Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: Between that

I think the general observation to be made here is that a lot of politically active people are also quite naïve. The world works in a certain way, and contains people who are saintly altruistic and conscientious and also complete selfish arseholes, and everyone else in between.

Utopian ideals are a noble goal, but it is not possible to flip a switch and go from where we are now to peace and equality for all, the best we can do is gradual change, and to push to make that change happen as fast as possible.

It's worth noting, as well, that although for some, a Marxist world is their idea of Utopia, it's certainly not a view shared by most on the left, in the same way that a corporatist world with all the wealth hoarded by a very few individuals is not the idea of Heaven for most on the right.

As for environmentalism? Well, it makes sense that we should make best endeavours to not cause our own extinction. Most people will agree that AGW and pollution are real problems that we genuinely need to tackle, although you'll find plenty of whackjobs hiding under rocks if you go looking for them who will argue otherwise, until their elderly parents start shouting at them to get out of the basement and find a job.

Environmentalism naturally sits somewhere to the left of the "political spectrum", so it's hardly surprising to find some proper radical Marxist types extolling its virtues, however, I think you'll find that the number of genuine full-on Marxists is very small, and the vast majority of leftists sit comfortably in the "lets be reasonable" ground of the centre-left, which is also the home ground of environmental concerns.

Re: Between that

In that case, it may well be industry slang for those who pretend green credentials to hide a radical leftist agenda, but I don't reckon it's in common parlance, or that there are a lot of people of that ilk.

Of course, one person's moderate left-of-centre activist is another's far-left radical, and the rather simplistic left-right spectrum is open to wild distortions from those on "both sides". Just remember that a lot of the press in this country is owned by oligarchs billionaires whose own political outlook is rather far to the right of that centre ground.

Re: Between that

Has it? It's not a term I've ever heard used. This might just be because I don't hang around with the sort of people who are likely to use it, who I suspect will be the right-wing corporatist types, who have a vested interest in undermining environmentalism, and for whom slinging mud of this sort probably has its own cost-centre in their chart of accounts.

Re: Airgap Russia?

You know shit has got worrying when AMFM is making serious, coherent posts.

Re: What if Russians voted for Zelensky?

The more quickly Putin falls from power (and off a balcony)

Traditionally, I believe defenestration is the preferred Russian technique.

Re: In other news.

I would have thought that, if anything, Eve severs would have had a lighter load without all the Russians, unless they're all DDoS'ing it again due to sour grapes.

Exactly, if you're fighting (or trying to do pretty much anything for any amount of time) in sub-zero temperatures, you need a high-energy food source. That means lard or other similar fats. There's a reason arctic peoples eat seal blubber, and I doubt it's for the taste.

I read your paragraph long sentence three times trying to parse it and gave up.

I don't suspect that it's my loss.

In 1914 Britain was a parliamentary democracy and France was a republic

In 1914, Britain was a global empire, that encompassed an awful lot of very poor and subjugated peoples, under the same monarch. You're thinking of England.

It was more a case of the first industrialised warfare between two global empires, the British Empire and the German Empire, which wanted to expand. I'm not sure how any of that relates to oil.

Re: Block the internet?

The Ukrainian people are being punished for resisting Putin. People in Russia who have resisted Putin have become equally dead. When you're dead, whether you've been bombed or shot is immaterial, as is who fired the bullet.

Re: It's not quite as simple as "Cutting Russia Off"

There's a lot of bollocks in that post of yours.

First off, NATO very much got involved in the Balkan conflict in the '90s.

Then, let's talk about Syria and how it's a civil war, with Russia propping up the incumbent dictatorship by supplying weapons. I'm not sure what the US involvement is here, but I don't think it's significant. It's pretty obviously part of Putin's strategy to destabilise Europe by sending lots of innocent refugees our way.

Then let's look at whether anyone is suggesting bombing Russian civilians. Anyone? Anyone at all. That's a "nope" then. The victims here, at present, are the Ukrainian people, who are being targeted in an indiscriminate war by a crazed aggressor. By all accounts, Putin cares as little about his own troops as he does about his victims, and let's not forget the arrests of thousands of protesters in Russia over the last week.

Re: Totally for it.

This is the most idiotic piece of fuckwittery I've read today, and there's a lot of obvious Russian state sponsored trolls about on social media...

Re: "your authoritarian government is committing human rights abuses"

Yes, well, if I have to say "don't vote Tory", those who need to get the message won't be listening anyway.

