namingthingsiseasy

joined 2 years ago
[–] namingthingsiseasy 2 points 5 months ago

Of all the things they learned from this election, it's how to make excuses when they lose. Somehow, my opinion of the Liberal party continues to sink even lower. I didn't even think that was possible...

[–] namingthingsiseasy 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

A lot has been said about how shocking and awful the results are, and I do agree with them. I definitely do not condone any of the far-right parties, their representatives, or their policies.

But what hasn't been said (and might be a bit controversial) is the fact that liberal parties are the biggest problem that the world is facing right now. It's the parties that pretend to be an opposition force, but in reality they just keep shitting on voters, making broken promises, and saying "it'll be better next time, just one more term!" They keep trying to convince people that the system works and that iterative changes will make things better. But in reality, things have actually been getting worse for 10, 15, maybe even 20 years... (the exact number depends on where you live and what you do for a living).

After a while, people stop believing in those broken promises. And the longer they refuse to put up any real opposition, the more and more they empower the far right.

In Canada, Trudeau needs to implement proportional representation NOW. If he doesn't want to do that, he might as well just come out and endorse Poilievre, because he damn well knows what will happen if he doesn't give people a real alternative (even he can't pretend it's any other way at this point). And no, ranked choice voting is not the answer here.

In the US, I have to be honest: it's not a country anymore. It's several countries, all jammed into one, and half of whom hate each other with no limit. And to be honest, this is how it's supposed to work!!! This is how the constitution is framed! Federal government is supposed to be weak and state governments are supposed to fill that void, but the States refuse to actually work that way and keep looking to control a Federal government in a way that they'll never be able to.

The USA really ought to break into constituent countries. The West Coast is a country. The Northeast is at least one country, maybe 3-4. And you can slice up the red states however you like - I honestly don't care. Maybe this way, they can finally actually get shit done in a way that starts making people happy, because there's far too much animosity between different and disparate parts of the "country" in its current form. It's definitely not going to come from the Federal government.

I know that none of these things are going to happen, so things will just continue getting worse and worse over the next decade or two. Fair warning to everyone: we're not even close to rock bottom yet.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You're doing amazing work here. Not enough people are trying to make an effort to understand far right voters. You don't have to agree with the policies, but you do still have to make an effort to understand why they appeal to people and makes them want to vote that way.

Liberal parties (Democrats, LPC, etc.) have been ignoring this for far too long and in my opinion, that's why they keep losing. They lose and blame the voters for not seeing the world the way they do, but they don't have any understanding or perspective of what the world looks like through the eyes of these voters. That's why they don't have any appeal and things are just going to continue getting worse as long as they continue ignoring the real issues that affects voters.

(Unless a real alternative party emerges, I suppose....)

[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

What is so bad about virtual environments? I found them to be really nice and useful when I developed in Python over about 5-ish years. It was really nice being able to have separate clean environments for installing libraries and executing things.

Granted, I only used Python as a solo developer, so if there are shortcomings that emerge when working with other developers, then I would not be aware of them....

Edit: also, performance is a bit more of a subtle topic. For numerical logic, Python actually is (probably) much better than a lot of its competitors thanks to numpy and numexpr. For conditional logic, I would agree that it's not the best, but when you consider developer velocity, it's a clearly worthwhile tradeoff since frameworks like Django are so popular.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

True, but if you're looking at a Python library that doesn't have type hints in 2024, then chances are that it's not very good and/or not very well maintained.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 9 points 5 months ago

Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I'm so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it's such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it... hope it dies someday.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 4 points 5 months ago

The comic states that Firefox is a crown jewel of open source, not the crown jewel.

That said, I agree that if I had to pick only one, it would definitely be Linux over Firefox.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they're all at the mercy of Poettering's Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 19 points 6 months ago

Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he's shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

At this point, it's hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

But for him, it's much easier to pretend that he doesn't know what's going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he's paid to do.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 4 points 6 months ago

Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?

This is the one that broke my back. Understandable that XPCOM extensions had to go, but leaving nothing to replace them, and then going on to push their trash UI redesigns without giving us any recourse to change them back - that was just unforgivable.

Then again, that was still well before they started pushing spyware in their own browser, so in retrospect, those were very quaint times!

[–] namingthingsiseasy 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Search engines are websites that people used to go to in order to get helpful information. These days, they just spam out a bunch of SEO garbage, AI-generated bullshit, and ads.

Google, probably

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