Agreed, they probably are cheap garbage (I myself don’t know, I haven’t driven cars regularly in a while), but two things:

1. Manufacturing volume is really important in making cars. You need know-how, you need experts and ways to make things better and deliver incremental improvements, and that becomes a lot easier when you have higher volumes.

2. People don’t have lots of cash to burn these days - quality is easy to sacrifice when you don’t have the cash to pay up.

Ease of adoption, if I’m not mistaken (so I was told 20-ish years ago when I started learning C++). Think back to the early/mid '90s - there was a lot of existing C code out there back then, people really didn’t want to throw it away but had few options if they wanted to use something else. C compatibility offered a way for large companies to incrementally adopt C++. All you had to do was change your compiler and your existing C code would compile, and you could write new stuff in C++. In the mean time, other languages could only leverage that existing code by using message passing or FFI-like frameworks. For example, you would have to use JNI if you were writing Java I think - maybe there were other options, but it was a big pain to deal with at the time, especially since tooling was probably not as polished back then.

Maybe it’s not as much of an issue today, but they have to maintain compatibility with earlier versions, so while it helped adoption a lot, it also is a big challenge for the language and its ability to move forward.

We live in a system where costs are only realized at the manufacture of a product and not at its disposal. The inevitable outcome is cheap production wins, leading to throwaway societies, and ignoring the cost of disposal, which is also an important, even critical cost of associated with the product. Society is left to foot the bill, while the manufacturers prance away without having to cover the costs of the problems they created.

The solution is simple - if a company manufactures and sells a product, then that company should be responsible for its disposal as well. This will encourage longer lasting products and reduced environmental damage as well. Plastics are not as cheap as they seem when you factor in the full lifecycle of the costs associated with them.

It would be difficult to implement in practice, but pales in comparison to the massive damage we’re doing to the environment.

Well it’s about time we fix that, isn’t it?

This is true, but the risks of the oil economy have been known for a very long time. Everybody knows that the oil/auto fuel supply chain is in areas with fragile geopolitical relations and it’s not like this hasn’t happened before.

What we should be doing is channeling our frustration toward transitioning from ICE automobiles to EVs[1], but look at how slowly European carmakers are adapting. The rate of change in Germany has been embarrassingly slow and China is galaxies ahead of anyone else. We need to invest and compete, rather than throwing up our hands and blaming others for fucking up things we shouldn’t be depending on anymore.

[1]: and improving public transit too of course

I managed to beat 4BC and decided I wasn’t having fun anymore. Once you get to 4BC or 5BC, it feels more like taking a driving test or a calculus exam, and I’d rather play a game that’s a little more forgiving of making mistakes because I like to try silly new things.

Fortunately, custom mode is available, so I would play on 5BC with refillable health potions and enemy damage turned down to the lowest amount possible, and I found it a lot more fun.

And side note: all games need a custom mode like Dead Cells has, it’s impossible to tune a game to a single difficulty that’s fun for everybody!

Dota 2 is the most I have logged at around 3000 hours, but I don’t have any friends to play with and don’t want to deal with randoms, so almost all of it is against bots. Even though the bots are garbage, there’s still so many creative, silly ways to play that game and ridiculous builds that are fun to try and see if they work.

Super Smash Brothers (64 and melee) is probably the most of all time though. Any time I pick up a new 2D game, I find myself comparing it to SSB in terms of mechanics. The way you control your characters in that series is the most innovative and compelling concept I have ever seen in a game. If I ever have the time to make a game myself, I would probably heavily model it based on that control scheme.

I also have to give a shoutout to Streets of Rogue, which is a fairly obscure rogue-like that deserves a lot more attention IMO. Another very replayable game with many fascinating play styles and ways to complete missions. It’s on Steam and it’s fantastic, I would highly recommend it.

Enter the Gungeon is another game I have high playtime on. It took about 40 hours before it started becoming fun, but man, it’s awesome once you finally figure out how to properly dodge enemies and make the most of your weapons and items.

If you go back a few decades, you would see how companies would produce technological innovations with the mindset of, “If we design the best, most useful device possible, customers will come to us and buy our product”.

Today, that has flipped into a mindset of, “We will create this technology, force users into adoption, and exploit them as hard as possible once we have them under our control.”

The technology has become a means to control users, not to enable them.

At least it’s good to see that people are catching on though.

Sure, I’m familiar with the conditions under which Javascript was created, but those are all political issues, not technical ones.

If you had to go back and recreate another C++, you would be forgiven for creating a bad language, because making a good, usable language without a garbage collector is really hard, and even moreso when it has to be compatible with C. If you had to recreate Javascript… I would think it would be expected that you don’t make a language with the same kinds of flaws JS has today. There were plenty of examples of languages Javascript could have been based off of when it was written (like Java).

Case in point: it took decades for Rust to come around which was the first real challenge to C++. In the same period of time, we saw several GC languages appear (Java, C#, Go, PHP, Swift, Ruby, Python, all younger than C++), all competing against each other. Javascript would have been abandoned if it didn’t have a monopoly on web programming.

I wholeheartedly agree, especially as someone with close friends and living in Bengal. I don’t even know how hot it gets there these days, but there’s a (very regrettably) good chance some of them may perish due to the heat.

But with that said, my concern is that individual action, or even collective actions by governments, on a planet with 8 billion people on it, simply isn’t enough in the grand scale of things. I believe that we have made enough technological advances to withstand an oil crisis, but what we need these days is a forcing event to push governments to adopt them and individuals to accept the transition. I am… cautiously hopeful that this could be that forcing moment.

And by the way, thanks for sharing those verses. I understand very little German, but even I can appreciate how beautiful those lines are.

Any chance that the American far right might have accidentally solved the global warming problem?

I also agree that Javascript is worse. C++ has two excuses for being bad:

1. It has to be compatible with C, a language that’s multiple decades older than it, and
2. It is not garbage collected.

Javascript has neither of those two excuses. People only use it today because of the ubiquity of web programming. In fairness, it did kill off a few other technologies, like Flash and Java applets, but that was more Webkit and Chrome picking it as the winner than anything else.

Maybe these arguments are a bit hand-wavy, but the way I see it, it’s like the C of the web programming era.

As a bit of an aside, I learned recently why Mozilla has the weird Corporate/Foundation structure that it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701441

Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501©(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.

Someone claiming to be the CEO of one of these foundations appears to confirm it. Just thought people might be interested to know since this comes up in pretty much every thread about Mozilla.

The only way to fend off far-right parties is to elect governments that will actually take action to make people’s lives better. I mean dramatic, even drastic actions to improvements in quality of life for real people, not billionaires.

Centrists and even some center-left parties don’t seem to get this, or they do but they don’t care. It seems like leftist parties are the only ones that are willing to step up. They need our support more than ever.

I don’t think you understand the implications of what you’re suggesting.

Forking a project as large as Gnome is a massive undertaking. Not only is it a lot of up-front work to implement the functionality, but you also have to stay up-to-date with all upstream changes, and there’s likely at least a few Gnome developers that are paid to work on it full-time, so that is a lot to maintain. And not only do you have to build it for your own distro, but you also have to convince maintainers of other distros to adopt it as well and put it in their repositories, otherwise you have no community of users, which means no community of developers either.

Forking Gnome is wildly impractical. It’s not a feasible suggestion to make at all.