What can you do about people who vote against their own best interests, and actively for those who wish to enrich themselves at the expense of their very voters? Political beliefs are never based on reason, or they'd not be beliefs, they'd be evidence-led policy...

Re: proportionality

So, saying "we have to defend ourselves" when your biggest neighbour starts making loud and threatening noises isn't a sensible course of action now?

The root of this problem is Putin, not Zelenskiy.

Re: Well, ya know….

Yes, US foreign policy has indeed been dodgy, pretty much since that country's inception (and not just the last 80 years). However, this is classic whataboutery.

I don't see the US engaging in a land war with its neighbours. For example, at no point has any US president said, "The Baja peninsular used to be part of the US, so historically it's ours, and we're invading it to prevent genocide", like what Botox Hitler is doing.

Re: Block the internet?

Not to go all "history lesson" on you, but I'm pretty sure Hitler's war machine was fuelled by slave labour, and conscription.

Yet we never underestimate the nonsense spouted by those who see the world in terms of "us vs the left".

It's worth remembering that Germany lost WW1 largely because of loss of support for their own government at home.

WW1 analogies are tough, though; neither side is clearly "the good guy" or "the bad guy", and when it boils down to it, the whole thing was essentially different branches of the ruling classes (in this case, cousins in the same royal family) fighting each other for control over the peasants.

WW2 analogies are a bit better, in the sense that there is a clear dictatorial aggressor attempting to seize the lands of others, on various historical pretexts (annexation of the Sudetenland, anyone?) in order to grow an empire.

I really hope this doesn't grow into WW3, and I think the thing that may save us is the fact that few other countries seem to be ready to stand behind Russia in this aggression. The biggest danger is China, but they know that their economy depends on the West.

Re: "your authoritarian government is committing human rights abuses"

It's very sad to see commenters on various platforms claiming that Ukrainian refugees can come here, whilst "those scummy boat people" should stay out.

Refugees are refugees, and those coming from places such as Syria and North Africa are just as worthy as those coming from Eastern Europe, whatever their skin colour and religion.

As for those who claim "this country is full"; this country has as almost as much land area devoted to golf courses as it does to housing. The housing may be full, but that is due to government housing policy (and not building social housing), not due to any inherent "fullness" of the country.

So, to those who say "we are full", I say "get in the sea, and that'll make some room for those more deserving than you".

Re: Internal advert filters

Ad-slingers sell ad space, they don't care if the ads get clicked on.

At least a portion of those buying that ad space are using it either to scam people (by putting an ad that looks like something else the user meant to click on), or directly maliciously by injecting scripts into the site's page.

If just 0.1% of ads are malicious, then you need to block them all, for your own safety and security.

Re: All part of gullability testing

I recently ordered something for my wife from an online retailer (I say recently, it was for V Day, and ordered 10 days earlier). It hasn't been delivered, and as far as I can tell, hasn't even been dispatched, so I used the retailer's online form to complain.

So far, I've had an automated email saying "we'll get back to you in x working days", followed two days later with another email asking me to review their delivery. For some reason they're getting rated zero on that one...

Re: Radio Bricking

Mazda might charge £1,500 for those radios, but I suspect the decimal point probably needs moving a few places to find the actual cost. I reckon the screen is probably going to be the most expensive component.

Re: History

It goes to show, even though PERL was one of the first languages I learned, way back in the day, that when I saw the .raku file extension, my first thought was "what the hell has a Japanese glaze-reducing firing technique got to do with file extensions?"

Maybe we have reached "peak" cute-names-for-programming-languages?

Re: Competition time!

...except that if you try to change the file extension on a file, MS (somewhat annoyingly) asks you if you are actually sure you wanted to do that.

Re: Still humans in the mix here not just machines

The main problem with reading the first few bytes of a file to show what it is/does, is that when listing the contents of a directory, instead of just reading the page off the disk that contains the filenames, you then also need to go off to the disk sector that directory entry points at, and read that too. That might not be a problem for situations where you only have a dozen or so files in a directory, but if you've got a lot of large files in one directory, all on different physical disk sectors, that's going to be slow, and also wearing on your drives. OK, this doesn't cause such an issue with SSDs, but the idea of pointless and inefficient disk reads is still idiotic.

all binary files should have a specification which mandates the use of a magic number

I agree, it's so much easier to open a file up in a hex editor, and then look up the first few bytes in a great big lookup table, which would never be out-of-date. What sort of idiot would want to quickly and easily establish the type of a file just by looking at the extension?

