theneverfox

Motherfucker... How many times do you you have to fail before you listen to your customers, who are screaming what they want?

This is why voting with your wallet is nonsense. They'll never learn why they failed, only that they did

Why do you think C is the one true language? It's a tool.

There's a single very simple answer to "what tool should I use?". Use the best tool for the job

The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What's in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

For you, the best tool might always be C. I don't know how you've specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there's just no better option for the jobs you take on

For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I've chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I'm not meticulous, it's against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don't need to understand to start doing

All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won't be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can't afford the cost

Ultimately, I think you've correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn't the tools, it's the fact that the cost is someone else's time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can't - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don't know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don't know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don't want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don't want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

That's the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I'd go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren't the problem - the economics are the problem

They're trying to make this the new recycling aren't they... Pitching an idea that seemingly would work, and feels like we're doing something without actually addressing the problem

When the media starts over focusing on something odd, it's because billionaires have an agenda

Of course, you have to wait until the movie company decides to sell approved sunglasses for an additional free. Or get written approval beforehand

It's also copyright infringement for your life experiences to influence your understanding of the film in ways not intended by the copyright holder. Especially if you think it was bad.

Anyone you share these unapproved opinions with is a potential sale, adding full ticket price + digital rental to the damages

I thought the same thing. It's a full answer - it's not just "it's the motherboard", it's "this is what is happening, we've reproduced it, and this is how you'd go about fixing it"

It's like the Irish potato famine - Ireland had the output to support themselves. You'd think capitalism would bow to survival - but it doesn't

Will we cut off exports to keep people alive? The people with money won't.

The rubber has met the road. Physics has caught up with creative accounting. If we don't act now, will we act when people start dying?

That's basically what I'm saying - the US massively overproduces food. There's many problems with how it's done and how it's used, but the Americas aren't likely to starve. So long as the US stands, starvation isn't likely - we literally burn crops to keep production at a level where we could feed much of the world

Climate refugees aren't murderhobos - they're people. People that will mostly without a job, often living out of their cars, and largely desperate. They need just as much to survive, but desperate people do desperate things. The ones that aren't desperate will integrate, the ones who are will be a burden on the system

Let's say Florida or Texas start bleeding population. Almost nowhere is equipped to handle 5 million more people in a short time frame - it would wreak havoc on the job market, strain supply chains, and lead to a massive increase in crime. Desperate people do desperate things

Yes, it's our current problems magnified. There is enough to go around, but not like we do it today. We have to restructure the world - will we do it today, while we have breathing room, will we do it in a decade, when our systems fall apart around us, or will we do it decades from now, when the choice is between sacrifice and death

Climate change is here - it's a right now problem. If we give it time, it could collapse everything - if the US collapses entirely, a famine in Toronto is a possiblity. Every city could starve. I don't think we'll get to that point, but there will be death. There is already death. The sooner we start to address reality, the less suffering our species will undergo

I don't think humanity could die out unless Earth becomes another Venus. We're too adaptable, too widespread for that. And if we've already lost, who cares. It's a pointless line of thinking. We could be screwed, but I don't think​ we are...I think the Earth trends towards a stability humans can live with. I think we have more systems balancing us, if we go down that road it'll be a slow and painful one we won't live to see

This is a problem that will affect you, it will affect everyone. We can minimize it - many will die no matter what we do. But most could survive, but only if we change the systems at play - I think we'll get there, but the question is how much suffering we endure before then

We could. It's a totally solvable problem - until it isn't. If an aquifer is dry and you're already rationing the water, what can you do? Presumably ship in enough water to keep people alive, if not to sustain commercial needs too

Which is going to drain water from somewhere else, and what if they're having the same issue? Take it from further. Salt lake City was looking into the idea of building a pipeline from the Mississippi, and I'm sure someone is looking into building a fleet of water tankers and checking if there's profit to be had

Now, where's the part in all this where we take back water rights? Where's the part where we start to fix the problem?

You know how we had SARS, and bird flu, and swine flu, and MERS? And every time scientists rang the alarm bell, but it turned out to not be a big deal? It's because they knew COVID was inevitable - they knew the sketchy meat markets were a huge vector for a coronavirus to cross the species barrier.

COVID could've been much worse, but it certainly affected everyone. It also probably could have been prevented, or at least delayed

These smaller, regional problems are warning signs. A lot of people are dying from them already, but if we don't take them seriously they're just going to get big enough to have global effects. Not in the next century, in the next decade

Are we going to go extinct from climate change? I don't think so. Are you going to die from climate change? Probably not. Will someone you know die from it? Possibly. Will it negatively impact your life? Absolutely, it already has, and it will keep doing so in interestingly obvious ways

Because it's a monopoly created by international agreement. It's like a phone number - it needs to be routable in the system, but if you follow the standards, you can get integrated into the system as a registrar

The top level domains are owned by countries - the UK has .UK, the US has .com and .gov, the UK has .io (because they stole it), but most countries have just one. They charge a fee to register a secondary domain, and the registrar can charge whatever they want to their customers to register on their behalf

This is just the centralized system though - you could build your own, AOL tried to do that through "keywords" back in the 90s

That's not the effects I'm talking about - what we were talking about specifically was water shortages, across the US we've drained aquifers that will need centuries to build back up. Another fun side effect is crazy sinkholes

Droughts and lack of snowpack obviously play into it, but across the Western states it's already a critical problem - and we've done very little to address it. We don't have a plan, and the problem isn't going to fix itself - wild ideas like water pipelines across multiple states have been proposed, we could provide drinking water in tankers temporarily, but ultimately this just buys a bit more time. This is a right now problem - we've been rationing and talking about this future problem since I was a child, but water needs have only gone up

As for other similar issues happening right now - wildfires across the continent, massive floods everywhere, massive crop failures in China and India, Spain turning into a desert, algae blooms killing already depleted fisheries, deadly heatwaves, polar vortexes, bigger and slower hurricanes hitting places unprepared for them - the list goes on

It's a right now problem. It affects the vulnerable first, but it's already touched all of us in one way or another. But what happens when the sinks in salt lake City run dry? What happens when someone's house is burned down in a wildfire, twice? What happens when the power grid of Texas keeps going down every heat wave or cold snap?

People who can move will move. People who can't will die in place or become climate refugees when things get bad enough. It will be just inconveniences and news of distant tragedies until somewhere hits a tipping point - hopefully you're not in the wrong place at the wrong time, but even then you'll feel the aftershocks

I had a conversation with a friend. A well educated friend, who has devoted his life to the cause

He thought he was fighting for his children or grandchildren. I told him no, we've been saying that for two generations - this is our problem. We will feel the hurt. Your water supply is not guaranteed, our food so supply could run dry one year. Our parents were told this was a future generation problem - we're that generation... This is already happening

In the US, in the EU - some places are already feeling it, but we will all feel it soon