He/him. Chinese born, Canadian citizen. University student studying environmental science, hobbyist programmer. Marxist-Leninist.

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Cake day: Oct 03, 2019

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They say hell is lonely and filled with demons. It’s hell. It’s just hell.







Ubuntu is the stepping stone from Mac/Windows to Linux. Like the tutorial level. It’s also one of the most “corporate” Linux OS vendors outside of RedHat. Of course it’s shitty lol.


The most popular non-Canonical derivatives, Linux Mint and POP OS, have both totally rejected and vocally criticize Canonical’s bullshit, Snap or otherwise. This isn’t going to make the fall in line, this is going to make them finally get serious about ditching Ununtu and switching directly to the upstream Debian base.


And Snap isn’t? If you think Flatpak is bad how exactly is locking you into an objectively worse universal package manager the solution?














Can 100% second dandelion. They’re a delicacy in parts of China and supposedly has many health benefits per Chinese herbal medicine. They’re bitter but in a way that a lot of people enjoy. Ever had dandelion dumplings? They’re incredible. Definitely an acquired taste, but I’ve come to enjoy it as my very traditionally Chinese grandparents are all over that stuff, and yes some of that is hand picked from a forest park near where we live. (The stuff growing on the sidewalk is more dodgy due to pollution, but I’m not entirely sure if they’re actually unsafe or not, it’s just that we prefer not to pick them since we have other options.)

Dandelions are also really good for pollinators so it’s really frustrating from an ecology standpoint that everyone thinks they’re weeds and want to kill every one they see.



Based people like this gives me hope that socialist revolution in the West is possible yet


Poverty keeps the working class in line. The implicit threat is obey or starve. The US likes to claim that Soviet Russia uses the Gulag as a threat to anyone who feels like going against the government, but they use something much worse: instead of an actual prison camp, the entire country is selectively turned into a prison camp for those who do not play by the rules of capitalism.


If I remember my physics class correctly, 28MW at China’s 27.5 kV standard rail electrification would pull 1018 Amps. Likely significantly more as even that is assuming perfect efficiency, which is impossible. Pretty fricking cool that the little overhead wire can handle that. And really cool that they can design a pantograph contact surface that can handle that.





Tight, high density suburbs exist. Typically from the pre-car era, and they really show just how much space cars steal from pedestrians and bikes.




Do you think freight trains can ever replace trucks in dense downtowns?
I find the disparity between the popularity and public opinion of urban passenger trains and urban freight trains really interesting. The world's densest urban centres almost all have comprehensive passenger rail systems, and you can almost always get around downtown without a car, or in some places completely without rubber tired motor vehicles. But freight delivery to urban cores is almost always done by truck, from pickups, vans, to full on tractor trailers, and it seems that it's the less dense areas that are better served by train for freight shipping. While there have been some attempts at urban freight rail, like the cargo trams in Germany and Switzerland, it seems that they're either dead or pretty limited in their capacity or extent of network, usually serving a few facilities at best. Most urban shipping is still done by truck. Meanwhile, heavy freight rail is usually viewed extremely negatively in urban cores, and extensive effort has been made to remove urban freight corridors or divert them around the downtown. It seems that freight trains are really good at delivering freight to the edge of an urban centre, but then it needs to be shuffled in an intermodal yard onto trucks. And even if it wasn't, it seems that freight rail, especially in North America, only serves the largest industrial facilities, even when passing through the downtown, so you if you run a grocery store or other small or medium sized business, you can never take advantage of rail and are forced to rely on trucks for your wares. Especially if your business is in a mixed use building with commercial and residential spaces in one, and not a standalone single story department store. This also means you can never have your personal deliveries or mail come by rail. It's a problem because the places most favourable to people (read: least favourable to car traffic) can't take advantage of the efficiency and economies of scale of rail for freight deliveries like they can with passenger rail, and the same bottlenecks on passenger cars these areas have also apply to fright trucks. One would assume that urban freight rail would have the same benefits over trucks as urban passenger rail has over cars. What are your thoughts on this? Why don't we see more urban freight rail, and should we be looking into building more urban freight rail?
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Can Windows just die already? It's clearly obsolete and has jumped the shark.
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Without changing anything else about how the code is managed, which, doubtful considering Musk (at least not for the better), a rewrite will end up just as dysfunctional as the original codebase by the time it’s reimplemented all the features.

