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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • You know, the more I think about this, the more I bristle at Dyson claiming this will solve Britain’s food security problem.

    Firstly, this kind of system seems limited to small cash crops rather than staple foods. (Good luck growing wheat on these.)

    More importantly, Dyson has personally done far more to harm British food security than this gadget could offset. He was an ardent Brexiteer, which resulted in substantial barriers to importing food from our closest neighbors. (He also then immediately started relocating his business to Singapore in a stunning show of confidence in post-Brexit Britain)

    These people don’t want to save the world. They just want to look like heroes




  • Seems like a pretty fun language with an unfortunate amount of 90s baggage.

    However, I firmly believe that trying to de-parenthesise lisp is a distraction. The main reason being that s-expressions make the beloved code=data concept very obvious.

    A suitable editor makes it really easy to ignore the parens (until they’re useful, e.g. for navigation). When reading, the structure of the code is inferred from indentation and line breaks. Just like C.






  • Reading time 105 minutes…

    And worth every second!

    I decided to have another go at learning C++ given all the recent work that I had heard about regarding memory safety and support for functional programming. This gives me a lot less confidence that my efforts will be worth it in the long run.

    Time to check out rust I guess 🤷.


  • In my experience it Just Works ™️. I spin up a distro/toolbox, compile some software (e.g. Emacs) then run the executable inside the container, and up pops the GUI window.

    If you use distrobox, you can even distrobox-export desktop files, at which point a containerised gui application is practically indistinguishable from one installed on the host system






  • Whilst I’ve heard lots of talk that lunduke is getting increasingly politica, and I disagree quite strongly with his politics, I’ll have to agree with him here. IA did something unnecessarily risky (redistributing unauthorised copies of print books), which has more jeopardised their mission of archiving the internet.

    I also agree with everyone here saying that current copyright laws are ridiculous (and not just because they are “outdated”, the Victorians had better copyright laws than we do). However, I think only the most radical overhaul of copyright law would condone what IA did, and that isn’t coming any time soon (If ever).