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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • By the same argument, replacing the coal fired power plant with wind and solar wouldn’t pose a challenge either.

    The point is, you’ve got to compare apples to apples: either coal power vs. desalinization powered by coal, or renewables vs. desalinization powered by renewables. In every case, the pollution produced by the desalinization process (i.e., the brine etc.) is simply added to the pollution produced by whatever means was used to generate the power for it, which means @soEZ’s attempt to compare desalinization to power generation doesn’t make much sense.







  • While DRM is the bane of everybody there are cases where trust and integrity is important and it’s an intriguing look into how hard it is to manage.

    Nah, when the user wants to ensure trust and integrity in his own system, it works just fine. The problem comes when the user who needs to be able to access the data is simultaneously the adversary who needs to be stopped from accessing the data.

    In other words, it’s one of those situations where the fact that it’s hard to manage is a gigantic clue that it’s wrongheaded to try to do so in the first place.





  • grue@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlno cap
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    1 year ago

    Edit: wait… return ! 0 ; wtf

    I mean, returning non-zero exit status on error is just good practice. It even managed to evaluate to the same numerical value as EXIT_FAILURE when I tested it on my machine (gcc 11.4.0 linux x86-64), although I’m not sure if that’s always the case or if it’s undefined behavior.

    This cursed code is quite well-written.




  • speeding is bad…

    True.

    …and that lowering car speeds is good…

    Also true.

    …so all these changes can be implemented.

    No, see, that doesn’t follow because not “all” changes are good. Only modifying the geometry of the street is good. Changing the number on the speed limit sign should only ever be done in conjunction with that geometry change, and even then it’s just an afterthought.

    It’s really, really, really important not to give the people in control of the budget any excuse to think that they can cost-cut “fix the geometry” down to “install lower speed limit signs” and still have it count as accomplishing something!


  • Look, you’re not wrong from a moral perspective; it’s just that your sentiment isn’t useful either.

    • When roads are designed appropriately, the vast majority of people don’t speed and the ones that do are incorrigible. In this, case, trying to shame the latter group to stop speeding is ineffective.

    • Conversely, when roads are designed inappropriately, the vast majority of people do speed. In this case, successfully shaming a few of them into driving the speed limit only makes the situation worse because having a wide disparity of speeds is even more dangerous than everybody uniformly exceeding the speed limit.

    The bottom line is that, from a traffic engineering perspective, trying to shame people into not speeding simply doesn’t ever improve the situation. Moreover, bringing it up in a discussion of how to fix speeding is actively unhelpful because it’s a distraction that serves to dissuade policymakers from forking out the money for the solutions that do work!


  • Nobody cares about your condescending non-solution that ignores human nature and is therefore worthless.

    Traffic engineers have to design for the reality of how people actually act, not some theoretical Platonic ideal of how they “should” act.

    Edit: that first sentence is harsher in tone than @derpoltergeist@col.social deserved, in retrospect. I’m not going to rewrite it because I still mean what I wrote, but please treat it as being addressed towards people who make that sort of argument in bad faith instead of at Pablo. (Sorry, I guess I’ve still got some leftover cynicism from Reddit.)





  • There are lots of countries that have compulsory military service with alternatives for conscientious objectors (which is basically what you’re describing).

    I agree that it’s a good idea. Moreover, it comes closer to the original meaning of that whole “well-regulated militia” thing. We should consider doing like the Swiss do: give (roughly) everybody mandatory firearms training, send them all home with an infantry standard-issue assault rifle, and then severely restrict access to ammunition except for legitimate purposes like practice at the firing range.