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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Outside of the US, you can get a 10k or less electric mini-van, mini-truck, or mini-car which would serve 90% of most peoples’ needs. Most US trips are under 3 miles after all and giant fast luxurious vehicles for those bike-range trips is just totally silly.

    Meanwhile the cheapest new car in the US is what, a Mitsubishi hatchback for $18k? It’s ridiculous. The US Automakers are in a tacit conspiracy to squeeze us as hard as they can by refusing to sell anything affordable – by inflating sizes and bloating features to justify way higher MSRPs. Meanwhile the French have access to cheap ICEs like the Skoda Citygo and even ultralight city EVs like the Citroen Ami for half that price while still being easily 90% as capable for most people.

    Or for roughly the same price as that bottom-of-the-market US ICE car you can get a totally workable EV like the Dacia Spring.

    The US subsidizes huge vehicles in a million pointless ways. I absolutely refuse to believe that vehicle inflation is just caused by some cultural woo. It’s mostly just that we create giant roads, giant parking spots, giant highways, and have automakers that intentionally go as big as the market can bear because bigger means more money. And sprinkle on some bullshit tax loopholes and state agencies/NHSTA being ultra-conservative and you have a disaster. Smaller cars thrive in the old world because the old world doesn’t make it as convenient as possible to have a goddamn road yacht. They’d go big too, but it would just be a nightmare dealing with those huge cars because their governments don’t prioritize making way for them in every way possible.

    And that’s not even getting into the frankly fine $2-3k EVs you can get in China. This is all just Europe.



  • The entire reason notepad still exists is that it edits and saves to plain text files. I do not see how an opt-in spellcheck or autocorrect interferes with that – though honestly, I don’t see who the possible customer is for those features either. It’s a waste of time, but it doesn’t undermine the application.

    What reason, honestly, did Wordpad have to exist? Who was clamoring for an RTF editor but thought any of the free the full-featured ODF editors or online service a la Google docs were not up to the task? Seems a lot of people are salty that Wordpad was dropped, but I just don’t get who was using it. This from someone so frustrated and annoyed by pretty much all WYSIWYG doc editors that I’ve lately been doing more stuff in latex despite how irrational I know I am being.


  • I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).

    On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That’s the thing to really like about Rust – you can be pretty much fearless in it. It’s just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box Result, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.


  • I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally… but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.

    Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It’s mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.

    I still think it’s a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it’s incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.






  • How long until the inevitable posts of “Oh I respect WHAT they’re protesting but I hate the WAY they’re protesting” shows up on this like it does for all the other anti-fossil political activism?

    Oh wait, it won’t, because this kind of protest has minimal impact and is easily ignored by the average person.

    And those same people will act like these directs protest were never even considered. “Why don’t they just take it to the oil companies”, they’ll say, ignoring that it is entirely ineffective to do so.

    I’m thinking the disobedience around fossil fuel protests is still quite a bit too civil.


  • Lockdown doesn’t require password unless your device settings require password – it normally just kicks it back to requiring pin. Which is still quite secure. I don’t know what you mean saying it is disabled by default – it is available by default if you long press the power button and click Lockdown.

    Even better is to reboot the device. Then it will be in lockdown mode – pin required – and also encrypted awaiting the pin. A modern device fresh from a restart should be quite hard indeed to crack without some alternate access to the person’s Google account.