And if you were committed to changing your coding practices, a rewrite would almost invariably be unnecessary as slower incremental revisions will invariably cause the codebase to turn over and shed the problematic parts while keeping the working stuff.

When larger codebases than Twitter have managed to completely shift languages without a full rewrite, this idea is coming from ego and Elon’s savior complex, and not a place of logic and actual necessity. Not even shift languages like Java to Kotlin (which, Twitter is written in Scala which is another primarily JVM language) I’m talking full ecosystem shifts like PHP to Python or JavaScript to Rust while keeping the codebase continuous. Not saying it’s easy, but it can at least be mostly painless if and only if it’s managed correctly. For context, Google has switched from Python to Go for its core infrastructure, Firefox is switching from C to Rust and Tor is following the same route, Patreon changed from PHP to Python a few years ago, and Discord is also switching its core infrastructure code from (IIRC) Node.js to Rust.


A great TLDR of why this is a bad idea: https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/109982182514133646
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I hadn’t even considered that. Ok yeah that’s really important too.


I’m still manually doing HTML includes for jQuery and Bootstrap. Not from CDNs either, I download the files to my repository with the correct license and attribution notices and host them on the same static file server as all my custom assets. It’s really not hard to do and also means your website has one less tracker for users to worry about (yes CDNs track you, even the ones that swear they deliver files anonymously because how exactly do you plan on proving that they actually deliver files anonymously).

Also, never really found PWA frameworks any better than good old jQuery and Bootstrap, so yeah I still use those two. This also mean my webpages do not require JS to load, making them lighter, more compatible with legacy browsers, as well as working most of the way with JS disabled if the user is not comfortable with allowing JS from some rando’s blog (which, as a rule, users shouldn’t be).


Also, now that I think about it browser compatibility might be an issue if you change the standard library willy nilly.


Fair enough, but I also think it’s really sad that the open source community, namely the web/JS community, is so averse to copyleft.


I haven’t checked but I am 99% sure that is licensed under MIT which is the darling license of the node ecosystem. When you do that you are basically opening yourself to being abused by corporations.

To be fair, if they’re just distributing the source code, not even AGPL can stop them, since they’re distributing the entire codebase, unchanged, under the same license. Plenty of other reasons not to use MIT, like you said it’s easy for corporations to exploit, but I don’t think this would have helped.

If I had to do something like that I would most likely copy paste the code from a stack overflow answer. Having a whole module for one small function seems ridiculous to me.

Moreover, the JS ecosystem is notorious for its use of helper libraries with a ton of primitives that you then use in your code so you don’t even need to deal with the standard library. The most famous and infamous being jQuery. This couldn’t have been rolled into one of those?


Might have been an API call sent by accident. Not a huge deal because points don’t really mean anything.


