I'm probably your twin, separated at birth... may you share your bitmap font?
> I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display
This is a very good point. As resolution increases, antialiased fonts become less ugly, but also less necessary. Thus at no resolution they make any sense; but they look ridiculous for different reasons.
> the city announced that the land is now paid parking to the city
what a strange way to put it... why didn't they just say that they are not using any more taxpayer money to finance your parking space? Land in a city is not "for free".
> It's very easy to call another group entitled if you're not one of them
I'll be totally honest in that I don't know what the arrangement was before, but that free parking was previously enforced by permits so it's a reasonable assumption that it was not at the tax payers expense
Your job in any political office is not to leave everything as-is and to cement yourself into that position, but to make marginal improvements, even if doing so costs you the next elections or inconveniences people (hopefully only temporarily).
Most of those marginal improvements can only be seen as something positive in retrospective, not while they're being made. While they're being made, they'll always be unpopular, as the voter base is usually not keen on defending the people that are currently in charge. That doesn't mean they won't show up in the next elections, just that they are quieter in the meantime.
in the ideal world maybe - but we don't live in the ideal world: most are trying to get re-elected, or elected to a higher office now that they have experience.
and even in the ideal world a great leader can do more in the next term if they get relected.
I cycle in Paris every week, and the only annoying experience climate-wise is the extreme heat you can get some days in july and august. If it's cold or wet, you can just wear appropriate clothes and be comfortable. But if it's sunny and 35°C, you are going to be drenched in sweat no matter what! Of course, being in the metro those days is even worse...
why not? the language is straightforward and loops are fast. It is portable and your code will work unchanged for the next 50 years. It may be a bit verbose, but that's not a big deal with today's tooling.
Yea na, Fortran is pretty compiler dependent and there are a lot of compilers. Already old Fortran code used all sorts of now-dead proprietary compilers and can take a huge effort to get it to compile on modern compilers or even modern computers. Modern code might use Gfortran which sometimes makes breaking changes so that's not an option. Perhaps if everyone uses the latest shiny new Flang or whatever, then it'll finally last 50 years? Not likely, given the history.
For a standardized language, Fortran isn’t very portable across compilers. GNU Fortran has done a great job supporting legacy features, and I hope that our work in flang-new has made it easy to port to, as well. I basically ignored the zealots who wanted flang-new to be a strict compiler by default. The hobbyist project LFortran is quite the opposite, and will yell at you by default for perfectly conforming variations in keyword spelling. For those who like that sort of thing, that’s exactly the sort of thing that they like.
> your compiler adopts a J3 breaking change to the language
Like all the 3 of them they added in the last 30 years, and that compiler vendors are not enforcing anyway because they don’t want to annoy their users?
Windows’ backward compatibility is a joke compared to Fortran.
> I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality
I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size; do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color padding around your crop?
Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour should be the same.
From a developer perspective you're obviously correct, but from a user perspective it doesn't make sense that the tool discards information, especially when competing tools don't do that.
Of course as a developer that makes it all the more impressive - kudos to the team for making such big progress, I can't wait to play around with all the new improvements!
Cropping IS a destructive operation. If the program isn't throwing information away, then it doesn't actually do cropping, but some different operation instead.
From a user perspective I wouldn't like it, if I were to crop something and the data would be still there afterwards. That would be a data leak waiting to happen.
I genuinely can't empathize with this objection. To me it's basically the same as arguing against Undo/Redo in a text editor because someone could come along and press Undo on my keyboard after I've deleted sensitive data.
What percentage of users sends around raw project files from which they've cropped out sensitive data to users who shouldn't see that data, vs. what percentage of users ever wants to adjust the crop after applying other filters? The latter is basically everyone, the earlier I'm guessing at most 1%?
going by your text editor analogy, we are arguing against implementing undo/redo as a "non-destructive delete", based on adding backspace control characters within the text file. I want infinitw undo/redo, but i also want that when I delete a character it is really gone, not hidden!
Sorry, but I still don't see it - the text editor analogy is stretched far too thin. If I share a project file, I want the other user to see all this stuff. If I don't want them to see all this stuff, I send them an export.
