Spyke

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Insanity

A perfectly rational agent should choose behavior that works when other agents apply the same behavior.

If everyone uses her strategy, the queue can only get shorter if there's exactly one person left in the queue, but it gets longer each time someone joins it.

In an idealized world where everyone can instantly teleport, this doesn't technically reduce the throughput of the queue, however it does still increase its size unnecessarily. (and in the real world it also decreases throughput, potentially by a significant amount if the queue is physically long enough)
 

Even granting that she doesn't care about anyone else, the strategy is still slower for her even if she's the only one using it.

Judging from the picture, she will lose at least a few seconds when the person in front of her leaves the queue and she still has to walk the remaining distance to the front of the queue.

For a more extreme example, imagine the queue is a kilometer long. Assuming everyone before her shuffled along like the average queue enjoyer, she would now be one person-width away from the goal had she shuffled along with them.
If she used her "perfectly rational" strategy instead, she would now have to walk a full kilometer which, being very generous to her, would cost her an additional 12 minutes.

Perfectly rational behavior, if your only objective is to annoy others.
 

(there is perhaps an argument in favor of some variant of her strategy, if there is a high time/effort/opportunity cost associated with starting and/or stopping, but I think realistically this will rarely if ever be the case in an airport security queue)

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What Era was the best and why was it the 90s?

I don't share the hate for flat design.
It's cleaner than the others, simpler and less distracting. Easier on the eyes, too. It takes itself seriously and does so successfully imo (nice try, aero). It feels professional in a way all the previous eras don't - they seem almost child-like by comparison.

Modern design cultivates recognizable interactions by following conventions and common design language instead of goofy icons and high contrast colors. To me, modern software interfaces look like tools; the further you go back in time, the more they look like toys.

Old designs can be charming if executed well and in the right context. But I'm glad most things don't look like they did 30 years ago.

I'm guessing many people associate older designs with the era they belonged to and the internet culture at the time. Perhaps rosy memories of younger days. Contrasting that with the overbearing corporate atmosphere of today and a general sense of a lack of authenticity in digital spaces everywhere, it's not unreasonable to see flat design as sterile and soulless. But to me it just looks sleek and efficient.
I used to spend hours trying to customize UIs to my liking, nowadays pretty much everything just looks good out of the box.

The one major gripe I have is with the tendency of modern designs to hide interactions behind deeply nested menu hopping. That one feels like an over-correction from the excessively cluttered menus of the past.
That and the fact that there's way too many "settings" sections and you can never figure out which one has the thing you're looking for.

P S. The picture did flat design dirty by putting it on white background - we're living in the era of dark mode!

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Yup

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It's almost like their class interests changed and class interests influence behavior.

Almost like it's proving their point. Capitalist critique is not about individual "bad" people but about a system with perverse and harmful incentives.

(granting your claim for sake of argument - feel free to support it with data)

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I'm Guilty as Charged

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They also usually assume a lot about the users' knowledge of the domain of the program itself.

In my experience, many programs' man/help is very brief, often a sentence or less per command/flag, with 2 or more terms that don't mean anything to the uninitiated. Also, even when I think I know all the words, the descriptions are not nearly precise enough to confidently infer what exactly the program is going to do.
Disclaimers for potentially dangerous/irreversible actions are also often lacking.

Which is why I almost always look for an article that explains a command using examples, instead of trying to divine what the manual authors had in mind.

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The lengths we have to go to

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Yup.

Spaces? Tabs? Don't care, works regardless.
Copied some code from somewhere else? No problem, 9/10 times it just works. Bonus: a smart IDE will let you quick-format the entire code to whatever style you configured at the click of a button even if it was a complete mess to begin with, as long as all the curly braces are correct.

Also, in any decent IDE you will very rarely need to actually count curly braces, it finds the pair for you, and even lets you easily navigate between them.

The inconsistent way that whitespace is handled across applications makes interacting with code outside your own code files incredibly finicky when your language cares so much about the layout.

There's an argument to be made for the simplicity of python-style indentation and for its aesthetic merits, but IMO that's outweighed by the practical inconvenience it brings.

news

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Kellogg’s is going to war over Mexico’s nutrition label rules. A similar fight is coming to the U.S.

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Actually fruits are pretty great for us, if they aren't highly processed.
Better to eat an apple than drink apple juice, also better to eat an apple than just about anything from the supermarket that isn't fresh.
Of course, you still need a balanced diet, and you can't get nearly all the necessary nutrients from just apples. Still, assuming an otherwise nutrient-complete diet, it's a lot less healthy to eat a slice of frozen pizza than an apple or a banana. (the apple might even contain less available sugar than the pizza slice - people often overestimate how much sugar fruits really contain)

The "stuff removed" bit is more important than you seem to give it credit for. Take out all the fiber and water and sure it's still the same sugars that are left over, but we didn't evolve to consume large quantities of pure sugar, so it spikes our insulin and gets stored as excess fat.