Thoughts on the Leftpad debacle?
Pocket reposted an older QZ article about Leftpad and it's sort of reignited the controversy, at least for me. [Here's the link.](https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code?utm_source=pocket-newtab) I'd love to hear what you think of this, but here are my thoughts: One, why is this not in the JS standard library? It's a *super commomly used* method with equivalents in every programming language, right? JS is pretty notorious for being bloated (which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO), but the fact that it lacks this basic function is kind of ridiculous? Two, people were calling him out as the villain for having the *audacity* to delete a method he knows powers most of the internet, and to those people I ask: Have you even looked into why that happened? The most common story was just that he was butthurt because "NPM didn't treat him like royalty like he wanted", but, what actually happened was Kik, yes, the messaging platform notorious for being infested with child groomers, that Kik, wanted to publish their own library (I think it was an API for their app), and Koçulu already had a library called kik. So what does Kik? They go to fucking NPM and essentially allege trademark violation (which is bullshit because Koçulu's kik was not a commercial product, and trademarks only apply to names used in commerce). But NPM still removes Koçulu's kik package, at which point Koçulu removed all his libraries and deletes his account in protest, and the rest is history. Long story short, it ends with NPM restoring his packages against his wishes, and as far as I know he never released anything on NPM again. So, generally I see two hiveminds when it comes to this controversy. One is of course people mocking Koçulu for being a snowflake or whatever, that he needs to control his anger and not withdraw his packages because he didn't get his way. Obviously, I disagree with that. I think Kik was being a snowflake for throwing a hissy fit that their name was already taken for something completely unrelated, by someone who almost certainly did not even use their app. They could have named their library kik-chat, kik-app, kik.com, whatever, and it still would have been the same library and people still would still have discovered it. Needless to say, I don't think he was in the wrong at any point of this. The other hivemind was really mad at NPM, which is a step in the right direction, but they were mad that they restored his package. That makes no sense either, because one of the pillars of open source is that anyone can publish or distribute it as long as they distribute it with the original license and give credit. NPM is an asshole, but they still have the right to distribute an open source library. What we *should* be mad at NPM for is that they threw him under the bus by removing his package in the first place. Again, Kik has no legs to stand on and NPM was never in any legal trouble because of this, trademarks do not apply to non-commercial products. They're called *trade* marks. Trade. As in commerce. Also, it really highlights their priorities that they hold a corporation infamous for enabling children to be victimized in higher regard than someone making code used by the entire internet and not getting paid for it. I also don't see enough people being mad at Kik. What they did was absolutely unacceptable and they should have faced the brunt of the hate. Then again they've already shown themselves to be horrible so they probably would have shrugged it off or maybe even played into it for publicity. What can the open source world learn from this? Well, for one, I think it has become clear that having your open source dependencies managed by a for-profit company is bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Kik paid NPM a ton of money and essentially "bought" the kik name like a fucking NFT. The solution would be a combination of package repositories managed by worker co-op nonprofits with transparent financial reports, and decentralized/independent package sources hosted by the authors themselves. If JS took inspiration from Java just a bit more and also made their dependency naming system work by domains, we would have gotten `com.koculu.kik` and `com.kik.kik`, and no conflict. Almost like a federated package manager. Especially now that NPM is owned by Microsoft and Yarn was always owned by Facebook, we really do not have a good, trustworthy JS dependency repo, which is a problem because like the language or hate it, it is still extremely important for our modern computing environment. I think it's long overdue to break their duopoly. IDK, that's the end of my rant. Didn't really mean to write a wall of text, just saw this article and got me wanting a retrospective, but yeah. What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Why or why not?
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Thoughts on the Leftpad debacle?
Pocket reposted an older QZ article about Leftpad and it's sort of reignited the controversy, at least for me. [Here's the link.](https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code?utm_source=pocket-newtab) I'd love to hear what you think of this, but here are my thoughts: One, why is this not in the JS standard library? It's a *super commomly used* method with equivalents in every programming language, right? JS is pretty notorious for being bloated (which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO), but the fact that it lacks this basic function is kind of ridiculous? Two, people were calling him out as the villain for having the *audacity* to delete a method he knows powers most of the internet, and to those people I ask: Have you even looked into why that happened? The most common story was just that he was butthurt because "NPM didn't treat him like royalty like he wanted", but, what actually happened was Kik, yes, the messaging platform notorious for being infested with child groomers, that Kik, wanted to publish their own library (I think it was an API for their app), and Koçulu already had a library called kik. So what does Kik do? Are they like any other programmer who would go "aw man, that name is taken, better come up with another name for my thing then!" No! They go to fucking NPM and essentially allege trademark violation (which is bullshit because Koçulu's kik was not a commercial product, and trademarks only apply to names used in commerce). But NPM still removes Koçulu's kik package, at which point Koçulu removed all his libraries and deletes his account in protest, and the rest is history. Long story short, it ends with NPM restoring his packages against his wishes, and as far as I know he never released anything on NPM again. So, generally I see two hiveminds when it comes to this controversy. One is of course people mocking Koçulu for being a snowflake or whatever, that he needs to control his anger and not withdraw his packages because he didn't get his way. Obviously, I disagree with that. I think Kik was being a snowflake for throwing a hissy fit that their name was already taken for something completely unrelated, by someone who almost certainly did not even use their app. They could have named their library kik-chat, kik-app, kik.com, whatever, and it still would have been the same library and people still would still have discovered it. NPM claims that they did this to "reduce confusion", but at best that is massively underestimating the intelligence of people who *already know how to program*, and is a complete lie cooked up by their PR team at worst. Needless to say, I don't think he was in the wrong at any point of this. The other hivemind was really mad at NPM, which is a step in the right direction, but they were mad that they restored his package. That makes no sense either, because one of the pillars of open source is that anyone can publish or distribute it as long as they distribute it with the original license and give credit. NPM is an asshole, but they still have the right to distribute an open source library. What we *should* be mad at NPM for is that they threw him under the bus by removing his package in the first place. Again, Kik has no legs to stand on and NPM was never in any legal trouble because of this, trademarks do not apply to non-commercial products. They're called *trade* marks. Trade. As in commerce. Also, it really highlights their priorities that they hold a corporation infamous for enabling children to be victimized in higher regard than someone making code used by the entire internet and not getting paid for it. I also don't see enough people being mad at Kik. What they did was absolutely unacceptable and they should have faced the brunt of the hate. Then again they've already shown themselves to be horrible so they probably would have shrugged it off or maybe even played into it for publicity. What can the open source world learn from this? Well, for one, I think it has become clear that having your open source dependencies managed by a for-profit company is bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Kik paid NPM a ton of money and essentially "bought" the kik name like a fucking NFT. The solution would be a combination of package repositories managed by worker co-op nonprofits with transparent financial reports, and decentralized/independent package sources hosted by the authors themselves. If JS took inspiration from Java just a bit more and also made their dependency naming system work by domains, we would have gotten `com.koculu.kik` and `com.kik.kik`, and no conflict. Almost like a federated package manager. Especially now that NPM is owned by Microsoft and Yarn was always owned by Facebook, we really do not have a good, trustworthy JS dependency repo, which is a problem because like the language or hate it, it is still extremely important for our modern computing environment. I think it's long overdue to break their duopoly. IDK, that's the end of my rant. Didn't really mean to write a wall of text, just saw this article and got me wanting a retrospective, but yeah. What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Why or why not?
fedilink

