Yeah. If you’re a minor you have to take Drivers Ed that requires a couple hours of driving with an instructor. If you’re an adult, you can just take the written and driving test. I think I just drove around the block, and did a reverse parking test for my driving test. Depending on where you live, roundabouts are not common here. I don’t think I saw one IRL until I was in my late 20s when I moved to a different state.

Bitcoin price movement seems to follow the US stock market, so I wouldn’t bet on it.

IIRC, a deposit is made by two parties to create a lightning network channel that’s enough to cover all transactions (kinda like a multi-sig escrow), and both parties have to sign-off on their balances after every transaction (the last balance signed by both parties is the only valid state). I think most people would use a custodial wallet where the custodian already has channels set up, and this would require trust in the custodian. Lightning networks didn’t exist, and wasn’t fully spec’d out the last time I looked into it though.

Some people’s aversion of algorithms on the fediverse kind of reminds me of people’s aversion of GMO food. Genetically modifying rice to contain more vitamin D is probably good; genetically modifying vegetables to contain more cyanide would probably be bad. Algorithms don’t have to be built to maximize “engagement;” they can be designed to maximize other metrics, or balance multiple metrics, or be user-customizable.

IMO, Mastadon is much worse off for their refusal to implement any kind of algorithm outside their “explore” feed. When I tried using Mastodon, search was unhelpfully in chronological order, and my home feed just got overtaken by the people that post the most. In contrast, Lemmy’s handling of algorithms is pretty good, imo.

As bad as search engines are now, they’d be even worse if they just gave you results in chronological order.

It’s ok for very small scripts that are easy to reason through. I’ve used it extensively in CI/CD, just because we were using Jenkins for that and it was the path of least resistance. I do not like the language though.

Hmm. Looks like that was in Texas too. https://truthout.org/articles/a-city-in-texas-just-put-10000-bounties-on-trans-people-using-the-bathroom/, and they’re going to pass quite a few more bounty laws yhis year: https://prismreports.org/2025/01/08/bounty-laws-texas-trans-rights-abortion/

Dunno, they’d probably have a hard time suing European instances, but they can’t outright block, as that would be unconstitutional. U.S. states have recently been using lawsuits to get around constitutionality. I.e. Texas also has a “bounty” law, where if you know a woman went out of state to get an abortion, you can report it, and the state will sue them and give you $10,000. I think another state has a similar law for if you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia they were born with.

With the current laws on the books, Texas could probably sue Lemmy instances because they contain pornographic content and they don’t verify users’ identity.

Worked manual jobs (assembly line) right out of highschool (well fast food during highschool too), and absolutely hated how boring it was to me. I’m not a social person, and used to have really bad social anxiety. I’ve always had an interest in computers, for whatever reason, so after a few years of manual labor, decided to go to college for that. Also, I lived in a very depressed area, and the jobs I had were very low paying, to the point I couldn’t afford to move out from my parents, so something had to change.

Anyways, I made the right choice, because I’m pretty good at what I do, and I love encountering and solving difficult problems.

While in college, I did work at a metal fab shop for a summer, and I could’ve totally seen myself doing that as well. It wasn’t mind-numbing like assembly line work, did involve problem solving, and the tools and machines were “cool.”

I learned it because I had to write a WPF desktop application, so you could start with WPF tutorials. I was already very familiar with Java, which is very similar, so it wasn’t too hard. Last time I used it was in Unity. You might want to find a good free online course for C# to get a good grasp of C#/Java’s style of OOP, design patterns, and all that kind of stuff.

It’s not really automation though. The store is outsourcing labor to the consumer.

I think some apps allow it, not sure though. You can also move to an instance defederated from .ml if that instance is more aligned with what you’d like to see. You can also just subscribe to communities and not browse “All.”

I’ve used a 2.5" hdd on a rPi before using a usb-to-sata adapter (powered from rPi’s USB port). I’ve used a 3.5" hdd using an hdd enclosure that’s externally powered.

This works well too, and with many different models: https://github.com/guardrails-ai/guardrails

Humans used to live in socialist-like societies before agriculture. I.e. “primitive communism.” I’d argue socialism is more aligned with basic human nature than capitalism.

Code should be self-documenting. That way it is never outdated. Here’s an example of this similar to what you can expect to see in practice:

def nabla_descent(X, y, theta, alpha, delta, nabla):
    m = len(y)
    for _ in range(delta):
        h = X.dot(theta)
        nabla = (1/m) * X.T.dot(h - y)
        theta = theta - alpha * nabla
    return theta

I (probably unreasonably) despise using web front-ends for desktop applications.

GTK is OK. QT is very feature rich, but that adds complexity. Both can be cross-compiled to most systems and shipped with all the required libraries pretty easily.

I haven’t used it in a long while, but I remember liking Java Swing for some reason. Java should be “write once, run anywhere.” But, cross-compiling isn’t usually too hard, so not sure how much that matters. There’s more modern frameworks for JVM-based languages now, but I haven’t tried them.

I’ve noticed Gradio is popular in the ML community (web-tech based, and mostly used for quick demos/prototypes).

Edit: For web applications, I prefer Angular’s more traditional architecture over React’s hook architecture.

Haven’t tried Gemini; may work. But, in my experience with other LLMs, even if text doesn’t exceed the token limit, LLMs start making more mistakes and sometimes behave strangely more often as the size of context grows.

I usually just use VS Code to do full-text searches, and write down notes in a note taking app. That, and browse the documentation.

Nah, LLMs have severe context window limitations. It starts to get wackier after ~1000 LOC.