How would one measure old school federated contexts like IRC and NNTP in this way? I wonder would they would fare.
Should be easy enough to do the math: https://netsplit.de/networks/
Readit Newssmlavine commented on Are we decentralized yet? arewedecentralizedyet.onl... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
> So if you’re not connected, you won’t get messages
That's true, if you're not connected, you don't receive messages.
> even after you reconnect?
That's not true, once you're connected, you start receiving messages again.
> For many that’s not very useful.
Yeah, I understand it isn't useful if your perspective is that you should be able to read what happened when you were away. But I guess my previous point is that people shouldn't have to do that, there should be another resource for catching up what happened when you were away, and instead it should be OK to return without having to read through all the messages.
I think this is the number one reason more people don't end up using IRC nowadays. The flow for newer, younger users is:
- Use some software project, want to ask a question, see they have an "IRC channel" - Hopefully it's a hyperlink to an IRC web chat, or else they'll have to do a lot of research to find out what IRC is - Join the web chat link, see a room with a list of names - See no messages - Ask a question - Wait ten minutes, get no reply - Assume it's just dead and leave
The ability to see older messages would be a huge boon, and to see messages between connections as well. I've seen it happen that a user joins a channel, they leave because nobody talked to them, somebody answers their question after they leave, they rejoin, they ask the question again, then disconnect.
Being a programmer is not about configuring your development environment. It never has been. I know a relatively accomplished programmer whose preferred development environment is Unix with the ex editor, and plenty of beginners whose whizbang IDEs completely fail to compensate for their lack of understanding.
That's not to say that tooling doesn't matter at all. Just that, historically, it's been a relatively minor factor. Maybe LLMs have changed that, or are about to.
An athlete with shoes for a different sport might run 5% slower. In a winner-takes-all competitive environment, that's fatal; a sprinter that ran 5% slower than the gold medalist is just another loser. Most programmers, however, win by collaboration, and on a relatively smooth fitness landscape, not a winner-takes-all spike. Even in winner-takes-all regions like startups, failure always results from bigger errors. I think nobody has ever said, "My startup would have succeeded if we'd used Dvorak keyboards instead of QWERTY", or vim instead of VSCode, or vice versa. It's always things like feuding cofounders, loss of motivation, never finding product-market fit, etc.
Being a programmer is absolutely about knowing how to configure your development environment, though.
smlavine commented on Using Ed(1) as My Static Site Generator aartaka.me/this-post-is-e... · Posted by u/BoingBoomTschak
smlavine commented on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI theverge.com/news/657594/... · Posted by u/donohoe
If Duolingo wants to be an "AI-First" company, then what's stopping all of us from being an "AI-First" society and just using Google Translate all the time?
This contradicts the whole thesis statement of their company -- that it is worth time and effort to collaborate and learn with others, even when a machine can make it easier.
smlavine commented on The Icelandic Voting System (2024) smarimccarthy.is/posts/20... · Posted by u/alexharri
It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.
This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.
smlavine commented on The Icelandic Voting System (2024) smarimccarthy.is/posts/20... · Posted by u/alexharri
I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.
Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.
I'm not sure I fully understand but changing a lot of code nowadays, we mostly offload the tedious part to an LSP.
Using clangd in vscode, I don't see how you'd be faster in neovim making changes by glorified search and replace? Also you're limited at "file-wide" and not project wide?
Well, my knowledge stops at "file-wide" at least :) Thinking more now I think the most important part is knowing what your tools are capable of and how to use them to their fullest, more so than the particular environment (assuming that such capabilities exist at all).