lycopodiopsida (u/lycopodiopsida)

lycopodiopsida commented on Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language" robbyonrails.com/articles... · Posted by u/robbyrussell

ashishb · 2 months ago

Here is my single way of deciding what your favorite language is.

It is not "I like to write code in this language" but "If I am handed down a production ready system, I would prefer it to be written in this language".

A lot of people won't say the same answer to the first and the second question.

lycopodiopsida · 2 months ago

As long as I’ve written the system, any language is fine. Otherwise, hand it down to someone else!

/s but also true

lycopodiopsida commented on Underrated reasons to be thankful V dynomight.net/thanks-5/... · Posted by u/numeri

A_D_E_P_T · 2 months ago

Peak Whig History. You may want to consider whether you're mistaking temporary anomalies for permanent truths. A review of history illustrates that democracy is simply the mechanism by which the merchant class destroys the traditional aristocracy. It is a transitionary phase, not a permanent state. It will inevitably transition to mob rule or oligarchy -- and you can see this all around you! Answer me this: If "democracy" is so great, why is it that every Western political establishment is terrified of direct democracy and plebiscites?

Ancient Greek-style democracy -- where every citizen votes on every important issue -- can now be implemented in the US and any European country, with ease. It's not like we don't have the technology. Why do we need corrupt intermediaries? To simplify things a bit, it is because we're going to get oligarchy or ochlocracy, and the oligarchs want to make sure they're on the winning team, whereas direct democracy is a path to ochlocracy within a mere handful of years.

The Ancients knew all of this, of course.

All that said, a state's form of government has very little (in some cases nothing) to do with that state's ability to benefit from material progress.

It's a real laugh to suggest that our ancestors were "suffering enormously" on account of the fact that they were ruled by a feudal lord who descended from his mountain fortress once a year to collect taxes in the form of a handful or two of grain. Our ancestors had a place, a duty, a strong faith, and a connection to their superiors and inferiors. Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music. On balance, they were probably happier than modern man.

lycopodiopsida · 2 months ago

> a strong faith

laughing in Marx

> Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music.

You may want to visit an open museum about a peasant life. It was all but a festival with homes "full of music".

lycopodiopsida commented on Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good kristofferbalintona.me/po... · Posted by u/harryday

chuckadams · 2 months ago

IDEA can certainly get slow, but `esc 10000 c-x e` still means I'm hitting abort before it gets even close to done. I use multiple panes/windows in IDEA all the time, and it also supports opening tabs in new windows/frames.

lycopodiopsida · 2 months ago

I have just opened a 7k loc JS file in idea and I can observe for at least 2 seconds how syntax fontification and all the hints are applied and rendered. All of it on a macbook M4. It is not acceptable and also the slowest of any editor I've used.

lycopodiopsida commented on Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good kristofferbalintona.me/po... · Posted by u/harryday

chuckadams · 2 months ago

> Defaults emacs ships with today are really good.

They're really not. It still defaults to opening a split window, still litters #foo# and foo~ files in the directory of whatever you're editing, and still comes with few language modes supported out of the box, let alone set up to automatically spawn and use LSP servers. Running a macro over a 10,000 line file is still incredibly slow on a 1-year old mac. Many common functions are still bound to chains of two or sometimes three keystrokes with multiple combinations of ctrl-keys and sometimes the mysterious ctrl-u prefix. Rebinding all the defaults is pretty much a given for any emacs power user. It's no wonder RMS ended up with RSI problems, because "emacs pinkie" is still very much a thing.

I miss emacs in a lot of ways, I used it for a good two dozen years starting in the 90's, but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.

lycopodiopsida · 2 months ago

> but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.

IDEA is so painfully slow that while I have it paid by my company I cannot force myself to work in it for extended periods of time. And I say it being fully aware of Emacs's speed problems. Also, the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA, as well as in VSCode.

lycopodiopsida commented on The lost cause of the Lisp machines tfeb.org/fragments/2025/1... · Posted by u/enbywithunix

vindarel · 3 months ago

And the Lem editor (an Emacs-like in Common Lisp).

lycopodiopsida · 3 months ago

Rather just "an Emacs" - it was a family of editors, after all, with GNU Emacs being the only one living offspring.

lycopodiopsida commented on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright bbc.com/news/articles/c1j... · Posted by u/YeGoblynQueenne

lycopodiopsida · 3 months ago

My car (a VW) has adaptive light with zoning, which seems to work well - at least no one is flashing me! But in general, modern cars are a black box - the light is always on, everything runs on automatics, there is no height adjustment anymore. I mostly have to rely on it working as intended.

lycopodiopsida commented on Meta is about to start grading workers on their AI skills businessinsider.com/meta-... · Posted by u/pella

lycopodiopsida · 3 months ago

The grift is most insane right before the crash, I guess.

Also: there is no need to push people to use "AI" in their work - if it is even remotely useful they'll do it on their own. If "AI" is not used, it most likely causes more trouble than it saves time.

lycopodiopsida commented on A brief look at FreeBSD yorickpeterse.com/article... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lycopodiopsida · 3 months ago

> Besides that there is a bigger question that I need to answer for myself: given the quirks of FreeBSD, what actually would the benefit of using it be?

I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.

lycopodiopsida commented on Time to start de-Appling heatherburns.tech/2025/11... · Posted by u/msangi

api · 3 months ago

IMHO Apple is actually being honest here. They cannot legally operate in the UK without providing a back door, so they are dropping the claim of ADP in the UK. This is letting the user know what's up, and might also help inspire a backlash against these laws. Apple needs to make it clear that they are being forced by UK law to degrade service.

Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.

I'm sure there's services out there that will secretly comply and still claim to be secure.

There's also a lot of companies that will simply abandon security features like ADP or never develop them. Apple is going to the trouble of disabling it only for UK people not everyone, instead of just deprecating it. The latter would be less expensive and expose them to less legal risk.

If you really want security in the UK now you have to roll your own and do the encryption yourself. Honestly that's always the best security, since you can never be 100% sure a closed cloud or software vendor isn't messing with you.

lycopodiopsida · 3 months ago

> Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.

It is also maybe a good thing? Corporations should not be stewards of our rights, we do not want to be governed by tech-barons.

The problem here lies clearly in UK's laws and government and they cannot be fixed by Apple. The West in general is in this crumbling state, where we take corrupt bastards chewing off our rights for a law of nature, instead of getting furious. France is the only western country where people dare to really protest.

lycopodiopsida commented on Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980) www-formal.stanford.edu/j... · Posted by u/birdculture

armitron · 3 months ago

Clojure is a niche language that (for realistic purposes) is still tied to a single platform, the JVM, which (Clojure, not the JVM) looks more dead with every passing year. It never became popular and it's been steadily losing users. It's also not as general purpose as Common Lisp (ie. not suited for system or lowlevel programming).

If you're going to learn a niche Lisp, you might as well learn Common Lisp or Scheme which have well-specified standards, have stood the test of time and will still be around for decades to come.

lycopodiopsida · 3 months ago

I prefer CL, but… clojure at least has some commercial usage and is by far the most successful of current lisps, if we do not count elisp.