Danacus

no one is demanding you

In that case my previous comment is irrelevant and off-topic. It was a misinterpretation of your comment on my end.

In my original comment I did say that I don’t have a problem with people that do tell me their pronouns, even if I do think that’s a bit stupid and weird (we will have to agree to disagree on this one I’m afraid). This does not mean I’m not accepting of others, I only mean that I think this specific kind of social interaction feels weird to me.

I apologize if my opinion of this comes over as unkind or unhelpful. In fact I might even agree that it is unhelpful and unkind, but I much rather share an unhelpful opinion than a dishonest one (perhaps it is better for me to stay quiet in this case). I’m sure many people share my opinion or have a similar one. You also can’t expect people to immediately change their opinion or be dishonest about it based on the needs of a minority group.

I also apologize if my initial comment sounded too aggressive and/or hateful. Maybe I should have chosen a more polite way to share this opinion?

The reality is that not everyone can go out of their way to adapt to every minority group in existence. I get that it affects people, but that’s just life. Social norms are based on the most common needs and interests of society, not on those of each minority group combined.

As another example, consider neurodivergent people (ASD, AD(H)D, etc.). Such people (including myself) may struggle when trying to live in a world where most people are “normal” (e.g. poor social skills, anxiety, sensitivity to noises, etc.). It would be nice if everyone could adapt to the needs of all others, but it’s unrealistic in practice due to how many different people with different needs there are in this world.

I don’t go to people and expect them to adapt to my needs either, because I’m not entitled to their effort to adapt. Unless they are close friends, and they get to know me better, then maybe they will choose to avoid doing things that make me uncomfortable.

My point is: stop trying to revolutionize the world and introduce new social norms based on the needs of very tiny groups, you’ll only annoy people.

Fair point, it doesn’t hurt to include it. But my point is that in most cases it’s irrelevant and it isn’t something everyone has to start doing.

When I go outside and look around me, 99% of the people don’t need to tell me what their pronouns are, because I guess simply guess them with high certainty based on how they look. You might disagree with this if you feel like everyone should be able to choose their own pronouns (which is fine by me), but in reality most people don’t want to tell you their pronouns, they want you to look at them and just know.

While I personally wouldn’t go as far as to call people self-centered, I do think Mr Blott has a point, a lot of people may think they are self-centered for immediately declaring their pronouns (or anything else other than your name for that matter).

Anyway, that wasn’t what I was trying to say. All I wanted to say is that I don’t think that announcing your pronouns is something that will be or should be normalized, since it’s pointless for the vast majority of people. I do understand why some people would prefer to do this anyway to avoid the awkward situations like “ahem, actually it’s… euuh… he, not she”, and I don’t have a problem with that.

I apologize if my comment sounds a bit whiny or if I sounded a bit touchy. I was just a bit annoyed with the amount of comments that seem to suggest telling people what your pronouns is is a common thing in real life, while in my experience, almost no one will ever do that, since it’s obvious in 99.9% of all cases.

But I suppose I could have phrased my comment a bit less aggressively and I could have made my point clear with less rambling.

Honestly, I think that if I would say “my pronouns are he/him”, people would think that’s a weird thing to say and would think something like “oh, it’s one of those woke people”.

Where I live, the people that tell you about their pronouns are a minority, and they are usually people that need to tell you their pronouns to avoid confusion, or people that are particularly active in the “woke” community.

For 99% of the people you meet, it’s fair to assume pronouns because it’s obvious. And if your assumption was wrong, they can just tell you. No need to get butthurt over it.

Saying “my pronouns are…” without anyone asking for them is just ridiculous in my opinion. Like, what are people going to say 5 years from now? “My name is …, my pronouns are …, my ethnicity is …, I live in … and my favorite color is …”?

What a dumb way to start a conversation. You know, the whole point of a conversation is that you ask and answer questions, or share things you like to share. We don’t need to share everything in the introduction sentence, including pronouns. It’s just pointless most of the time.

To be clear: if anyone wants to tell me their pronouns right away, all good, I won’t dislike you for it. Just don’t expect the same from me, just assume my pronouns and I’ll be happy to correct you on the off chance that you’re wrong.

CIQ is the company behind Rocky and they joined. I believe Alma is taking a slightly different approach than the others, hence they did not join.

