Sure it's technically always a choice, but because society exists, some options are dramatically more plausible than others.
For example, say phones become more and more locked down and invasive. Technically you can choose not to have a phone, but how are you meant to function in today's society without a phone? Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone. Technically you could make your own phone, I guess, but that's very difficult.
I don't think you can reasonably make the argument that because technically everyone can make their own choices, we should be ok with whatever status quo in society.
I know, the expectation of phones and "just install our app" sucks, but it's easier than the alternatives for most people.
I don't think we should be ok with the status quo, and I think complaining about issues can be a catalyst for change, but rather than just complain about the state of affairs, I'm pointing out that alternatives exist, so it's on us to enact change.
TBH, I'm pessimistic about my words making a difference, but I want to promote independent/DIY mindset anyway. It's ironic that the frontier LLMs are proprietary platforms, yet they're enabling more independence to their users. Regardless, if everything goes to shit, we can still opt out and go back to the previous generation's lifestyle. No mobile phones and moving at the speed of snail mail doesn't sound all that bad, though I'd sure miss Google Maps.
Its not a boolean choice. How often, and how you use a phone matters as well. While I am no stranger to screen time, my phone sees very limited and specialized use. I look at the weather, I talk to my car, I text when I am away from my desks. I am not using my phone now.
"Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone" -- this is far from the truth in my world. It seems that how one uses a modern smartphone shapes one's world view of what's valued and what's possible.
Well said. I wonder about this too in my city (Australia). Apparently many people think "living the dream" is having an excessively large copy-pasted house in a copy-pasted suburb in the middle of nowhere, with no amenities, no green/community space, and you have to drive for an hour to get anywhere. It sounds like a dystopian lifestyle to me.
Or, you could live in a somewhat smaller residence where you actually have access to the things that make life good. But god forbid there's a train nearby that increases the sound by 10dB every 10 minutes and brings in all those dodgy (i.e. working class) people! Grrr functional society makes me angry!!
Could it be possible that what makes life good is subjective and people have different enjoyments and hobbies?
Having space for a woodworking shop or a large garden or a backyard pool or any other such things bring joy to some people. Not everyone wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan.
This is a strange opinion to me and I guess it's just "the divide". The things that make life good to me, of the things that change with home location, are peace/quiet, privacy, safety, meditative aspects, nature, space to host and play and have kids run around. Hearing that a city block contains "the things that make life good" is kind of baffling. Driving time is suboptimal but it's nowhere near an hour and it's worthwhile.
The suburbs I'm talking about do not really have nature or space to play. They are by no means rural, but endless seas of identical streets and houses. They are basically the worst of both worlds (no nature and no accessibility), with the advantage of a little extra space. And often they don't have shops either because again, they're so far from anything. Just sad places in my opinion.
Also, there is such thing as medium density, in between "city block" and "endless houses". No one seems to want to acknowledge this exists and may be a good option. I'm fortunate to live in a medium density area and I think it's very pleasant. It is absolutely not a city block but there's a train station 1 minute away and a local shopping/community precinct 10 minutes away (by walking). A decent amount of green space, and it seems to be popular with couples and small families. But suburbs like this seem to be rare and that's my point.
Nah I'm a C++ (ex?) enthusiast and modules are cool but there's only so many decades you can wait for a feature other languages have from day 1, and then another decade for compilers to actually implement it in a usable manner.
I am fine with waiting for a feature and using it when it's here.
But at this point, I feel like C++ modules are a ton of complexity for users, tools, and compilers to wrangle... for what? Slightly faster compile times than PCH? Less preprocessor code in your C++.. maybe? Doesn't seem worth it to me in comparison.
On one hand I can see where you can draw this argument from. But on the other hand I don't think daily consumption of the huge quantity of news that exists is necessary for having a decent political opinion, especially given that most news is inflammatory junk (at least in my country). I just don't need a 5 page breakdown of every single event that some corpo decided to shove down our throats.
Also - and maybe I'm naive for this - I don't really need news to inform my political opinion because the current state of affairs is so far from my ideal world. Like no matter what could reasonably occur in the news, I still know who I'm voting for on polling day.
If you look at enough cheapo/handmade circuit boards you'll notice they often look like the bottom one. Cramped, untidy, or otherwise odd trace layout, poor part placement, poor soldering. The top one - although looking less space efficient because there's more going on - is layed out better. The design just flows in a way amateur designs don't.
I've been an avid C++ user for ages and this is the first time I've seen the final spec of C++26 reflections used in a practical context - and wow am I having a "wtf" moment at the syntax.
^^T ?? obj.[:member:] ?? What is this craziness? No way this is the best we could come up with. I'm actually thinking C++ may be going too far (and this is as someone who thinks template metaprogramming is "fine").
Never before has that quote "inside C++ is a smaller, better language trying to get out" been more applicable.
While I agree it has a certain Perl feeling and I used to advocate for functions/operators, e.g. reflex or similar, it still feels better than unicode operators in FP languages or the two macro systems used by Rust.
At least being based on compile time execution infrastructure means you can debug it on IDEs, Clion already has some work into that direction.
On the other hand, I know plenty of devs with a degree who are not very good. So should we conclude that have a degree is not very correlated with dev skill?
It's kind of a meme within the photography community though. People will spend many thousands of dollars on a camera that's supposedly "the best" (pick your fave reasons, ideally as obscure as possible) and then not actually shoot with it. Looking at yall, Leica fans.
Yeah this what I immediately think too any time I see an article like this. Adjustments like contrast and saturation are plausible to show before/after, but before any sort of tone curve makes no sense unless you have some magic extreme HDR linear display technology (we don't). Putting linear data into 0-255 pixels which are interpreted as SRGB makes no sense whatsoever. You are basically viewing junk. It's not like that's what the camera actually "sees". The camera sees a similar scene to what we see with our eyes, although it natively stores and interprets it differently to how our brain does (i.e. linear vs perceptual).
For example, say phones become more and more locked down and invasive. Technically you can choose not to have a phone, but how are you meant to function in today's society without a phone? Basically everything of importance assumes you have a phone. Technically you could make your own phone, I guess, but that's very difficult.
I don't think you can reasonably make the argument that because technically everyone can make their own choices, we should be ok with whatever status quo in society.
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