It would be a true shame if every useful feature was left out due to 1% of use cases becoming slightly different.
> It sounds like Onlyfans is exploiting workers and their own customers.
But this is the basic principle of capitalism. The company exploits workers (in order to obtain a net benefit from their work), and exploits customers (by selling the lowest-quality, most expensive product it can manage to). Companies that don't behave like that get out-competed by companies that do. This dynamic is the root of our economic system, as was very clearly explained by Adam Smith and Karl Marx two centuries ago (in slightly different tones of voice).
The particular case you mention is nothing special. The exact same thing happens for all the products that people buy. This is just the stable state of our (some would say "rotten", some would say "healthy") society.
It’s not exploitation unless the participants in the deal are being coerced. You can’t make a solid case for employees being coerced to work for an exploitative employer outside of company towns or non-functioning labor markets; neither of these apply to the Philippines.
If the chatter thought the job was so bad, they can quit and get a different one. Millions of people make that choice, it is available to them. There is no requirement that they do this work; it is entirely voluntary. The people doing these jobs have determined that it is the best option for them, personally, or they wouldn’t be there.
PS: $2-4/hr is a more than decent wage in the Philippines. Median income there is $2.11/hr, minimum wage is $1.36/hr.
If you don’t work, you die, or at least suffer much worse quality of life, especially in poor countries or countries without a big social safety net.
There is a reason why in many places it’s considered highly unethical to pay people for organ, egg, blood donations, etc (besides just compensating lost wages/travel expenses).
Maybe you should take it up with your deity of choice. Capitalism didn't make humans need to eat to survive. Or perhaps you should try to bring back slavery, to make others work so you can eat without doing any work yourself. I admit it's an attractive proposition, but I'm not too fond of the impact on others since I'm a bit of a softie
"Onlyfans agencies" have no business relationship with Onlyfans. They are social media management agencies that include Onlyfans as one of the platforms they "manage" their "clients" content on; their business relationship is with the creators who are the account owners, not with Onlyfans. Their existence, even if their clients effectively work for them rather than the reverse which is nominally the case, does not make the creators employees of Onlyfans, even functionally.
The problem with Marxian exploitation is that a better system can provide you with more luxuries beyond basic needs.
If you're buying a fancy car and capitalism makes you pay 50% more for the car, calling it exploitation is silly when the communist part of Germany only offers a waiting list for a Trabant. You can't complain about being exploited over luxuries.
This leaves just housing, food, energy, education and healthcare. Other than energy, those things suck in the US, but they are very reasonably priced in Germany.
Marxian exploitation is also incompatible with economic equilibrium, which means that a better solution than communism is to introduce equilibrium into our economies and not just declare equilibrium to be automatic.
no, it isn't. The point of the GPL is to grant users of the software four basic freedoms (run, study, modify and redistribute). There's no restriction to distribution per se, other than disallowing the removal of these freedoms to other users.
> No mention whatsoever of the $TERM environment variable. sigh
I have mixed feelings about this... Sometimes I feel young and reckless and want to just output whatever I need without checking $TERM. In practice, all modern terminal emulators are essentially xterm-256color compatible. If something breaks, the worse you get is some funny characters. Is that such a big deal? Much better than propagate the silly termcap/terminfo complexity.
> the app my electricity utility provides for viewing and paying my account DISABLES ITSELF FOREVER if you so much as enable USB debugging on your phone (even after you've disabled it again).
These are self-inflicted problems by these apps. Nothing to do with the OS. These apps simply don't work. Complain to the companies that push these broken apps to you.
Would you buy a microwave oven that kills itself if you play the wrong kind of music in your kitchen?
The problems may be inflicted by these apps but the reality is that in many cases you're stuck with them. Electric company freezes your account if you enable USB debugging? Well, you can't choose a new electric company. We can complain to these vendors all we want but they just ignore us.
So these problems become problems of the OS, not because the OS has a problem, but because it affects the reality of using the OS.
