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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I think the situation is more nuanced than that.

    Of course, the F-35 program was an incredibly expensive mess (litterally the most expensive weapon program of all time), because of conflicting specs, data leaks, political infighting, cost overruns which are the stuff of legend, etc… At some moments, there were certainly reasons to think the whole program would collapse on itself like wet tissue paper.

    But there are operational F35 now. 900+ as of 2023, which is 4 time more than the rest of Gen 5 fighters combined. And performance-wise, it is good, especially on the stealth & avionics parts. On the other side, the J-20 is largely unproven (probably a decent design, but not as good), and the Su-57 is a bunch of glorified prototypes.

    Now sure, cost is high, maintenance is time-consuming, availability somewhat below target, but it’s not particularly surprising for high-performance equipment. It may fall short of the ambition of the program on the cost part, but by itself it’s a dangerous and fully operational fighter.



  • If the game is reasonably well-coded, there’s not going to be any obvious difference between a game running on Windows, a game running native on Linux, and a game running using Proton.

    I mean yeah, you could have some performance impact (usually light, occasionaly not so), maybe video not playing (some games use video formats for cutscenes which can’t be distributed on Linux installs), or maybe issues with windowing (Tropico 6 has an weird bug where the game mouse pointer has a bit of offset compared to the real one, until you change screen size).

    But in most cases, if it works, it works the same.




  • While I respect the degree of technical expertise you can get on SO, I am very much convinced this is a failed experiment which will slowly collapse on itself. And I think that because the organization of the site is completely at odds with it’s professed goal.

    SO is not really a forum, because time is supposed to be irrelevant : a 12 years old answer takes precedence over a question asked now, failing to consider that, maybe, the context of this question has changed. Its ridiculous, especially in the context of software engineering.

    On the other hand, it’s not a library either : a library is a collection of book, which are relatively self-contained knowledge systems. And in practice, the SO answers are not self-contained. They merely answer a specific point, with no guaranteed coherence from one to another, so a beginner cannot use them to build a broad understanding of a subject.

    To take the analogy of the Cathedral and the Bazar, I am under the impression that SO members are trying to build a cathedral out of the stone sold by hundred of bazaar people, and refuse to see that fact that all stones all having different sizes and dimensions is maybe kind of a problem when you build a cathedral.


  • I don’t doubt you had terrible experiences related to sexual harassment, and I’m sorry for you. Nobody deserve this.

    But don’t try to muddle the issue here. You have been attacked by people. And you decided that the pertinent group to understand these attacks is their gender, so we need to differentiate on this basis. You could have analyzed it along education level, wealth, apparent race, apparent religion, social persona, zodiacal type, car brand, profession, haircut, or anything else.

    But you chose to judge the risk level of people based on their gender. Because you think that, for some reason, you have a much clearer perspective than other people you know litterally nothing about but their gender. It is the exact same thing that makes people discriminate others about the color of their skin, or wealth, or any of the illegal type of discrimination. You are using the same logic, and by extension, you are legitimazing it. There’s a reason discrimination laws do a blanket ban of this kind of thing, and not “some genders/races/others are more protected than others” : it’s because every use of every kind of this arbitrary categorization strengthen every other.






  • The problem of the “Punch a Nazi” line of thought is not particularly that Nazis are subject to violence : most people (centrists included) couldn’t care less about what happens to them specifically.

    No, the real issue here is that people don’t trust the perception of others. You don’t attack a fascist, you attack someone who you think is a fascist. And polarization of the political discourse mean that you can be easily accused of crypto-fascism for pretty much anything (see Hexbear for example). And some people will take it at face value, and hence feel justified to attack you.




  • I don’t disagree with you on the principle. But at this price tag (a significant part of the budget of a major Metropolitan area), you don’t only need to know it’s good : you need to know by how much it is better ; when the payoff is going to begin ;and how to you make sure you don’t create issues which will persist for up to a century. Granted, large road projects aren’t cheap either.

    It also tie a significant amount of money each year to pay for continuous operation of these transportation, and for the moment, there is a significant number of transportation jobs which can’t be filled. Roads are costly too, but can withstand these employment issue… for a time.

    US cities probably should invest much more in this area, but there are limits to the ability of these project to solve transportation issues.



  • Yeah, don’t try this one in french then. The comic is extremely loquacious (it’s a stylistic choice, which work very well for me), and even native French speakers often miss wordplays, or find the style difficult to understand (sentences can become quite convoluted for the sake of a pun).

    To be honest, albums are fairly unequal : some of them are downright classics, some of them are quite forgettable.

    If you want an idea of the stuff, I found this translation of one here, which should give you an idea of what the short strips ones look like. Even I remember this one being better in french.



  • Well, I think we’ll have disagree here : you take on the calculation problem is the opposite of both my theorical framework and practical experience of industry (I work as an Electrical Engineer).

    You can try to predict the demand of course, but the prediction is always fairly different from reality. Often, it’s workable. Sometimes it’s not.

    But to be honest, the Economic Calculation Problem is ill-named, because from a Signal Processing persepctive, it’s not really a processing power problem. No, the problem is in the Signal-to-noise ratio of the signals used to do these calculation.

    Ultimately, if you have a very noisy signal (and economic signals are incredibly noisy), there’s really not much you can do with just more processing power. And I have good reason to believe (based on Psycho-social understanding) that the way these signals are transmitted in Centrally Planned system (socialist or not), are particularly noisy themselves. Much more than prices-and-market based systems.

    That being said, I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye here. Thanks for the discussion tho, it is always interesting to hear how other people think.