Sometimes I wonder if people even know what anarchist means. Or if they bother to read people's profiles and previous posts before @ing them with the word "actually".

If it weren't for closed source software x86 would no longer exist. Backwards compatibility and the massive overcomplexity that comes with are unnecessary when you build everything from source.

@cocoron My flippant answer to this is "who the fuck cares as long as they're paying for it."

Except they're not paying for it.

But then isn't the problem that people can get access to subsidized electricity to use for arbitrary purposes, not Bitcoin itself?

What if they were running cloud computing services on that electricity? (In fact they almost certainly are but nobody cares because it's not an EVIL CRYPTOCURRENCY.)

Twitter. You know. It's like Mastodon but centralized.

YouTube. Like PeerTube but centralized.

Facebook. Like Friendi.ca but centralized.

WhatsApp. Like Matrix but centralized.

@Laurelai @upshotknothole @clacke Because when they "privatize" a utility it's by handing a preexisting (regional) monopoly over to a private company. Since it's a monopoly, they regulate rates, which means the company does other stuff like underinvesting in infrastructure and shutting off people's heat.

Taking a government monopoly and turning it into a quasi-private monopoly would be more properly called "dodging accountability" than "privatization".

@bhtooefr @kaniini @lain @ThisIsLeeloo Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons are only really useful against nation-states. They are worthless against distributed groups.

@kaniini @lain @ThisIsLeeloo For example, international law exists despite there being no single body with the power to enforce it. It's not obvious that such an approach cannot be devolved down to the individual level with the right kind of voluntary institutions.

I realized a bunch of code in a project I'm working on is in fact zombie code, so I embarked on a massive zombie hunt. As I went I became more and more nervous that my manager, who I don't know very well yet, was either going to insist on it as a matter of style or point out some use for it that I was missing. So I talked to him about it this morning. His was response was "I would like it very much if you fixed that."

Phew!

I used to work at Linden Lab. Its founder, Philip Rosedale, wants to use blockchain to track virtual assets across different virtual worlds. With free content this doesn't matter so much; you can just point at some inventory server and have access to the same stuff everywhere. But the blockchain seems well-suited to tracking something like license keys for commercial content. This is not an application I care about, but I *do* care about decentralized virtual worlds.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2018/03/vrba-high-fidelity-janusvr-metaverse.html

Squel (sql string builder for node.js) cannot, as far as I can tell, even handle a single quote inside a string in its "setFields" method. Go forth and inject some SQL.

Haven't been doing a good job keeping up with my RSS feed lately, and less frequent posters tend to be drowned out by the big multi-author blogs, but I just ran across this post from @ajroach42 that would make a good answer to whoever was asking about URL shorteners a few days ago, and I don't know if Andrew responded directly. http://ajroach42.com/permanent-urls-from-archive-org/

@HerraBRE @sir But the speedup from speculative execution IS from parallelism. We're just asking the CPU to find it instead of the compiler. So couldn't you move the smarts into the compiler?

@h @natecull @akkartik @vertigo Yeah I would not design a language for existing programmers. A lot of assembly language programmers had no interest in Fortran when it came out. In fact, all the new languages tended to be adopted by people who weren't already programming in one of the older ones.

@natecull @akkartik @h @vertigo Could have nested expressions in cases where an expression's value is used only once, arrows where it's used in multiple places.

One cool thing about visual programming is that you can avoid naming variables much of the time. Not that that would impress @h since they like Forth :)

@natecull @deejoe @clacke @h @vertigo It's all about which specific properties you value. If you value ease of indexed access over compact representation, you use a fixed-width representation like UTF-32. But you're always engaging in some sort of compromise. Unless you're Terry Davis.