miki

miki, 23 days ago

@simon @hmaealdeza Also KYC/AML sucks. If there is one kind legislation blind people should be much more vocal about, it's KYC/AML bullshit.

miki, 23 days ago

@yassie_j This was always possible by opening a private window. I'm quite surprised that they finally got enough sense to stop gaslighting their users about this.

The actual point of blocking is preventing you from seeing content from people you find disagreeable and/or triggering. IMO any kind of mechanism that lets somebody see that they've been blocked just defeats the purpose.

miki, 25 days ago

@drewdevault This happens because there are no reliable credit scores in Europe.

You have a form of this everywhere. For us, it's usually in the form of demanding an affidavit from another owner / renter that they will take you in in case you're not paying the rent and have to be thrown out.

The alternative is a social housing system like the one in Stockholm, where apartments are cheap and ubiquitous, if you're willling to wait in line for 20 years. We had a similar system before the free market took hold here, with the added complication that a bribe and/or a family connection to the right officer could potentially let you bypass the queue.

miki, 26 days ago

@revanmj Nie zgodził bym się ze stwierdzeniem, że to podcinanie gałęzi. Problem z telefonicznym spamem w kontekście tego posta, czyli w krajach anglosaskich, nie bierze się z dużych i szanowanych firm, a ze scamów propagowanych przez szemrane callcenter w krajach trzeciego świata. Wszystko rozchodzi się o to, że w czasach powszechnego dostępu do internetu i taniej telefoni voip, Amerykański / Brytyjski / jakikolwiek numer telefonu można dostać mieszkając gdziekolwiek, w tym w kraju nie szanującym tamtejszego prawa i bez traktatów o ekstradycji / ze skorumpowaną policją. Dodajmy do tego fakt, że nie tylko Amerykanie / Brytyjczycy mówią dobrze po angielsku, Indie w szczególności mają sporo takich osób, i mamy receptę na szemrany a jednak mało ryzykowny biznes. Udawaj że jesteś Amazonem / Microsoftem / skarbówką, przekonuj ludzi do wysłania ci pieniędzy, daj w łapę komu trzeba, i nikt nic z tym nie zrobi. Efektem jest czasem kilkanaście do kilkudziesięciu połączeń i SMSów dziennie. Przy tych ilościach trzeba blokować.

U nas w Polsce problem też istnieje, ale w dużo mniejszej skali, bo osób mówiących po polsku i jednocześnie mieszkających w krajach mających na pieńku z Polską policją nie ma dużo.

miki, 26 days ago

@FluidEscence You haven't seen Emacs have you?

I think my favorite is Teledildonics mode. No, the "dildo" in "teledildonics" is not a coincidence.

miki, 26 days ago

@alexhall In most languages, "and" and "or" return their operants and not true/false directly.

The result of "or" is the first operant if the first operant is true, otherwise the second operant. The result of "and" is the first false operant, or the second operant if both are true.

This lets you write things like port = int(os.getenv("PORT") or config.get("port") or "4000"). This will set port to the first truthy value from these three, where 4000 is always truthy and will be used as a fallback.

miki, 26 days ago

@alexhall A fun corrollary to this is that if your language supports recursion, has this property and has short circuiting and and or operators, those two concepts are enough to express an arbitrary computer program, no if statements or loops necessary. See this (cursed) function for example.

def sum_all_array_elements(arr):
return len(arr) and arr[0] + sum_all_array_elements(arr[1:])

miki, 26 days ago

@alexhall For if statements this doesn't matter because they treat values as "truthy" or "falsy" anyway, so the behavior is equivalent. For everything else, this makes it possible to avoid cumbersome if statements and use || for default values. The const port = getPortFromSomewhere() || "4000" thing is an idiom in JS for example.

miki, 26 days ago

@jscholes @alexhall Python programmers don't even use this property that much, compared to JS for example. I've certainly seen it in Python code, but JS for example just goes completely overboard with it.

This is probably because of JSX and the fact that it only allows expressions in certain contexts where people really want to put a statement.

On the other hand, Python also has this context, and such rampant operator abuse isn't as popular, so maybe it's just a question of idioms.

miki, 26 days ago

@jscholes @alexhall Python programmers don't even use this property that much, compared to JS for example. I've certainly seen it in Python code, but JS for example just goes completely overboard with it.

This is probably because of JSX and the fact that it only allows expressions in certain contexts where people really want to put a statement.

On the other hand, Python also has this context, and such rampant operator abuse isn't as popular, so maybe it's just a question of idioms.

miki, 26 days ago

@jscholes @alexhall True true. I've seen my fair share of "Python as she is wrote by a scientist", and that was close to the most horrible code I've ever seen.