In case it had escaped you, that was irony. Binary file identifiers are good for machines, when it's machines reading and writing the files. Most of the time, though, it's humans using computers, and fleshbags have different requirements.

Re: Alas poor SOAP!, I knew him

Compare the following:

<object><property>value</property></object> - 45 characters

"object":{"property":"value"} - 29 characters

I've chosen fairly short "object" and "property" names here as well; typically in a large XML document, they're going to be more specific, hence longer. Either way, in this example, the JSON is less than 65% of what the XML is, and that's before you start including things like DTDs and namespaces.

Add to that the fact that JSON is much more human readable, and it's no wonder it's now the de-facto standard for data interchange.

To be fair, that was firmly tongue-in-cheek. I'm sure that PERL still has a place somewhere, but it's not a place that I or anyone I know has been to in the last 20 years.

Of course, I may be being unduly harsh on Python; I just don't have a use case for it, and don't know the underlying reason for coming up with yet another programming language beyond "because we could" - what does it have that others don't? Genuine question!

Is it just because some people don't like languages that use braces for delimiting blocks / scopes? The fact that they have become commonplace across so many languages kind of suggests that this is one thing that C got right.

Re: Easier games to play

You do know that if you create a new console project in .Net 6, the default template does that without you actually having to write a line of code? They've even done away with the need for a namespace and default class / entry point method, although I prefer to still use them myself, because I have an implicit dislike for such things being implied.

As for the usefulness of templating "hello world"? Well, you can make your own judgement on that...

Looks like I upset the Python bros. I'm sure there's a cracking use case that calls for an entirely new language with an ethos based on a 1960s comedy sketch show, that there were no existing tools and languages to cover, and I just missed the point entirely.

Re: The influence of Java on .NET is complex

The native Java UI is hideous, and always has been, and .Net provides lots of ways of interacting with the UI layer of the underlying OS. You can do lots of things cross-platform as well, like doing your UI layer as a web page (which, in case you hadn't noticed, is how a lot of business work in the present day), or using something like Xamarin, which is implemented in Mono, so is cross-platform.

Re: Memories!

This is because the web separates (rightfully) semantics and presentation by design, whereas clunky old languages like VB (and the other one mentioned here in passing, FoxPro) didn't, leading to no separation of business logic and presentation layer, unless you enforced that yourself by strict discipline.

I'd prefer to use a tech stack that is designed around doing things the right way, rather than having to beat other people's code into conformity in order to make software maintainable.

Re: Alas poor SOAP!, I knew him

SOAP was anything but simple, relied on XML (and therefore massive, restrictive, schemata), and didn't have the flexibility of REST APIs, and the way most things are very forgiving in parsing JSON.

For example, if a property is missing from a JSON structure, most APIs will assume the value for that is null. Similarly, if a chunk of JSON has an unexpected property, most APIs will ignore it. This allows for easy forward and backward compatibility for non-breaking changes, without having to have multiple schema versions, and versioned endpoints. In the Real World™ this happens a lot.

Oh, and data size - JSON is much more compact than XML, even if you choose really short and meaningless tags for all your data. This has a real-world effect in things like network throughput and storage.

So basically, REST killed SOAP, because JSON, rightfully, killed XML.

Re: Easier games to play

I guess your idea of writing multithreaded code is to FORK and manually use IPC, rather than just using async and letting the runtime manage it.

Just because you can spend your life debugging race conditions, doesn't mean you should.

Or is all your code strictly single-threaded, and runs a single processor core at 100% whilst leaving the other 7 idle?

"Oh no, I have to read and understand the documentation for a fully documented API. On occasion, I might have to google to find an example of its usage on Stack Overflow."

I've yet to come across any tech stack that doesn't rely on APIs, with varying levels of documentation, and stability. On the whole, 'Net stuff tends towards being better documented and easier to use, although with some things the level of abstraction can be a bit mind-bending when you want to do something simple.

As for Python. Well, whoever thought making indentation part of the syntax for any reason other than "because we can" needs a good thumping. Whenever I've come across it (for instance when tinkering with embedded programming), there has been a choice between Python and C/C++, and despite my C skills being somewhat rusty, that's still the preferable choice. Hell, I'd take PERL over Python.