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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I would imagine it is the same situation everywhere. Does anybody know of a nation that builds on time? Failing that, a big project that didn’t overrun? The only example I can think of is soviet rearmament during Barbarossa. You could argue they produced the t34 tank in time to save Moscow. There must be more recent examples that our governments could learn from.

    Unless the government is directly managing the project and they are also sufficiently competent to do so, we will always be at the mercy of shady contractors.




  • I don’t think a physical SIM is a guarantee that the phone number remains intact. The SIM is a token in the system that links a piece of hardware to a phone number and that link is maintained by the carrier. My phone spontaneously stopped being able to make calls and receive SMS. I went through the usual steps to rectify it but no dice. The carrier had to manually reconnect my number because it had become a victim of their periodic cull of disused numbers. Took quite a few calls over a period days to achieve this. ‘yes I have turned it off and on…’ ad nauseum.




  • Got banned from the stims community after satirically commenting ‘I’m 14 and what is this?’

    The moderator demanded that I submit identity documents. I pointed out that the account was twelve years old but they couldn’t back down at this point. I think they were trying to do a good job and were at least active but it was another nail in the coffin. In theory, an unpaid mod could be more objective because there’s no profit motive but the reality is that many are ideologically biased or dumb or controlling and none of them are trained. That any single individual wants to be in charge of the narrative is suspicious. Scale that ambition up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people it’s a red flag. Reddit is completely cooked these days, I haven’t returned since finding Lemmy.



  • The obfuscated nature of compiled code does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on behalf of shareholders. Imagine a world where x-ray specs suddenly revealed source code. The flight to open solutions would be irresistible. Windows is hot garbage but it clings to its market share like a limpet, through the magic of closed source, occupying space like a flabby tumour. It doesn’t care if it kills the host because the top priority is growth and an unassailable market share. That’s the magic of capitalism.



  • The premise of most of these type of arguments is that intelligence is something we can measure. Meanwhile, nobody knows what’s going on inside their own brains, never mind other species.

    Until very recently we just assumed that animals don’t have a complex inner life because it doesn’t superficially resemblance our own. It’s also convenient to make that assumption if you’re going to industrially farm those animals or destroy their habitats, etc.









  • Vehicle control systems are overwhelmingly programmed in C, mostly from graphical design tools such as MATLAB Simulink via an automatic process. These are real time control systems which are quite different to an interrupt based operating system such as Linux. The many individual controllers must work in concert according to a strict architecture definition and timing schedule that defines the functionality of the vehicle. It’s not at all like a PC or phone, whose OS become irrelevant over time, with respect to their environment of other systems. The vehicle environment is the same environment that we inhabit i.e. the one with gravity, friction, charge and the other SI units. This is slowly changing with advent of self driving but, yeah.