In our codebase at my former job, which I had the (mis)pleasure of refactoring, I found a function to join a list of strings, using a comma and a space as separators. This was done in a for loop, by doing += on the accumulator string twice, and then returning that string sans the last two characters. I was alerted to the existence of this abomination by the fact that this method can't deal with empty strings. The rest of the code wasn't much better.

miki, 26 days ago

@x0 Of course there are security reasons, just as there are (even more important) security reasons to disallow third-party App Stores and sideloading, and some places and platforms still allow those despite the risks.

miki, 26 days ago

@x0 IMO security would be better in a model where there's no sideloading and no third-party App Stores but apps can potentially gain root access than it is in Europe's or Android's model. Assuming the relevant "do everything" entitlements are behind some kind of fair vetting process, only granted to apps that need them and revoked if an app does something naughty and against the guidelines.

miki, 26 days ago

@x0 Yes exactly.

I'm a fan of the Chrome OS model here. Restrict to approved first-party apps only, but let the user factory wipe the device and re-initialize into a developer mode with little to no restrictions. THe factory reset part prevents clueless users from being tricked into doing this, while giving actual developers and tinkerers the power they wanted all along.

miki, 27 days ago

@shanselman They have CPU, GPU, memory and storage, but they also have sandboxing and API restrictions that effectively prevent any third-party from making a "good" AI assistant. You can't make or receive calls without annoying user prompts, you can't access call audio to do transcripts / summarization, have Alexa-style wake word detection without a massive drain on battery, manage alarms / calendar / reminders and so on. Not that Rabbit does this, but any good AI assistant will. Android is better at this than iOS but only slightly.

IMO this is a far more important antitrust issue than petty squabbles between big American companies and big European companies about who deserves what share of the pie. I'm fine with the App Store as long as there's a "do everything" entitlement that is fairly granted to apps that want to do unorthodox things we don't have system APIs for.

miki, 28 days ago

@bkhl THis is the "extremely serious issues" part of my post. The Chinese/Hungarian/Polish student protests were about extremely serious political problems, in the students' own countries, affecting them in some (usually serious) way directly. We don't see this as much (if at all) in the modern (AKA post-soviet-collapse) Europe.

miki, 26 days ago

@MS26 No I think you're right. That begs the question of where the polarization is coming from. Some people say social media and that's certainly part of it, but the US is not the only country in the world where social media exists. Some say racism / Trump / evil MAGA republicans / evil woke democrats / whatever their pet issue is, but the science doesn't seem to support this. Some say economic declines and greed, but there are places in worse shape where this isn't happening.

miki, 25 days ago

@x0 @MS26 Do you believe that somebody charged by a prosecutor, but not yet convicted by a court or jurry, should not be able to run for office? What if an unfriendly prosecutor in Buttfuck nowhere charges your favorite candidate next term? Even if the charges are trumped up (no pun intended), and would never have a channce in court?

Deferring the election is not a solution either. If this was the law, presidential terms would basically stretch to infinity, as everybody would constantly be bringing charges against some candidate or other and trying to make the case last as long as possible.

To be clear, I'm no fan of Trump, but I think that what's going on right now in the US is the legal system working as intended, and anything else would quickly lead to far worse abuses of power.

miki, 25 days ago

@x0 @MS26 Also an incredibly narrow perspective IMO. If you think the US justice system is slow, you haven't seen anywhere else. We don't have the concept of "right to a speedy trial" for example, and even simple cases with no appeals routinely last for years. The case is completely apolitical, you've murdered somebody, there's CCTV evidence you've murdered them, you've admitted to murdering them, you aren't planning to appeal or contest the charges, arrest-to-conviction is still going to be a good few years. There's no trial, there are "hearings" instead, which may happen once every few months. There has been a hearing scheduled for six months and a key witness has a wedding in the family on that day? Oh well, see you next year.

miki, 25 days ago

@x0 @MS26 Speaking strictly from a Polish perspective, our issue is mostly a lack of judges, caused by the lack of funding for the court system and a lack of "right to a speedy trial" in the constitution. I've spoken to an actual court judge and a few law students about this, as well as watched interviews with judges, and all of them mentioned the funding issue. depending on the kind of court you're operating in (civil versus criminal versus family), 300 to 900 cases per year per judge is what we're talking about.

We have the same problem with doctors and teachers, this is why getting a surgery term for 2027 in 2024 isn't anything that a Polish person would be teribly surprised by. If you're not in immediate danger of dying, this can happen. It's worth noting that extreme pain that prevents you from having an enjoyable life is not an immediate danger of dying by this definition.

miki, 28 days ago

@TheQuinbox @jcsteh Wondering if piping it to code would actually work, I don't know what behavior it has with blocking processes, but it's a thing to try.

miki, 28 days ago

@TheQuinbox @matt @jcsteh also the ability to jump between prompt lines in the output. Some of the fancy, modern, GPU-rendered, inaccessible as hell terminals do this, and I think it would be a especially useful for us. Also semantic TUIs and Aria in the terminal, but one can dream.