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  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • “I drive for free”

    So your solar panels didn’t cost anything? Look I’m very pro-solar but rooftop solar for residential makes sense for very few people. It’s not very efficient (even with the best panels available at the time) and the efficiency falls off over time as the panels degrade. Most rooftop solar savings calculations use absurd estimates for power costs in the future to justify themselves and take 10+ years to pay off. Furthermore selling a house with rooftop solar is harder due to having to find someone to take over the lease (which is needed to pay for it for most people).

    None of this even starts to address the solar rooftop companies that have gone out of business while leaving their customer high and dry.

    Again, I like solar but rooftop just doesn’t make sense for most people.


  • So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.

    It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.

    IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.



  • I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.

    I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.






  • Dealing with this now at work. Got a dev whose time in the industry should make him a senior dev but he gives off massive junior vibes.

    • The need to change everything he touches

    • Wanting to write clever code over straightforward code

    • Everything “needs” a refactor

    • Just deprecates things when he doesn’t want to learn them and writes a new implementation without updating old code

    • Thinks he knows best while not understanding huge swaths of the codebase

    • Everything he can’t understand in <5 min is stupid and wrong

    If he was less competent (when kept in a box and closely monitored) I’d be pushing even harder to get rid of him.



  • Proton and Rosetta 2 are two totally different beasts. One allows windows programs to run on non-windows hosts and one translates x86 to Arm.

    I’m not aware of Proton doing anything like Rosetta 2 and if it did Steam would have probably used an Arm chip in their Steam Deck instead of an x86.

    Maintaining 2-way compatibility doesn’t seem like an important goal. One way, x86->Arm, sure but not Arm->x86. Apple clearly sees x86 as a dead end for its own product lines and we will see if the rest of the industry follows suit over time. Of course there is a ton tied up in x86 but aside from legacy apps or games I don’t have much need of x86 in my life.

    Even the servers I run are trending towards Arm due to the power savings. AWS graviton stuff is like ~25-30% cheaper than x86 last I looked




  • I’m not understanding the CoPilot hate. It’s an amazing tool if you are competent. Even when it gets it wrong it still saves me 90%+ of the typing then I just correct what it did differently than how I want it.

    Boilerplate becomes a breeze and I work way better when I have something to iterate on rather than coming up with it from scratch. It lets me play with and test ideas way faster and sometimes even does it differently than I’d do it which leads to learning new things and/or looking at the problem in a different way. I don’t blindly follow its output, sometimes I reject it wholesale, sometimes I edit it, sometimes it’s literally exactly what I would have typed myself.



  • I think the current startup scene leads to some pretty perverse incentives, as we’ve seen. However, I agree with you, and something needs to fill the void. A number of these startups have a very hard to no path to profitability but the ideas they come up with and execute on aren’t happening at larger corps.

    I think maybe with less of a monopoly/duopoly/etc we can move past the “you have to own the whole market or it’s not worth it”-mindset. That’s one thing I hate so much about SV/startup culture. You’re either a unicorn or you’re a failure, which is total bullshit but when VCs and the like are involved those are the only 2 options.

    I have my own side business, it’s small right now but it could grow to support me fully. It will never be a billion dollar idea, it will never “change the world”, but it’s an honest job and over time if I keep growing it I could go full time on it. I wish more people aimed for something like that.

    I’ll also get up on my soapbox and talk about how things like UBI, universal healthcare, and similar programs would make this path 10000x easier for people. Having a safety net and not having to pay a second mortgage for healthcare would be nice.