I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?

When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.

Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!

But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.

Oh man really? That’s hilarious! I’m glad Dad didn’t shell out for a big spread in there then. It was just his name and that’s it.

This reminds me a bit of that shady outfit that was promising to have a star named after you for a price. I was taking astronomy at the time and some friends asked me about it. I said NO! Don’t even think about it. While there are way more stars in the Milky Way alone than there are people who have ever lived, astronomers are most certainly not in the business of naming them all. You can get a visiting comet named after you if you spot it first though.

I was at a used bookstore and there was this volume called the Who’s Who Almanac or something to that effect. I was shocked to find my dad’s name in there! He was an academic in a rather narrow discipline. I wouldn’t say he was a prolific publisher or had any major discoveries under his name, but he spoke numerous languages and was well-travelled. To be fair, the book was essentially a giant list of names and didn’t include bios or anything, so the bar might have been pretty low? But still…

Yeah seriously don’t tell my wife this. She still counts on them and it’s going to go badly…

I can’t find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.

I’ve been playing around with the free-threaded build of 3.13 and it seems pretty stable with the standard library at least. Most of what I’ve read suggests the only problems have been with 3rd party libraries that make unsafe assumptions about the GIL being around. But I’ve tried it out with my own production code and it’s been rock solid and performant (at least by Python standards).

I see what you’re getting at here. The solar constant is the solar constant. If you’ve got a perfect angle to the sun, you should be getting the same amount of power regardless of latitude. I mean I suppose it’s possible there might be a slight attenuation with the sun at a lower angle due to there being more atmosphere to traverse? Otoh solar panels don’t function as efficiently at high temperatures, so it’s possible they may be more efficient in some cases.

But you have to consider that averaged out, you’re looking at shorter daylight hours overall at high latitudes, even if there are periods in mid-summer when days can be super long, so that’s a consideration. So yes, the panels should pull in similar amounts of power while the sun is up, but it’s not up as much.

About a year ago, there was a boycott on the Loblaws supermarket chain in protest of their boasting record profits at a time when grocery inflation was out of control. It lasted about a month before kind of fizzling out.

But I think by comparison, this buy Canadian movement has legs. It’s a major nationwide shift in people’s spending habits. And the key word here may be habits. Let’s say for argument’s sake that after 4 years of Trump, a new administration comes in and repeals all the tariffs. By that time, people will have settled into alternate brands across a wide range of consumer goods, and it may be difficult to convince them to switch back again. There’s a certain inertia in human behaviour. So the effects of this could potentially go on quite a bit longer than the tariff war.

That’s a tricky one. I guess it sort of means “it is that” if you take it super literally? “It is that I want to try on the suit.” But in practice, it just adds a level of politeness and formality to the sentence.

You will hear a lot of masu (ます) and desu (です) tossed in there all over the place when people are trying to be courteous.

I work with 32MHz microcontrollers at work and you can do plenty with them. It’s a different world from say general CPUs where speed is king. You’re often more concerned about timing reproducibility than outright clock rates. There are also considerations about power consumption, electrical noise, functioning in extreme environments, etc. that may inform your decision to go with one controller over another.

Is it not a net benefit to China in that the US drawing inwards expands their global influence? And they must be laughing at what carnage Trump is inflicting on the North American auto sector at a time when China is surging ahead with EVs.

Thanks, I’ll give that a shot.

Ah ok, thanks!

Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.

I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.

What caused the jump in the first place? I only just opened an account myself because the folks who run my home instance lemmy.ca started up pixelfed.ca about a week ago and I decided to check it out.

Digital services tend to be an area where the US enjoys huge trade surpluses. If that pandora’s box is opened, it’s going to be really bad for the tech giants when retaliatory steps are inevitably taken. I thought this was why Trump was trying to keep the tariff war focused on material goods?

I know in Canada, FB stopped serving news when they refused to contribute to a government fund to help the struggling domestic journalism industry which they were scraping content from with reckless abandon. Personally, I’m happy to see one less stifling algorithm-fed echo chamber. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

Ouch. Well if you wanna take your chances in Canada, definitely advertise your senior COBOL dev skills! ;)

Lol yeah she’s in insurance! I bet you could probably also infer from the fortran that I work for a science-y outfit.

My wife was telling me at her work they’re desperate for cobol programmers, as they’re all retiring boomers leaving behind a giant code base. At my work, it’s legacy fortran that’s all over the place, but we’re a much smaller company.