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  • 17 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2024

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  • By the power invested in me by, well, nobody whatsoever, can I just take a minute to say, let’s all cool down a little in the comments!

    There’s a lot of arguing against:

    • The idea that acknowledging the tragic reality of climate change makes you defeatist
    • The idea that because we have had some great advantages in green tech we can sit back and let climate change fix itself

    I don’t see anyone making those arguments here though! Just lots of people concerned about climate change with different skews of how positive/negative we should feel.

    Personally, I swing between powerful optimism and waking in terror at 3:00am for the future we’re hurtling towards. I’m sure other people are the same, so let’s just be friendly to the fact that other people are in different vibes to us.

    There are some people working together very well right now to dismantle the climate, so let’s all remember that when we’re talking with each other.

    Peace and love!



  • Yes, for sure!! I hope my call for policitcal action didn’t come across as “don’t do anything and wait for politicians to sort it out!”.

    I was trying to get at the need for collective discussion and action, over the idea of a climate change fix that’s based on people’s feeling superior for their individual actions, especially because without political change, a lot of even the individual changes we need to make (more heatpumps, EVs over ICEs, etc) are only accessible to those with sufficient wealth.




  • I have advice that you didn’t ask for at all!

    SQL’s declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn’t work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It’s meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it’s just a bunch of extra rules to remember.

    Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn’t have to worry about performance.

    I.e. instead of:

    SELECT
      one.col_a,
      two.col_b
    FROM one
    LEFT JOIN
        (SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two
        ON one.x = two.x
    

    you can do this:

    WITH two as (
         SELECT * FROM somewhere
         WHERE something
    )
    
    SELECT
      one.col_a,
      two.col_b
    FROM one
    LEFT JOIN two
    ON one.x = two.x
    

    Especially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.


  • I find meat eaters ask me “would you eat grown meat?” a lot, but my response is always just “I guess maybe? I honestly don’t miss meat that much”. I haven’t come across any vegetarians/vegans who are particularly psyched about it either.

    This is all speculation, but I’m not particularly convinced there’s much of a market for lab grown meat over soy based products given how much more expensive they need to be.


  • Ok really tangential rant here!

    I find societal attitudes to art and morality really crazy.

    I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that art and morality should be linked, but it only ever seems to happen in a negative capacity of “don’t listen to x because they did y”.

    There’s a whole strain of:

    • Artists who are not necessarily bad people, but whose art is aggresively immoral (I guess an obvious example would be Biggie Smalls or someone who frequently raps about sexual assault and violence in a positive way, but also the ammount of mainstream pop or country that has sexist or racist undertones)
    • Artists who try hard to inject their morality into their work (such as Becky Chambers’ climate positive fiction, or Giancinto Scelsi’s anti-facist music)

    On the whole, I don’t see anyone care very much about the above two points, people just “like what they like”, which is as if we think morality and art are two seperate things.

    That makes sense, but then there’s this wierd category where “oh that person did this bad thing, so now their art is invalid”.

    So, what’s the overall attitude? Like, art isn’t related to morality generally, but there’s some mysterious line where if it’s crossed art moves into the “forbidden zone”?

    I’m all for calling bad people to account for their moral behaviour, but the way we do it in art is so jumbled and inconsistent.


  • Short answer is no, I think because what tools you need for programming change so much based on the development you’re doing. C++ developers need compiler toolchain stuff that Javascript developers would never need to look at and vice versa.

    Curveball answer is that modern extensible IDEs with the power of language servers and plugins have kind of become this. I’d massively recommend properly getting into one of the following and learning how to configure new languages and plugins:

    • VScode
    • Neovim
    • Emacs
    • Helix

    (Sure I’ve probably missed some great options, feel free to flame me on why notepad++ should be OPs first choice)










  • Ah Marginalia is absolutely awesome! I feel like modern search is almost an extension of website names now, so if I want to find netflix but don’t know it’s website, I might search for “netflix”. Marginalia is actually a cool way to find new stuff- like you can search “bike maintenance” and find cool blog posts about that topic.

    I honestly can’t remember if that’s something google and the like used to do, but doesn’t now, or if they never did. Either way, I love it!