marble-drink

I won't be here forever

Hard to read, but we definitely need to make sure the GNU project stays in the right hands.

Yeah, we've celebrated that for the past 50 years or so. It's time to move on.

The bicycle is a far greater invention. Cars are not sustainable.

Cars don't kill anywhere near as many people in Europe, though. The US is an outlier when it comes to first-world countries.

Still, I would like it if the power was taken back from from cars on the road. Cars should be a third-class road user, below bicycles and pedestrians.

My idea for improving driver quality is to do what pilots do. Before you are even allowed behind the wheel of a car you must have proven experience using the road on a non-motorised vehicle like a bicycle. Then you can apply for a small car. After some experience with that you can apply for a large car if you need to. It's insane that we let kids drive cars before they've even learnt how to use road.

I was recently walking on Kinder Scout in the Peak District (UK) and was surprised and quite alarmed to find people up there following Google maps. Many of the "paths" are really just public rights of way, which in Great Britain means you have a right of passage, not that it is necessarily easy or possible in all weathers. One of these goes straight across a bog on top of the plateau with no sign of path in sight.

I suspect all of these "paths" are automated additions to their map, but without the proper accompanying information it is quite irresponsible to show these.

Why? Google is a low-quality road map for cars. They don't put much effort into walking. In the OSM community Google is considering a very low bar. We aim to meet or exceed the quality of mapping like Ordnance Survey.

Yeah, that's all great. But I don't want to be a part of a relationship where I'm disposed of as soon as I stop being useful.

I'm not religious so going to church would feel wrong.

Internet dating is awful. My standards are too high.

The truth is finding a suitable mother is very far down my list of priorities. I know I could easily find one, but probably not a beautiful one. I don't think it's worth putting that much effort into something that is ultimately putting my heart into the hands of another person. Computers don't lie and cheat. I have sex with women but none of them are suitable to receive my support to raise children.

I firmly believe that the key to happiness is to do what you're good at. For me that means working and not raising children. I will never be a stay at home dad.

I didn't say it was bad. But women who work tend to do all of this and want to maintain that lifestyle which is clearly ridiculous to do on a single income with children.

I cannot find a woman who will be a full time mother after giving birth. I will not put my children into day care for 12 hours a day. I could afford to support a family in my own, but only with my very frugal and minimalist lifestyle (no fancy car, no expensive holidays, no eating at restaurants etc)

It's not an assault. I am sharing my philosophy. It's what keeps me happy and why I don't need to go to support groups. But I guess that's just not welcome here.

There is a short talk by Eben Moglen [0] which is only 10 minutes long but jam packed with wisdom. One part which changed the way I think about using computers is how he describes GUI interfaces: as a "point and grunt" or "caveman" interface. Using UNIX, on the other hand, is to use language to communicate with the computer and comes with all the benefits that we have when using it to interact with people.

[0] https://youtu.be/uKxzK9xtSXM

That's their fault, not mine. Read the drivel from celebrities on your carefully filtered twitter feed if you don't ever want to be offended.

Predictably downvoted. Apparently I'm not allowed to express how I feel.

Indeed. For me, being stoic is the only way. Crying about problems does nothing so why do anything at all? We all have the power to choose to be the best person we can be given our circumstances. That is what I try to do every day.

For me, men who need to share their feelings are weak. This is what women do. But we can't all be women. Men need to learn to enjoy their advantages: superior strength, speed, and resilience, but accept that problems won't just go away if you cry about them. Either solve the problem or accept it and don't give it another precious moment's thought.

England actually had at least one more competing gauge: Brunel gauge. Brunel thought it was silly to keep using the same arbitrary gauge and that a broader gauge would be more comfortable. Eventually it was decided to use the Stephenson gauge instead, though, and this became "standard" gauge.

It's an interesting example of a compromise where having just one standard is preferable to trying to find the perfect standard.

Google can, and does, use open data in their products.

Amazing that someone would choose to work for a huge American corporation for no fee instead of providing the data to anyone who wants it.

Talk of metaprogramming intrigues me. I'd like to hear what a Lisp user makes of it because I find non-Lisp users are usually amazed by any metaprogramming at all and can't be as critical about it.

I have a colleague who regularly interrupts me to say the complete opposite of what I want to say. I'm, of course, in the church of strong civility, so I always continue after the rude interruption. You'll often hear something like:

"We're struggling to meet our deadlines so I think we should---"

"Rewrite the project."

"---Avoid rewrites and do small reactors."

Yeah but I am sceptical about being able to enter truly deep thought while walking. I wonder how much work Torvalds actually does on it. He doesn't actually write much kernel code these days so might not need deep thought as much any more.

Don't just learn SQL. An ORM like SQLAlchemy will allow you to save time and write cleaner, more comprehensible code.

But do learn SQL. Do not use an ORM before you have learnt SQL.

Thanks. Now this is an appropriate link asking for money for this thread. The post I was replying to was completely inappropriate and shameless hijacking of an Inkscape thread.

Apparently the README is very important for this project. How else could I learn that it's the most downloaded python package and that I can certainly trust it?

No it isn't. Are you thinking about filter-branch?

Wow, that's awful. I've never seen a production project where a developer is allowed to push hundreds of pointless commits directly to master.

Git gives you the tools to do that effectively. Namely cheap branching and rebasing. That means you can commit to your heart's content on your own branch, then squash it all down to something useful for master. A hundred tiny commits on a shared branch is just being a bad citizen.

One thing I love about Inkscape is its keyboard interface and specifically how it lets you scroll up and down, left and right and in and out. This should be standard in all two-dimensional editing applications but I find it sadly is not. When it comes to editing speed, the keyboard is absolutely essential and shouldn't be an afterthought.

Thanks but I'll stick with free software. Why don't you give me an option to pay you to contribute to Inkscape instead?