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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • This is incorrect. The C# is valid. Throw in a catch statement simply rethrows the caught exception. Source: I’ve been writing C# for 20 years, also the docs.

    I won’t act like MS absolutely didn’t steal core concepts and syntax from Java, but I’ve always thought C# was much more thoughtfully designed. Anders Hejlsberg is a good language designer, TypeScript is also a really excellent language.




  • Thanks for the fun summary! (Oh hey, its Atomic Poet, I follow you on Mastodon too, love your work!)

    I played the newer trilogy on PC years ago and really enjoyed them, great little action games. I’m too young and American to have enjoyed the Amiga in its day, though a Commodore 128 was literally this baby’s first computer. Big Team17 fan currently too, I adored Yoku’s (sent me down a digital pinball spiral that was finally slaked by Xenotilt) and love them as a publisher too, being behind great indies like Blasphemous and Dredge!



  • It’s an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

    Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn’t capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

    And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there’s no more “slack” in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

    This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there’s no pulling out of.

    You want FLOSS software that’s good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

    Eat. The. Rich.


  • There’s a break-up song on Chvrch’s debut album called Tether. One line, frequently repeated, goes “I’m feeling capable of… seeing the end.” A fine lyric, very breakup, much hopeful.

    Except, I can’t tell when listening that she isn’t saying “I feel incapable of…” I don’t know if it’s intentional but I think the ambiguity really elevates the song from semi-empowering breakup song to powerfully-relatable song about the chaos of seeing a relationship end; simultaneously believing you can get through it while also having no idea how you’ll ever get through it.

    It’s just fun wordplay too: feeling capable/feel incapable. Makes me want to use that structure more in my own writing.


  • He’s complaining that a number isn’t unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn’t supposed to be unique and he’s complaining that it’s not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.

    But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they’re supposed to be used.

    But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just… so many of them.


  • It’s wild too. I’ve been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn’t accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father’s name.)

    Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing!


  • This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.

    The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA’s gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.

    That’s why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don’t need a lot of info to financially ruin someone’s life.


  • I’m sure folks on here know this, but you know, there’s also that 10K a day that don’t so…

    What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a “natural” key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it’d make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.

    SSN is not unique to a person. They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one). Edit: (See responses) It seems I’m misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.

    And they’re protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don’t really want to store them at all (unless you’re the SSA, who would have guessed that’d ever come up though!?)

    It’s so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren’t dying.