wredcoll (u/wredcoll)

wredcoll commented on Largest U.S. recycling project to extend landfill life for Virginia residents ampsortation.com/articles... · Posted by u/mooreds

lesuorac · 10 hours ago

To me it seems like the simple solution is to just require sellers to accept disposal of items (or parts of items) they sold.

If people started bringing back zillions of plastic bags to Krogers for disposal you bet they'd figure out reduce or re-use real fast.

wredcoll · 10 hours ago

In my state, grocery stores literally do take plastic bags back, they have standardized drop off bins and everything.

wredcoll commented on Largest U.S. recycling project to extend landfill life for Virginia residents ampsortation.com/articles... · Posted by u/mooreds

pfdietz · 10 hours ago

Glass is not entirely useless to recycle, but it's marginal. If the goal is to keep it out of landfills, then separating it can make sense, even if the recycling is just downcycling to a lower value use (like road aggregate or fiberglass insulation).

I've heard Glass Beach in California is nice; maybe we should create some more of those by dumping waste glass on a shore with wave action and waiting a few decades? (not entirely unserious)

wredcoll · 10 hours ago

What possible reason is there for keeping glass out of a landfill?

wredcoll commented on Australia's social media ban in chaos as youths flock to Chinese alternatives gbnews.com/news/world/aus... · Posted by u/delichon

DecentShoes · 21 hours ago

"Women-only' block of London flats now accepts men who 'identify as women'"

What's wrong with that one? It's dishonest if something claims to be women only but accepts men. And this is a growing problem, with women who object being sent death and rape threats over it regularly.

Are you saying you support a ban on women only spaces?

wredcoll · 21 hours ago

Give it a rest, nigel. Find some other place to peddle your malicious hatemongering.

wredcoll commented on SoundCloud has banned VPN access old.reddit.com/r/SoundClo... · Posted by u/empressplay

gruez · a day ago

Your friends don't find it uneasy that you can be tunneling illegal activities through their internet connection and have the FBI knocking at their door in a few months?

wredcoll · 21 hours ago

This word you used... friend... what does it mean to you?

wredcoll commented on The Five Forces That Broke Capitalism – and One Possible Fix bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

anovikov · 2 days ago

The only real problem about capitalism (and the rise of the right, as well as far left in some countries), is that everyone and their dog can vote.

If voting was limited to property owners that have individual economic agency not being dependent on earned income, like it was in the old days, democracy won't be threatened at all with periodic, normal and unavoidable economic crises, and these crutches supporting capitalism won't be needed.

Just take inflation. It is utterly irrational that inflation causes political upheaval it does. Because it is economically neutral - it's simply a convenient tool for the crooks to manipulate the masses by brewing their anger. If only the economically independent property owners could vote, inflation won't be a concern at all and economy could develop a lot better.

wredcoll · 2 days ago

Is this some kind of weird trolling attempt or genuine ignorance?

wredcoll commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

amadeuspagel · 4 days ago

They also make things hard to talk about. When you mention testing library in an ordinary conversation without @ signs and dashes, people won't know whether you're talking about the concept of a testing library or a specific one.

wredcoll · 2 days ago

The other day I was trying to tell someone to use prettier, the specific program, and they thought I meant the generic concept of code formatters

wredcoll commented on Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/nobody9999

briandw · 3 days ago

Will Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve and another software store have to allow mini stores on their platforms? That's to say software with its own payment system, inside of a free app?

wredcoll · 3 days ago

Valve already provides a store inside someone else's platform.

wredcoll commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

benrutter · 4 days ago

> Our field deserves better than a zoo of random nouns masquerading as professional nomenclature. Clarity isn’t boring, it’s respect for your users’ time and cognitive resources.

I felt a little guilty at first, I maintain a project called Wimsey (it's a data testing library but you couldn't guess that) and at work my team regularly enjoys fun/silly names.

Trying to defend myself, I was thinking about various logical responses to this article: non-descriptive names don't become out of place when a projects goals drift; descriptive names will lead to repitition; etc.

If I'm honest though, I think I just like software to have a sense, even a tiny one, of enjoyment.

The software I use everyday, like Cron (named after a greek god of time); Python (named after a comedy act) and Zellij (names after a tiling craft) all have fun, joyful names that tell me someone loved and cared about these projects when they built them.

I need to learn these tools beyond just "x does y category of thing" anyway, so I don't mind learning these names. And it makes software engineering just a bit more fun than using "unix-scheduler", "object-oriented-scripting-lang" or "terminal-display-manager".

I love working in a field where people are passionate about their craft. Stern professionalism doesn't sound like something I want to trade that for.

It's a human trait to name the things we love, that's the exact reason why pets typically have names like "cookie" and not "brown-dog-2".

wredcoll · 4 days ago

Naming your library "data-testing-library" would be useful... until there's a second one at which point the specific name effectively becomes meaningless.

wredcoll commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

collinmcnulty · 4 days ago

The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful about the project at all.

It is an unavoidable reality that knowing something's name gives you very, very little information about what that something is. That's what sentences are for.

wredcoll · 4 days ago

Knowing mysql is a database and not a socket wrench is mildly useful but it's more important that I know whether or not it supports enums.

wredcoll commented on Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools larr.net/p/namings.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

lr0 · 4 days ago

Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.

wredcoll · 4 days ago

I promise you, names are not self documenting. Not in any meaningful way.

This is one of those classic examples where things you've already learned are "obvious and intuitive" and new things are "opaque and indistinct".

We can go back and forth with specific examples all day: cat, ls, grep, etc are all famously inscrutable, power shell tried to name everything with a self-documenting name and the results are impossible to memorize. "llm-stream" tells me absolutely nothing without context and if it had context, pegasus would be equally understandable.