Fruit juice is pretty unhealthy, because all the sugar is more available due to all the fiber being stripped out and you can consume a dozen apples' worth in a few minutes, which you wouldn't do with actual apples.

Sure, there's not that much fiber left in raisins either. But in the context of musli they can be combined with whole grains and nuts, so you get enough fiber back to make the sugar less quickly digested and thus more healthy.

A third of the entire cereal mix being sugar is definitely worse than musli with raisins (which comes to about 10g of sugar per 100g), especially considering that a good portion of the rest of the mass in the case of musli is made up of fiber, proteins and healthy fats.

Adding sugar isn't just "another big issue", it's the big issue. Eating fresh fruits is a non-issue, and usually so is eating dried fruits in moderation.

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In case you forgot.

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Extra steps that guarantee you don't accidentally treat an integer as if it were a string or an array and get a runtime exception.
With generics, the compiler can prove that the thing you're passing to that function is actually something the function can use.

Really what you're doing if you're honest, is doing the compiler's work: hmm inside this function I access this field on this parameter. Can I pass an argument of such and such type here? Lemme check if it has that field. Forgot to check? Or were mistaken? Runtime error! If you're lucky, you caught it before production.

Not to mention that types communicate intent. It's no fun trying to figure out how to use a library that has bad/missing documentation. But it's a hell of a lot easier if you don't need to guess what type of arguments its functions can handle.

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Expert

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Oh neat, a real whoosh in the wild, on Lemmy!

On a more serious note, vim is one of the most initially unintuitive commonly used pieces of software I've encountered.

Sure, if you put in a little time and learn it, it's not rocket science. But that seems like a weird standard for an essential tool used for one of the most common computing tasks of today.

In response to your initial question, obviously it's a meme. But like most good memes, it's born out of a common* human experience. What do you think is the most common reaction when someone is thrown into vim for the first time? My guess is "what's this?" or something similar, followed very soon by "how do I exit this?". And the answer is, by modern computer users' standards, quite arcane.

IF you are somewhat familiar with the Linux terminal, you'll try CTRL+C and IF you're paying close attention you will notice that vim is giving you a hint. But if it's your first time interacting with vim, chances are at least one of those conditions is not met. So now you're stuck. And after an optional small moment of panic/disorientation, you google "how to exit vim" (provided you were at least lucky enough to notice/remember what program you're in) => a meme is born.

Exiting vim is almost like a right of passage for fresh Linux enjoyers. It's not a hard task but it can seem daunting at first encounter, which is humorous given that quitting a program is normally such an easy thing to do.

One more note, there is a group of people who will encounter vim quite unexpectedly and unintentionally: Windows users performing their first commit using git bash. They won't even know they're in vim, they're dropped directly into edit mode and there's no instructions for confirming the commit message, much less how to exit/cancel the operation.

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Yup

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That's true. However.

The owning class has interests directly opposed to the working class, which makes that "natural" trait toxic to the working class. In addition, the owning class has a lot more power.

Your landlord wants to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. (fair enough right?) The problem is that for that to happen

  • demand needs to stay high or go higher which means that
  • supply needs to stay low which means that (at the level of class interests, not personal belief)
    Your landlord doesn't want new affordable housing to be built in your area. They want you to never own a house, never have any cheaper rent options. They don't want to have to keep renting to you at the price you are paying now.
    They don't want to have to invest money in making your apartment/house safe or comfortable.

The problem is not that people will put their own wellbeing above yours, it's that their wellbeing is in conflict with yours. A conflict of interests between classes... class conflict... class warfare. And they have all the guns.
It doesn't have to be this way.

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Yup

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"They have all the guns" is a metaphor in the context of class warfare.

I mean that they have the means to employ force (usually through police, but not exclusively) in their interest as well as having the entire power of the state behind them (disproportionate wealth means they have disproportionate political influence which means they can lobby for laws to be adjusted in their favor. Even when the law seems just, it is rarely applied in the same way to wealthy people in practice).

Not to mention that they can and do buy influence over the media apparatus, controlling narratives and tricking the working class into acting against their own interests.

Within the framework of class conflict, those are the "guns".

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If you lost half of your income, but got memories of a a version of yourself living a life of leisure with that part of your income every night, would life be better or worse than it is right now?

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The point is not the difference between a fake memory and a real one (let's grant for now that they are undistinguishable) but the fact that positive experiences are worth a lot more than just the memories they leave you with.

I may not know the difference between a memory of an event that I experienced and a memory of an event I didn't experience. Looking back on the past, they're the same.
But each moment of pleasure that I only remember, without having experienced it, was essentially stolen from me. Pleasure is a state of consciousness and only exists in the present.