Armand1

3

As other users have said, we aren't compilers.

Types are important for type safety, so you don't access properties that don't exist, can use polymorphism etc. However, having worked in both duck-typing and hard typing languages, I believe the most important part of a type is it's name.

Classes are are arbitrary constructs we create to help us understand and manage code. They are inherently organisational structures.

That may sound like an argument FOR putting the name of the class first. "If I know it's a ConnectionCredentialsQuery, I don't need to know it's name, the use-case is evident!" Classes often get reused though, like a CartesianPoint. You may create several instances of them. Which of the name and type below are more indicative of use?

    
CartesianPoint PlayerPosition;

Types are, to some extent, implementation detail. The name tells you what the variable is for, which is more important.

Another point: You will always need to name variables well, because after declaration, whenever you see a variable, you will only see its name. You want to be able to fully understand what you are looking at without having to mouse over or go back to the declaration of a variable.

Additionally, many typed languages will allow you to use a syntax to altogether avoid declaring the type of a variable if derived from somewhere else.

 csharp

    
var result = a + b;

var customer = new Customer();

Given that the type can be inferred, and therefore specifying it explicitly is optional, why make it the first thing you see? That means you need to move your eye back and forth when looking for the names of things. Which of these two are better for legibility:

 csharp

    
var result = a + b;
CartesianCoordinate playerPosition;

 typescript

    
const result = a + b;
let playerPosition: CartesianCoordinate;

Finally, you say that types are more important because they are important to the compiler, but compilers don't care about the order of these definitions. Compilers exist to allow us to write easier to read code. They exist to convert high level languages to low level byte code. They exist to enable more readable code.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Armand1 @lemmy.world 1w ago

Damn it I'm not in there

Armand1 @lemmy.world 2w ago

🎵 Well, some of us are cannibals who cut other people open like cantalopes 🎵

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 2w ago

GC doesn't stand for Gender Critical, but for Genital Checker.

Armand1 @lemmy.world 2w ago

When being "gender critical" is brought to legal action, it is not typically not about your internally held beliefs, it's about harassing others and discrimination.

If a white supremacist had a firmly held belief black people were inferior and they held a role in HR or talent acquisition, they would be unfit for the role and should be fired. Similarly if they were found to harass black people in the workplace.

One thing the gender criticals, like white supremacists and religious fundamentalists don't understand is this:

Your political views do not outweigh the rights of others

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 2w ago

Conservatives are still using it now. They are allergic to personal growth.

Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

It's true that they are anti-rights organisations though. It's a shame that telling truth to power is such a dangerous thing in the UK.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

With EU customers, not reporting a breach within 72 hours of learning about it is actually illegal under GDPR.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-33-gdpr/

Not sure how much trouble that can get you into though.

Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

Yeah, it is effectively subsidized by VC right now.

I expect what will happen after the bubble bursts is that the only affordable models will be quite small ones, not the energy chugging behemoths we have now.

They've already started cranking up prices in enterprise.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

This seems to be his view:

In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

He doesn't seem to subscribe to the idea that everything you use MUST be open source, as some more radical open source advocates do, but instead that more software SHOULD be open source.

I would definitely prefer if AI was open source and self-hosted (or at least E2EE if cloud hosted). Sometimes though the best tool for the job as things stand is closed source.

Aa for the legally dubious output, while AI can exactly replicate training data, it rarely does nowadays. It's usually an amalgam of stuff.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

I think broadly speaking what he says is reasonable. If you don't want to use AI, then don't, but I think it can be used somewhat responsibly.

I have all sorts of issues with AI tooling:

the centralization of power
the load it adds on maintainers because of the amount of slop bad developers (and non-devs) produce with it
the environmental impacts of using larger models
the data centers causing health risks
the impact on the PC industry
the degeneration of skills and knowledge.

That said, it's a tool, and can be used to amplify good work too.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

I've heard it's full of old conservatives, so probably Farage will win. I'd love to be wrong though.

If it's close, it's still a humiliation so it's a win in my book.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

I used to be pretty excited about phones coming out between 2012-2018. I used to switch phones every year or every two years. Back then, things would really improve every year or two.

When I switched from my Pixel 6 Pro to a 9 Pro, I didn't notice much of a difference. The only interesting changes happening in phones nowadays are foldables imo, but the price is still too high and I haven't got a real usecase for them.

Many of the more experimental brands have died off, like Razer, LG, HTC etc. That had their own funky gimmicks. Nothing is the only remaining brand that's making fun stuff.

It's also harder and less interesting to install custom ROMs than it used to be. Most companies lock down their phones, and Android is a mature platform now with most of the features you'd want on most devices.

If I had to summarize, phones have become reliable but boring. I might also just be getting older and more blasé.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

Yeah, it depends on the transgression.

If it's transphobia and sucking up to billionaires or the Israeli state, you get promoted.

If it's something that is actually viewed as a crime then it's more like this... sometimes.

The message is "you weren't good enough at hiding your crimes, you're making us look bad". Many of them often know about those transgressions, but they'll only distance themselves if they come out to the public.

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Armand1 @lemmy.world 3w ago

I was curious as to why they didn't mention his party, turns out he doesn't have one, but is an ex-Conservative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Spencer_(politician)

Elected as a Conservative, he had the whip withdrawn in May 2025, and now sits as an independent.

On 13 May 2025, he was charged by the Metropolitan Police with two counts of sexual assault that allegedly took place at London's Groucho Club in August 2023. As a consequence, he had the Conservative Party whip withdrawn.

Sounds like it was the incident mentioned in the article that made the Conservatives abandon him.