I always end up ship-of-theseusing the hell out of my computer. Even if I replace my mainboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, and PSU, the old storage is still good, as are the case, the fans etc.

I phase out old components as they lose relevance, although my DVD burner has lasted forever and will probably keep doing so.

Honestly, I’m still very much in the “classes define what a tag represents, CSS defines how it looks” camp. While the old semantic web was never truly feasible, assigning semantic meaning to a page’s structure very much is. A well-designed layout won’t create too much trouble and allows for fairly easy consistency without constant repetition.

Inline styles are essentially tag soup. They work like a print designer thinks: This element has a margin on the right. Why does it have that margin? Who cares, I just want a margin here. That’s acceptable if all you build are one-off pages but requires manual bookkeeping for sitewide consistency. It also bloats pages and while I’m aware that modern web design assumes unmetered connections with infinite bandwidth and mobile devices with infinitely big batteries, I’m oldschool enough to consider it rude to waste the user’s resources like that. I also consider it hard to maintain so I’d only use it for throwaway pages that never need to be maintained.

CSS frameworks are like inline styles but with the styles moved to classes and with some default styling provided. They’re not comically bad like inline styles but still not great. A class like gap-2 still carries no structural meaning, still doesn’t create a reusable component, and barely saves any bandwidth over inline CSS since it’s usually accompanied by several other classes. At least some frameworks can strip out unused framework code to help with the latter.

I don’t use SCSS much (most of its best functionality being covered by vanilla CSS these days) but it might actually be useful to bridge the gap between semantically useful CSS classes and prefabricated framework styles: Just fill your semantic classes entirely with @include statements. And even SCSS won’t be needed once native mixins are finished and reach mainstream adoption.

Note: All of this assumes static pages. JS-driven animations will usually need inline styles, of course.

I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.

Because JavaScript and its complete absence of a standard library is a horrible abomination that should’ve been put out of our misery years ago.

Full stack developer:

The lightbulb is broken. Deploys a lightweight fix that involves 17 metric tons of chandeliers, stadium floodlights, sconces, and the necessary infrastructure to operate the street lights for a city of 500.000. His solution delivers a solid 100 lm of light using only 175 MW of power.

Very true. Good coworkers can make work a lot more bearable.

Looking a bit into the company’s business can help, too. If they do something vaguely interesting that can be a bonus. I ignored that once in favor of perks and that got me into the complete disaster area that is fintech. Don’t make the same mistake.

Das Millionenspiel.

It’s The Running Man except twelve years earlier and a media satire instead of an action movie. It comments on TV phenomena that wouldn’t exist in Germany until two decades later (like scripted “reality” TV). Also, it has early appearances of one of Germany’s most famous TV hosts (as the show’s host, fittingly) and one of Germany’s most famous comedians of the 70s to 90s (in a completely serious role, unfittingly). And unlike the Schwarzenegger movie it doesn’t construct a dystopian future to introduce public bloodsports but merely gives a terse reference to a “law on active recreation” dated three years after the movie first aired.

To make it even more odd, it’s actually a good movie despite being from Germany and made for TV.

AI isn’t taking off because it took off in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then. Same as in the 90s when they actually got them to be useful in a production environment.

We got a deep learning craze in the 2010s and then bolted that onto neural nets to get the current wave of “transformers/diffusion models will solve all problems”. They’re really just today’s LISP machines; expected to take over everything but unlikely to actually succeed.

Notably, deep learning assumes that better results come from a bigger dataset but we already trained our existing models on the sum total of all of humanity’s writings. In fact, current training is hampered by the fact that a substantial amount of all new content is already AI-generated.

Despite how much the current approach is hyped by the tech companies, I can’t see it delivering further substantial improvements by just throwing more data (which doesn’t exist) or processing power at the problem.

We need a systemically different approach and while it seems like there’s all the money in the world to fund the necessary research, the same seemed true in the 50s, the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the 10s… In the end, a new AI winter will come as people realize that the current approach won’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. Ten to fifteen years later some new approach will come out of underfunded basic research.

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I fully agree. Undefined behavior is terrible UX and a huge security risk.

Undefined behavior was kind of okay when RAM and storage were measured in kilobytes and adding checks for this stuff was noticeably expensive. That time has passed, though, and modern developers have no business thinking like that, even ones working on low-level languages.

I should’ve phrased my comment differently.

Yeah, that’s basically the kind of logic you use when designing a low-level programming language: If we didn’t define what happens here then anything that happens is correct behavior and it’s up to the user to avoid it.

Of course applying that logic to a GUI application intended for a comparatively nontechnical audience is utter madness.

That one’s easy. Is the crash part of the program’s design?

If not: It’s an implementation bug, the program is not behaving as intended.

If yes: It’s a design bug, crashes shouldn’t be intended behavior.

Eiffel 65 would like to meet you.

Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.

I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.

There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.

Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.

Mind you, Highlander II would’ve made more sense as a non-Highlander movie that just revolves around space aliens dealing with Earth having a planetary shield now. As a sequel to Highlander its premise was really weird.

Oh, please don’t take that remark as an excuse or endorsement. The intended tone is one of resignation – pseudonymity reduces the social cost of bad manners to near zero and there’s not much we can do about it.

I will forgive people for being blunt in their criticism, however. High-ranking politicians are exactly the people who have to be able to take a certain level of verbal abuse since their decisions can change other people’s lives in directions that justify the liberal use of expletives.

Which plays back into my perception that Fetterman is currently not suited to his role.

I can understand both sides here.

On the one hand I have empathy with him like with any victim of such a life-altering injury and wish him a swift and full recovery. I don’t want people to suffer and, quite frankly, “the brain doesn’t work right anymore” is one of my personal horror scenarios.

On the other hand this kind of behavior is a huge problem in someone capable of making decisions that can alter the lives of other people – millions of them, in this case. He has enough power to ruin a lot of people’s lives, intentionally or not.

Even as someone who isn’t impacted by his mental fitness in any way, I’d agree that removing him from office seems like a good move. That man needs rest, not the stress of a high-profile political office during interesting times. And his state needs someone with a level head, which doesn’t mesh well with a semi-recent traumatic brain injury.

And, well, this is a politics community so guess which part the discussion will focus on. (Also, this is online so people are inclined to be assholes.)

Well, the camera needs to talk to your onsite storage in order to store video. A simple consumer device like a Ring isn’t going to be hardwired; it just uses Wi-Fi (which every household can be assumed to have) to connect to your LAN and talk to the storage device.

The question is why the Wi-Fi could be turned off on the first place. Probably an ISP-managed router; I doubt they’d go and jam the entire spectrum between 2.4 and 7 GHz.

That’s one reason why people should use their own router and/or access point whenever possible.

Yeah. It’s one thing when people leave some extra money for good service or tell the server to keep the change, all while knowing that none of this is necessary.

It’s another when a 15%+ surcharge is added to the total so that the server can afford to live.

It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

Depends on your keyboard layout. On Macintosh-like keyboards it can be as simple as AltGr+dash. On smartphone keyboards you can just long-press the dash.

On Windows you’re expected to hold down Alt and enter some code.