Thoughts on the Leftpad debacle?
Pocket reposted an older QZ article about Leftpad and it's sort of reignited the controversy, at least for me. [Here's the link.](https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code?utm_source=pocket-newtab) I'd love to hear what you think of this, but here are my thoughts: One, why is this not in the JS standard library? It's a *super commomly used* method with equivalents in every programming language, right? JS is pretty notorious for being bloated (which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO), but the fact that it lacks this basic function is kind of ridiculous? Two, people were calling him out as the villain for having the *audacity* to delete a method he knows powers most of the internet, and to those people I ask: Have you even looked into why that happened? The most common story was just that he was butthurt because "NPM didn't treat him like royalty like he wanted", but, what actually happened was Kik, yes, the messaging platform notorious for being infested with child groomers, that Kik, wanted to publish their own library (I think it was an API for their app), and Koçulu already had a library called kik. So what does Kik do? Are they like any other programmer who would go "aw man, that name is taken, better come up with another name for my thing then!" No! They go to fucking NPM and essentially allege trademark violation (which is bullshit because Koçulu's kik was not a commercial product, and trademarks only apply to names used in commerce). But NPM still removes Koçulu's kik package, at which point Koçulu removed all his libraries and deletes his account in protest, and the rest is history. Long story short, it ends with NPM restoring his packages against his wishes, and as far as I know he never released anything on NPM again. So, generally I see two hiveminds when it comes to this controversy. One is of course people mocking Koçulu for being a snowflake or whatever, that he needs to control his anger and not withdraw his packages because he didn't get his way. Obviously, I disagree with that. I think Kik was being a snowflake for throwing a hissy fit that their name was already taken for something completely unrelated, by someone who almost certainly did not even use their app. They could have named their library kik-chat, kik-app, kik.com, whatever, and it still would have been the same library and people still would still have discovered it. NPM claims that they did this to "reduce confusion", but at best that is massively underestimating the intelligence of people who *already know how to program*, and is a complete lie cooked up by their PR team at worst. Needless to say, I don't think he was in the wrong at any point of this. The other hivemind was really mad at NPM, which is a step in the right direction, but they were mad that they restored his package. That makes no sense either, because one of the pillars of open source is that anyone can publish or distribute it as long as they distribute it with the original license and give credit. NPM is an asshole, but they still have the right to distribute an open source library. What we *should* be mad at NPM for is that they threw him under the bus by removing his package in the first place. Again, Kik has no legs to stand on and NPM was never in any legal trouble because of this, trademarks do not apply to non-commercial products. They're called *trade* marks. Trade. As in commerce. Also, it really highlights their priorities that they hold a corporation infamous for enabling children to be victimized in higher regard than someone making code used by the entire internet and not getting paid for it. I also don't see enough people being mad at Kik. What they did was absolutely unacceptable and they should have faced the brunt of the hate. Then again they've already shown themselves to be horrible so they probably would have shrugged it off or maybe even played into it for publicity. What can the open source world learn from this? Well, for one, I think it has become clear that having your open source dependencies managed by a for-profit company is bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Kik paid NPM a ton of money and essentially "bought" the kik name like a fucking NFT. The solution would be a combination of package repositories managed by worker co-op nonprofits with transparent financial reports, and decentralized/independent package sources hosted by the authors themselves. If JS took inspiration from Java just a bit more and also made their dependency naming system work by domains, we would have gotten `com.koculu.kik` and `com.kik.kik`, and no conflict. Almost like a federated package manager. Especially now that NPM is owned by Microsoft and Yarn was always owned by Facebook, we really do not have a good, trustworthy JS dependency repo, which is a problem because like the language or hate it, it is still extremely important for our modern computing environment. I think it's long overdue to break their duopoly. IDK, that's the end of my rant. Didn't really mean to write a wall of text, just saw this article and got me wanting a retrospective, but yeah. What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Why or why not?
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They can in theory combine multiple functions in one sattelite to save space. China already has the Beidou system (their version of GPS) with global coverage. If it starts getting crowded they can probably start tacking internet functionality onto new Beidou satellites they release as the fleet naturally turns over.


