn to code in almost plain English.

    Also, the stuff they wind up making is the kind of stuff that people with no coding experience make. Cooking up an ugly website with terrible performance and security isn’t much harder than making an ugly presentation with lots of WordArt. But it never was, either.

    Between COBOL and LLM-enhanced “low code” we had other stuff, like that infamous product from MS that produced terrible HTML. At this point I can’t even recall what it was called. The SharePoint editor maybe?


  • Yeah, Rust tries to find as many problems as it can during compilation. It’s great for those of us who want the bugs to be found ahead of release, not great for those who just want something out the door and worry about bugs only after a user reports them.

    Different platforms have different values, and that also affects what people consider fun. At the other end of the scale you find the triple-equals languages like js and php, which a lot of people think are fun and normal, but some of us think are so wobbly or sloppy that they’re actually much harder languages than other, stricter languages.

    If you value correctness and efficiency, Rust is pretty fun.