Congrats! Good luck not pooping.

Like $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME?

Probably yeah, but then Meta will have made yet another walled garden, and for some reason so many people seem to really love Meta and they will stay there. Then we’ll be exactly where we are today. So the way I see it, this new plan from Meta means nothing, but I’m curious to see how things will go.

The fact that W3C defines the protocol doesn’t stop large companies from doing whatever they want. Have a look at Google: their web browser has become so widely adopted that Google effectively controls what is considered part of the spec, not W3C.

If Meta’s platform grows to become the biggest fediverse project, they will control the spec and others will either have to follow, or risk dropping out. This is just like how Firefox is forced to follow Google to ensure all websites work properly on Firefox, even if these sites don’t comply with the spec.

I agree, I also make sure everything is fully local. I have separate subnets for the server that runs home assistant, the IoT devices, and the trusted home network. Then I have some firewall rules that ensure that the IoT network cannot communicate with the WAN or the trusted LAN network at all, only with home assistant.

We have some simple automations at home to turn on the boiler in the afternoon when we have an abundance of solar power, and some basic automation to turn off aquarium lights at night such that the fish can sleep. Anything more complex just becomes unreliable and annoying.

Being able to monitor energy usage is very useful. We can see how much our solar panels are producing and how much we are importing and exporting from the network. Based on this information we can decide whether we should start a dishwasher, washing machine, water boiler, air conditioning, etc. That way, we can save a lot of money by optimally making use of free solar energy.

Making sure you are still able to control everything when the network is down seems like a good idea.

In our house, the smart plugs have a physical button that can be used to toggle them on or off. The lights are still connected to a physical power switch, so they can be reset by flipping the switch a few times, in which case they will probably just act as a normal light. Air conditioning units have an IR remote.

For me it’s overall much better on Linux now.

There’s a difference between consuming power to do stuff, and consuming power to charge. More power to charge = faster charging.

After lots of distro-hopping, using arch for many years, I switched to Fedora and never looked back. I just want things to work, and fixing little issues gets boring really quickly, so I stopped using arch.

No, I phrased that poorly. What I meant is that if you have a struct that has some field (it owns that data), your operations on that data will be methods of that struct, and not some other struct that happens to have a reference to that struct. The latter is something people tend to do in OO languages like Java. In Rust, if a function accesses data, you usually “freshly” borrow from the owner of that data and pass it as argument to that function instead of relying on some “hidden” references somewhere in hidden in an object. Borrows will almost always be short-lived.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense, I’m sorry for the bad explanation. It might make more sense if you play with Rust yourself.

When you create an instance of a struct and assign it to a variable or field of another struct, that variable becomes the owner of that value. When you assign it to some other variable or pass it to a function that takes ownership, ownership will move. Otherwise, you will borrow. But there will always only be one owner for each value. That way you know exactly when to free up memory: whenever the owner is dropped.

You can store references in another structure, but you probably don’t want to do this most of the time, since it’s a major headache to get ownership and lifetimes right. You shouldn’t think of references as pointers, but you should think of them as “borrows”: you are temporarily borrowing something from the owner, but you can only do so if the owner exists. So you need to statically guarantee that for as long as you borrow it, the owner must be alive, which gets tricky when you store that borrow somewhere in some data structure. In practice, references or borrows will be short-lived, and most operations on data will be done by the owner of that data.

Underneath, references are represented by pointers, but you shouldn’t think of them as pointers, but rather as something you have borrowed, so in that sense it’s different from C.

Also, Python does use references everywhere, it’s just implicit, and depends on the type. Try storing a list in a class: you’ve just stored a reference to another structure. Most things (e.g. lists, objects) are passed and stored by reference, some types like integers are copied. In Rust, you can choose whether you want to pass by reference, copy or move ownership. At this point we’re still at a high level of abstraction, we don’t think so much about whether this will be pointers at the low level.

But my main point is that whether you use pointers, references, or whether it’s implicit or explicit doesn’t make a language slow or fast, it just defines how programs are written. Rust is very fast because it’s compiled to machine code and doesn’t do garbage collection or have any other overhead from a “runtime”. Python is relatively slow because it’s interpreted. You could argue that more manual control over references/pointers can make a language faster, but it’s not the main contributing factor.