On something like a bike hydrogen makes a ton of sense. Because on a long trip you really can run out of power and most e-bike batteries don’t charge very fast (you generally don’t want superfast charging either unless you absolutely need it, because that reduces battery longevity). Hydrogen is a great solution.


Yes! The more airplanes we get rid of for travelling between population centres the better!

(I have a deep, seething hatred of airplanes because they’re literally the only choice for long distance travel where I live. Everything about them sucks and it’s like they design the experience to be as grating and tedious as possible.)



Funny how they never catch them doing any of that. Either China/Russia are really good at fucking with the US or the US, despite bring the most militarized country in history and having the most heavily armed police force, really sucks at protecting its own citizens.

Wait…


When you start a grease fire in your kitchen so you burn the house down to prevent it from spreading.


INB4 “OMG their safety is so bad it’s like China” comments.

No. Dumbass. Their safety is so bad it’s like America.


grand but mysterious history

Whenever I hear about a “mysterious tribe” or “mysterious Indigenous city” in Western media, I don’t think it’s mystical or cool or anything. I’m disgusted, because it’s probably “mysterious” because the white man destroyed without care for human life or culture.


I mean, hasn’t this always been the case?

When countries like Vietnam and Venezuela were “”“attacked”“” (read, their own citizens got fed up with their government’s shit and decided to have a go at socialism), the vanguards of “democracy” NATO definitely felt the need to “save” them (which, the people of a country saying GTFO to a capitalist government and trying to implement socialism is probably the most democratic thing possible).


It seems to me that Tesla drivers literally think they’re greener than any other vehicle. Including busses, trains, maybe even bikes based on how they treat those on the road.

Yeah no. Between the oldest, crappiest diesel busses and trains and the newest Teslas, public transit still wins handily. That old bus probably has fewer cumulative carbon emissions than the battery alone.


Also, a mature cast iron pan very much has nonstick properties. I remember threads on Reddit about people freaking out that well meaning but misinformed people scrubbed the surface layer off their cast iron cookware, because that takes a long time to form and is essentially a natural nonstick coating.


the fediverse was using discord to run a hate campaign against the organization

Why do I doubt that if the Fediverse was going to run a hate campagin, they’d use Discord




Yeah that breakwater’s not going to hold against sea level rise and the increasingly intense storms we’re going to experience (are already experiencing).

I also don’t understand why you would even build this. It’s the worst of both worlds of a bridge and a tunnel.


If someone says long distance rail can’t work where you are because you’re on an island show them this.

Aside from connecting a major landmass to a single island, this would also be great for archipelagos or anywhere where you have population centres relatively close in distance but separated by water too far to tunnel or build a bridge across, which is a lot of places. Not sure why these aren’t built in more places (and places like Denmark are even removing their train ferries) because there are a ton of benefits of taking a train straight across the water instead of getting off the train, getting on a ferry, getting off the ferry, and getting on another train. Single seat service like this would make train travel much more competitive with air travel.


This is an aggressively Japanese invention.


Interesting. Xiaomi (and Huawei IIRC) seem good about allowing bootloader unlocks as well, so will definitely have to look into this avenue.