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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Like other commenters have said, start by asking the upstream developer (whether that’s by sending a message with a link to the fork or by sending a mega-PR that says you don’t expect it to be merged as-is in the description). They should be the best judge of how they’d prefer to handle it. The thing I’d add is that you should try to avoid taking it personally if their preferred approach isn’t one you think is a good idea. Sometimes good fixes end up never merged because of disagreements becoming too heated even if everyone’s basically on the same page about the fox being good. There’s also a decent chance that your refactors are things the upstream developer explicitly doesn’t want and would otherwise have done them themselves and implemented the same fix, too, or they don’t agree that your fix is good enough. They won’t want to be on the hook for maintaining contributions that use approaches and code style that they don’t like, and that’s okay. They also might know something you don’t about their project that would make something that’s obviously a good idea to you obviously a bad idea to them.

    Basically, just try and remember that if it’s a hobby project, it makes progress when the maintainer is having a good time, and gets abandoned when they’re not anymore, so try and avoid making a mess and having arguments when they’re the one that’ll have to deal with any fallout from any mistakes.



  • Under first-past-the-post systems, as long as there are other people who support the greater evil, and evil’s willing to use its power to increase its influence (whether that’s removing anti-bias laws that restrict the press, raising limits on campaign donations, or more directly, things like gerrymandering), you’ll get the shift towards evil from voting for the lesser evil, as the lesser evil will chase after the voters who vote for evil.

    However, plenty of people notice that, and post memes like this one that encourage voting for a third party with no hope of winning or not voting at all, which only serves to accelerate the effect, as the lesser evil has to attract an even greater share of the evil demographic’s vote to have any hope of winning. People say that voting third-party demonstrates to the lesser evil that it’s worth courting non-evil voters, but that can’t have any effect until the next election, and in the meantime, you’re stuck with maximum evil for a whole term, and the hurdles to overcome grow larger.

    The best hope is to start campaigning for a third party or non-evil candidate for the lesser evil party immediately after an election instead of leaving it until right before an election, as that hopefully gives enough time for support to grow enough that the lesser evil party will see non-evil as a meaningful demographic that’s worth aligning with. It’s not guaranteed to work, but if it doesn’t, either evil is genuinely a majority and the democratic thing is to be evil, or the system isn’t a democracy, and there’s no way to remove evil by voting, so alternatives need to be considered.



  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldEvil
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    8 days ago

    no doesn’t become false, it becomes Norway, and when converted to a boolean, Norway is true. The reason’s because one on YAML’s native types is an ISO country code enum, and if you tell a compliant YAML implementation to load a file without giving it a schema, that type has higher priority than string. If you then call a function that converts from native type to string, it expands the country code to the country name, and a function that coerces to boolean makes country codes true. This paragraph was wrong. The other paragraphs are unaffected.

    The problem’s easy to avoid, though. You can just specify a schema, or use a function that grabs a string/bool directly instead of going via the assumed type first.

    The real problem with YAML is how many implementations are a long way from being conformant, and load things differently to each other, but that situation’s been improving.


  • It’s generally accepted that file formats aren’t protected IP, so you can write a compatible reader or writer and be in the clear as long as you reused no code from the original reader/writer. The specification may have licence terms that restrict who you can share the spec with, but you don’t necessarily need the official spec to come up with a compatible implementation. Plenty of file formats have been reverse engineered over the years even when the original didn’t have a written spec.


  • The article says

    The Israeli military has used the system in the Gaza Envelope since 2008, but it failed to prevent the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, after being destroyed and disabled by Palestinian Resistance forces.

    So it looks like they’ve had this for quite a while.

    I’d definitely heard about it before 2022 as I was at the recording for the 2021 BBC Reith Lecture on autonomous weapons (fun fact - free BBC recordings do not advertise this, but often provide free beer and wine) and was expecting one of the topics to be the potential to automate things like this. I was also expecting already-automated CIWS systems (which protect ships from incoming missiles, so you don’t necessarily have enough time for a human to confirm a target after radar contact is established) to come up, including the times they’ve already killed people in friendly fire incidents.


  • I question the choice of sauce bottle. That’s clearly sriracha, and as someone who doesn’t consider themselves a hot sauce person, it’s not hot, it just contains chillies. I don’t think anyone who goes back for seconds after melting their face would melt their face with sriracha.





  • Cups can be a nightmare in the UK as it’s usually US cups, but sometimes it’s metric cups (which are just 250ml, so an entirely redundant measurement in the first place), and recipes rarely say which, and if you buy measuring cups, they’ll rarely say which type they are, but more commonly be metric ones, despite those being the least likely that a recipe would use.




  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldMeme.
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    22 days ago

    The instance admins and mods of some of the larger communities are self-described Marxist-Leninists, and sometimes delete comments and ban users who make comments and posts that they disagree with. Sometimes the removed comments are what most people, including most communists, would regard as basic statements of fact, like that Stalin wasn’t perfect, that something bad happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that Ukraine’s Jewish president isn’t a fan of the Nazis, or that Uighurs are not universally having a brilliant time.

    There’s a second issue that when openly Stalinist instances like Lemmygrad (who at least used to explicitly say membership was only open to users who thought Stalin was good in their instance description) were defederated by major instances like lemmy.world, lots of users made new accounts on lemmy.ml to post exactly the same tankie nonsense (typically along the lines of Russia is fighting a defensive war and hasn’t hurt anyone but even if they weren’t, they’d be justified in annexing the whole of Ukraine and killing anyone who objected) as had led to the defederation in the first place.

    Sometimes this leads to people not from .ml to make snap judgements about comments and posts from .ml users, when really it’s just a vocal minority of nutters posting the nonsense and trying to claim that any criticism they receive is just people being brainwashed by nutters in a more neoliberal/neoconservative direction like Reagan and Thatcher.


  • It’s rational to make yourself feel more good. That’s the final outcome of every aspect of self-interest that isn’t solely to remain alive. If the intention is to act solely in the self-interest of an emotionless unfeeling human-shaped robot:

    • it’s very silly as such an entity doesn’t exist and wouldn’t care about its own interests if it did.
    • it’s inconsistent with many other things Rand advocated for that only make someone feel better, but do so through hedonism rather than charity.
    • it’s such a terrible model for real humans that it can’t inform us of what’s good for humans.


  • If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.


  • When people use the phrase rational self interest they’re overwhelmingly meaning what Ayn Rand called rational self interest. If you take the words literally, they apply to any political philosophy as no one’s trying to design a system against their own interests. The disagreements come from people disagreeing what their interests are and how they can feasibly have them fulfilled, not because they don’t want their interests fulfilled. No one else bothers using the phrase because it’s obviously the goal and stating that would be entirely redundant, but risk making it sound like you were advocating for something Randian.