Abstraction, when used well, is actually a tool that produces more simple code in the long run. It separates different concerns into different pieces of code, makes code readable by extracting common logic and giving it a recognizable name, and reduces boilerplate.

That said, OOP-style inheritance-based abstractions, while useful in some cases, quite often lead people down the complete opposite path - mushing together unrelated logic and then making call sites difficult to understand with a lot of hidden state that has to be kept in mind.

Only if the touchscreen also has a fluffy texture.

Honestly it’s not the worst idea, the french have tried something like that during one of their revolutions.

Semi-relatedly, I’m salty they didn’t push for duodecimal numbers and base metric on that, it would incorporate the only good part of imperial system & 12-based time system, not only into measurements but also all other aspects of life.

Then they could make time more consistent too, maybe have like 10000 (20736 in decimal) “metric seconds” in a day (which would mean 1 “metric second” ≈ 4 “normal” seconds) and derive stuff from there (e.g. 100 “metric seconds” in a “metric minute”, 10 “metric minutes” in a “metric hour”, 10 “metric hours” in a “metric day”). Would be really quite neat.

Of the two, Celsius is less arbitrary because it is based on actual measurable reproducible things and not “we threw in some salts in water, and guesstimated a human body temperature”. It also makes a lot of sense in our post-industrial society because we do/don’t want to freeze/boil water almost every day for a variety of uses. Water is both an extremely important substance for humans and its freezing/boiling points occur in everyday life (unlike air or metals).

To be fair, it’s the other way around. Kelvin scale is Celsius scale shifted by -273 ℃.

Yes, the reasoning behind this is sad, but the outcome is very positive.

These particular news are based and a long-term good for the humanity. Moving from spying corpo slop to an open-source solution is a win-win for the french people. Sad that it is only happening now, this should have been done decades ago, the US empire and its corporations have always been evil. Now they are just showing their true face to europe and the US population.

I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.

I don’t think he’s necessarily a genius, but he is a force for good and a great writer. We do need someone to keep stating the truth, keep saying what’s right and what’s wrong, this is literally how we win the information war currently waged against us.

It’s the same with the genocide experts calling out genocide, or the eco-activists calling out climate change. It might be obvious common sense to you, but it might not be to other people, and this is precisely why it needs to be shouted from every rooftop we have available.

Oh, and also, if you actually read his works he clearly does more than just state the obvious and coin new terms (even though both of those are important too). He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power (it is more dialectical-materialist than most tech journalism out there). Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us, and practices what he preaches too.

It didn’t last because the will of bureaucracy was placed before the will of the people, it was a long decline of democratic rights of the working class started under Stalin and continued by all following leaders. It was not due to socialism per se, more due to the specifics of CPSU politics. China seems to have figured out a better way to do democratic dictatorship of proletariat and is successfully combining aspects of capitalism and socialism, to both make the country appealing to capitalist investors and also build up a socialist economy to bring the living standards up. It’s not perfect (and is definitely not “the end of history” by any means), but it is doing fine as an interim solution.

A soviet era russian also had access to free healthcare, free childcare, free higher education, cheap (sometimes free) housing, excellent (for the time) public transit, and a safety net for unemployment or old age. Oh and there was ample opportunities to build community ties so that if something did go horribly wrong and you needed that help. Capitalism in decline will give you none of that.

Please let “AI” be next…

Given this is all going to be stolen and slightly modified code anyways, I don’t see why not. 64 sessions sounds like a lot.

comprehensive public transport is impractical or next to impossible

That’s how we used to do transit before cars were invented. The US had a railway line to even the most remote farms. USSR had amazing railways that interconnected almost everything despite being the biggest country on earth by a wide margin.

Generally the trick is to build densely populated walkable towns where you don’t need a car for daily activities, and connect them with railways. In that case, it doesn’t matter what the overall population density is.

Even for sparsely populated land, if you can build an asphalt road wider than 2 lanes, chances are you can also build a small commuter railway there eventually. It would also be cheaper overall, if you consider externalities like everyone having to own a car, car crashes being a lot more common than rail crashes, and of course CO₂ emissions and the climate change that comes along with them. And that’s besides the socioeconomic benefits of letting everyone have a way to travel, rather than only those with financial means to maintain a car and the ability to drive.

Cars are sometimes necessary, but it’s like 1% of what they are used for currently.

This one is actually a pretty good idea. Eventually we get rid of the parking garages too and cover everything with railways.

Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come.

(emphasis mine)

I think Cory was pretty clear that it wasn’t just about copyright and DRM, and the enemy will come up with new ways to achieve its goals. That article was about the first battles in the war, we’re now entering the midgame.

The reason I see the connection is that big dogs like Apple or Microsoft will be able to get RAM from those suppliers (or build it themselves like Samsung), and will be able to sell you walled-garden “computer appliances” which only run approved software. But you won’t be able to afford to build your own computer from parts yourself, and won’t be able to install whatever you want on it as a result.

This sounds like they are joining the war on general-purpose computing, and not on our side. Fuck em.

Except in this case this particular fridge has worked for 40 years already, so just by Bayesian statistics it is more likely to keep working than a modern one from a range that are known to break. Same reason why some old cars are getting more expensive nowadays.

Documentation will always have to be actually written by the author(s) of the code (or at least someone who understands the code really well), because only the author knows the intent behind a certain function or API endpoint, and that’s what the documentation is for.

LLMs don’t understand shit (sorry AI bros), they will sometimes produce accurate descriptions of the function code as written, but never the intent. Even if the LLM “wrote” the code, it doesn’t “understand” the real intent behind it, because it is just a poor mashup of code taken/stolen from someone else, which statistically fits the prompt.

What LLMs could help with is generating short, human-readable descriptions of what is happening in a given function. This can potentially be helpful for debugging/modifying projects with poor documentation, naming, and function separation, so that instead of gleaning through multiple 2000-line C functions in a 100k SLOC file, you can kind of understand what it does quickly. I’ve used deepseek for this before, with mixed-to-positive results.

But again, this would just be to speed up surface-level digging and not a replacement for actual documentation or good practices.