It obviously depends on where you live. In my country you certainly con choose a new electric company. I mention that because we really should use consumer choice to overcome these types of problems where we can. Ie if you can switch to a bank/electricity provider/whatever that has a less terrible app it’s really good to do so.
I agree on principle. I'm not sure if everywhere in the US is like this, but everywhere I've lived in California basically had a monopolistic electric and gas provider.
For things where we do have a choice, yes I agree.
Is it such a burden to write them a letter stating, "Because you have decided to disable my electronic access, I am notifying you that I withdraw my consent to e-delivery. Please provide me statements and directions to mail you a check for payment." Maybe spend 20-30 min to find the specific laws that give you the right to do that and remind them of their timelines to comply.
Send a letter like that certified. It gets attention, and the time to write and mail a check really isn't, if you batch your bills, more than using an app.
We do have ways to push their inconvenience back on them.
It is great that you have the right in your jurisdiction to do that. Where I am, they just shut off your power if you don't pay.
It's a big and hairy world out there. Having lived on three continents and traveled to some pretty wild places, I always get a kick out of seeing which rights people have and assume that the rest of the world also has.
This a pretty general recipe to make a company care.
A Professional letter letting them know that you know your rights, and that they know your rights (Them getting your letter is your proof of that) is what the beginning of someone losing his bonus for a compliance incident looks like.
Companies don't care about you, or even shareholders, they care about the incentives of leadership.
Not everyone has the time and resources to battle their utilities and bank(s). I know it’s important and sustained effort is necessary even if it’s hard, but we are talking about massive populations here and most people simply can’t or won’t fight that battle on their own. Organizing a large pushback is also a huge effort. And at the end of the day, there is an easy solution for folks: buy a “proper” smart phone that “just works” because it solves the problem now.
We’ve gotten to the point where unfortunately it is a luxury to fight for your privacy and consumer rights.
Yes that is correct. So what do you suggest people do? What is a realistic way to move the needle? Because I can tell you now that (as I detailed in another comment) asking someone to change their banks, utilities, etc. to accommodate their smartphone choice is not a serious suggestion, nor is asking everyone to wage war with all the services they engage with. They’re simply not going to do it no matter how many passionate speeches or flippant comments you throw out there. They’re going to buy the thing that solves the immediate problem of not having access to critical services in their lives. If their amazing open source phone can’t pay their bills, it’s going in the bin.
To be clear I want the same thing you do. But just going “do it it’s important” is not going to make it happen.
Well, we gotta choose our battles, right? It's easy to get collective support for visible oppression and fascism. Everyone sees it on the news. It's hard to get support for "lemme use a smartphone that isn't apple or android." the average person doesn't care.
Not saying that we should just give up. But as the above poster said, it's a luxury that takes a lot of time and resources.
Perhaps, but a recent example is ICE in Minnesota. The administration tried its best to spin it to match its propaganda but many people saw through it.
Not sure where you live but in much of California, there are no alternatives for most utilities. Water, gas, electric often only have one singular provider in many regions.
Fair enough, although barring VPN use is quite a bit different from forcing an app that requires Play Services or iPhone. A VPN isn't as legitimate a need to pay a utility bill in the same way paying without an Android or iOS phone can be.
Fair enough, although barring VPN use is quite a bit different from forcing an app that requires Play Services or iPhone. A VPN isn't as legitimate a need to pay a utility bill in the same way paying without an Android or iOS phone can be.
> I don’t see why not. It entirely depends on why someone needs a VPN.
Nah, not really. Using a VPN is a luxury, a preference. You're arguing that using a VPN should be a right in a discussion about people not being forced to use specific Apple or Google services, which is an entirely different thing.
You’re implying we have more choice than we do and asking “the average joe” to change banks to accommodate their smartphone is not a serious suggestion.
My utility company, for instance, literally won’t let you navigate their site with a VPN running. These kinds of practices are commonplace and becoming standard.
> I don't believe in anti-aliasing for a coding font, not even on a retina display
This is a very good point. As resolution increases, antialiased fonts become less ugly, but also less necessary. Thus at no resolution they make any sense; but they look ridiculous for different reasons.
reply