Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 35

@CobaltVelvet Every business person I've met wants the following:

1. Start/invest in business.
2. Make large amount of money.
3. Leave daily operations to underlings.
4. Go off and do things they actually enjoy, like sailing or having cocktail parties.

@CobaltVelvet It comes from need? Well, I've personally met some very needy people, then...

@CobaltVelvet I find it very difficult to discover evidence to suggest that societies without central leadership are viable. I'd love for it to be true. I just don't see it, looking across vast expanses of history. There's always people in charge, and where there wasn't, that society was overrun by another society that *did* have someone in charge.

@CobaltVelvet Dictatorship is the other mode that fits our animal natures, but it's less stable over time because maintaining it requires a great deal of intimidation and violence, and at some point, the dictator dies and power passes over to someone who's less competent at that game.

@CobaltVelvet Many wild species will overwhelm an ecosystem if there is no predator to regulate the population, again confirming that we are not so different from other animals.

I always assume that any given human behaviour is animalistic if it also exists in the animal kingdom. Birds build nests, we build condominiums. Gorillas kill rivals, humans go to war.

A system that doesn't fit our animal natures is a system that will get resisted.

@CobaltVelvet Much like democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others, capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others.

I think capitalism reflects human nature. Exploitation and greed are universal things, exhibited by all civilisations of a sufficient size and development.

Capitalism is the symptom, not the disease. Human nature is the disease. We are animals who fight for resources and mates.

The most perfect high tech product I can think of, given the criteria above, is the iPhone. It does most of the things a high quality piece of equipment is supposed to do, and is very specialised at the task. It's not a computer that you carry in your pocket. It's an appliance. It's good at being an appliance, not so good at being a hacker's toy, because it wasn't designed for that purpose. It approaches perfection, but issues common to all smartphones prevent it from quite reaching it.

If you buy a knife and it keeps sharp for a long time after sharpening it, feels right in the hand, makes things easy to cut, it never breaks, and the design is attractive, that's also a perfect product. There are such knives out there, and many ordinary kitchen knives do approach that kind of quality, possibly because we've been perfecting the craft of knife making and forging steel for thousands of years.

They say nobody's perfect and it's human to err. However, there HAVE been perfect products. Usually, they're so good that we don't even notice how perfect they are. If, for example, your fridge looks stylish, always keeps your food at the right temperature, and runs reliably for over 10 years, that's a good product. If it has (equally reliable) features you didn't know you needed but are now indispensable, it's a perfect product, because it goes above and beyond what's necessary.

I'm a developer, but also a user, and when I'm a user, I fucking hate developers, because I know they could've done better. 90% of the software I use on a daily basis is basically mediocre because nobody seems to care about perfection. In fact, 90% of society seems to be like that. Someone has a good idea, and sometimes, if a startup did it, it's good for a while, and then it goes bad. If government is tasked to do it, it's bad from the start. Why must everything suck mildly?

The thing I don't get about large software projects is why there are occasionally bugs that live for years and no one gives a shit about them. Also, why do you, my fellow programmers, consistently mis-categorise serious bugs as feature requests?

CertBot has a bug where it ignores the order of domains in the numeric list you give it when you create a certificate, causing it to pick a random domain as the main one. Fixing that bug is not a feature request. If it's an annoyance, it's a bug.

And for those with memory constrained systems, let's *not* imitate Chrome's memory consumption for tabs.

I like the overall concept of Vivaldi with all the customisation options, but it's unfortunately a buggy browser. Many sites that work fine in Chrome and Safari don't work properly in Vivaldi. Also, Vivaldi occasionally crashes. It uses the Chromium engine under the hood, in a way that, for example, breaks YouTube on macOS. Random pages malfunction, like a mailing list unsubscribe form just now. I really want Vivaldi's tabs, Safari's speed and Chrome's consistency and support for ad blockers.

I like the overall concept of Vivaldi with all the customisation options, but it's unfortunately a buggy browser. Many sites that work fine in Chrome and Safari don't work properly in Vivaldi. Also, from time to time, Vivaldi will crash with a segmentation fault. Vivaldi uses the Chromium engine under the hood, but they are using it in a way that, for example, breaks YouTube on macOS. Random pages, usually obscure ones like an email unsubscribe form, malfunction. I really want the tabs, though.

This is like finding a hay in a needlestack.

The only "race condition" possible is if two subcircuits attempt to do opposite things to a particular data line. This happens more frequently by design than by accident, though, since you're forced to implement extra circuitry to avoid a short if you want two subcircuits to share the same wire.

It's interesting to note that the direction that programming is moving in, with instant transitions between immutable states, resembles digital logic itself a great deal. In a digital circuit, a clock pulse triggers the next state, and each state is instantaneous and concurrent across the whole system, and there is no memory of previous states unless you add memory registers. Even with memory registers, state remains immutable between the clock transitions.

@dd86k What is this project about?

@quad Oh Lord, won't you buy me a self-hosted cloud...

@MightyPork I think I2C has been working all along.