edynoid's comments

Living in the area at the height of the protests, so I can fill in.

Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.

That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.

There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.

Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.

And that, comrades, is yet another way to realize our economy's incentive system is misaligned with people's material needs.

> It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. It is a testament to the power of compounding interest, to the power of a focused plan executed violently for decades.

A social welfare plan? Are you for real?

Both Walmart and Amazon are pioneers of modern union busting practices. They screw workers over as much as they can get away with to squeeze out the maximum amount of labour. Instead of writing this you could as well spit in the face of working class people.

The premise of this article so willfully ignorant of material reality, that it is impossible to take this serious.

What's up with that weird tangent about feminism? It's not like no feminist ever noticed the bottled-up toxic masculinity in some gaming communities and started analysing that.

Do more sports is definitely one of the more naive "solutions" I've come across.

Who said a hobby had to be useful? This self-improvement cult is really annoying...

exactly, and that's a good thing. scaling means basically exploiting of other people's labour.

You'd have a hard time arguing that breaking GDPR is the only way to stay in business. There are enough compliant news websites to undermine that argument.

Nix contributor here. You are completely right, that is missing. Unfortunately the documentation is somewhat fragmented and its structure makes it quite hard to find relevant information, especially to newcomers.

We started to work on making official guides for common Nix tasks, about how to get a development environment set up, how to build a Docker image… focus is on the DevOps side at the moment, not so much on the desktop user, as we see that as the most valuable use case. This is part of the work of the NixOS marketing team to facilitate adoption of Nix into the mainstream.

Have a look at https://nix.dev/ for the first guides being worked on – pretty barebones so far, but we are aware and working on it.

You can get pretty far with a statically typed, purely functional language. For example, Elm's package manager enforces semantic versioning: https://elm-lang.org/

I don't think you can do that with JavaScript.

Yes, cyclists should not run red lights. But we need to improve cycling infrastructure a lot. Right now there is a lot of incentive to break the rules in small ways here and there, because the situation is pretty bad.

There are quite a few places in my city, where I have no idea what the legal way to get from one side of a large road to the other. Sure you can always act like either a car or a pedestrian, but that is either dangerous or slow. For example, I find it quite unfair, that many left turns require me to either ride between cars or stop twice.

Some bike paths just look like the planners reserved space at the roadsides and simply skipped coming up with a solution at the intersection. And that is frankly disappointing.

Electricity is not everything. Heating and transport eat up much more fossil fuel. That can be replaced by, uh… nuclear-powered electricity and synthetic fuels, I guess? However you do it, it adds a lot to the necessary power budget.

Trains and isolation are great. But gas still produces net carbon emissions. So if you adopt it, you have to move away from it very soon anyway. Seems like wasted effort from my point of view.

My first thought to this: can the turbines be made from wood instead? Searching for it, I found this:

https://newatlas.com/timbertower-wooden-wind-turbine/25007/

Making things out of wood is generally a good idea to save on carbon footprint. I have doubts you could build a nuclear power plant from timber given all the containment & shielding requirements.

Paying for traffic to be prioritized is the exact opposite of net neutrality. No need to pay lip service to the idea then. The obvious danger here is that small indie studios may not be able to afford making enjoyable real-time multiplayer games.

How about improving public internet infrastructure instead?

This website consumes about half my CPU. But for what?

Don't know about the material science behind it. But from a purely physical point of view, the problem there is that void (= vacuum) does not have any pressure. So the frame would have to support itself against the atmospheric pressure instead of the gas doing it from the inside – that is a big technical challenge. The catastrophic failure scenario (hull breach) would be an implosive compression of the entire hull, which kinda sounds worse than a hydrogen-fuelled fire.

Interesting… most of the motivation to use new tech is that it enables me to solve problems more efficiently. When you use older, but more established technology, its limitations still hold back the problem solving a bit. This is especially hard to take when I know there are better solutions out there. And it also costs more time & money.

There probably is a pain point somewhere, where it makes sense to switch. I did like the point about reducing the cost of new technology – that may be quite often easier said than done though.

What you allude to there is pretty bad TDD. It was never intended as a replacement for good design, rather as an aid to be clear about design and requirements without writing tons of specs up-front.

And I agree, that there are lots of anti-patterns that have grown in tandem with TDD, like excessive mocking with dependency injection frameworks or testing renamed identity functions over and over just to get more coverage. However, I'd argue that is equally the fault of object-oriented programming though.

Where I disagree is this: TDD and unit tests are still a very useful tool. Their big advantage is that you can isolate issues more quickly and precisely, IF you use them correctly.

For instance, if I have some kind of algorithm in a backend service operating on a data structure that has a bug, I do not want to spend time on the UI layer, network communication or database interactions to figure out, what is going on. Testing at the right scope you get exactly that.

If you look at more recently developed GUI architectures there is this heavy influence from functional reactive programming. The UIs are modelling as reductions over event streams with no mutable state.

Most architectures around React do this, for example. The reasons why virtual DOM technology has been developed on the web, was to hide away the stateful nature of the older, OOP-influence DOM API.

I find it quite fortunate, that they don't use it automatically. Introducing a 1e-3 relative error is quite a deal breaker for some. Not for games sure, but for science that is mostly unacceptable.