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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2024

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  • The notion that prison is only for “housing criminals” is just wrong, and leads to the fucked up legal system you see in the US. Its primary purpose should be reforming someone to become a better person, drop their old ways and rejoin society. The percentage of people who can’t be reformed is vanishingly small if you do it right. And even in those cases, murdering someone just because they require resources to live is wrong. They are still human beings, however fucked up their actions, and deserve life and dignity simply because of that.

    Capital punishment is state sanctioned, that is the only difference in my eyes.

    No, the main difference is the active and actual threat the person poses. When they are isolated in prison already, they do not pose any further threat.


  • I don’t think capital punishment (murdering a helpless person in custody) is ever justified. It’s just cruelty for the sake of cruelty.

    What we have here could be an act of societal self-defense, where the target was in the process of actively harming millions of people, and the legal system wasn’t doing anything to stop it. Whether or not it was self-defense or just a pre-paid hit for some other reason I can’t say, and neither can I judge whether it was justified or not. I just think it’s categorically different from capital punishment.



  • Phone? Nah. It’s only a tool, used for photography, maps/navigation, messaging while on the go, shopping lists and phone calls for that one time a month you need to make one. Maybe other stuff sometimes, like making a bank transfer when not at home or editing OSM.

    I used to be indirectly addicted to it. It was actually doomscrolling Reddit, but now that I’m off it I don’t get the urge anymore.

    My desktop is a different story, I’m kind of addicted to it while I’m at home; when outside I don’t really miss it.








  • If I’m honest it’s breathtakingly beautiful. I’ve been around most of Europe and some of Asia, and the only comparable places are Swiss Alps and the Himalayas; however, Georgia is much cheaper than the former and more developed/safe than the latter. It’s also quite tiny but heterogeneous: within a day’s drive you can go from (slightly underwhelming) Black Sea through amazing forests into wild mountains, back down to vineyards and sunflower fields, through a volcanic plateau with otherworldly landscapes and then bathe in hot springs under the starry sky. There’s an insane density of buildings and ruins from dozens of different cultures and epochs, all the way from bronze age to medieval Georgian to Russian colonial style to Soviet-era constructivism. I don’t drink wine but I’ve heard that it’s quite amazing too. My only gripes is that the country might be backsliding into authoritarian rule, and the locals are welcoming but “conservative” (bigoted) to the extent that it’s straight up dangerous for LGBT people to visit.


  • For usable public transport routing the router would need to know the timetable, and that data is not available in osm.

    Not necessarily. At least here, transit (metro + buses) is typically rapid enough that you don’t have to worry about timetables much, unless you’re really in a hurry; I’ve done a few trips using OsmAnd’s public transport routing and it worked just fine, and it doesn’t know about timetables.

    Also, most towns publish not only their timetables but often the live locations of their buses & trains with GTFS; I wish more apps supported it, at least by offering to manually add the URL of the transit operator you’re using.



  • What annoys me even more with both osmapp and lokjo is that they show neither metro stops/lines (unless you zoom right in) nor bike paths (at all), and there’s no option to enable it. Also neither of the apps allow you to make routes via public transit. Apart from feeling car-brained, this makes those apps functionally useless for navigating in bigger cities for more than a couple kilometers (and I say that as someone who has a car; I’m not spending my life in traffic, public transit is much faster, easier, and eco-friendly!)


  • Back when I was in Russia I’d say it’d be Suzdal, famous for the density of churches and other traditional architecture; or Tarusa, known for that one song that everyone seems to know a couple of lines from, Gorodok (here is a random rendition I found just now), both with just under 10k pop according to the wiki. And, as a bit of a stretch since it’s not a town and most people would call it Solovki, Solovetsky settlement, famous for being a prison, with about 800 people. Also Oymyakon with under 600 people, the coldest settlement on earth if you’re into that sort of thing.

    Now in Georgia, I’d say Borjomi with just over 10k pop famous for its water, and Bakuriani (just over 1800 people) for its water and the ski resort. Again a bit of a stretch, but I guess everyone in Georgia at least also knows the ski resort of Gudauri at just under 100 people, as well as mountain resorts of Gomismta and Bakhmaro, both with no permanent residents due to the rough winters. Geography nerds will also be familiar with Ushguli, (arguably) the highest inhabited settlement in Europe, population 220.


  • Typically this is true, but it’s certainly possible to get comparable performance with functional style

    It’s possible, but you have to specifically write code that’s fast, rather than idiomatic or ergonomic, and you have to know what you’re doing. At that point, you may have been better off writing it in something else. I feel like OCaml is good at this because it allows you to write abstractions and main control flow in a functional way and hot paths in an imperative way without switching language, but so is Rust.

    Carp, which I linked above, basically uses the same approach to memory management as Rust. It doesn’t rely on GC.

    I’ll take a look, thanks!

    I also find that for most cases it really doesn’t matter all that much unless you’re in a specific domain like writing drivers, making a game engine, etc. Computers are plenty fast nowadays, and ergonomics tend to be more important than raw performance.

    I mostly agree with you, e.g. Haskell and Clojure, despite being “slow”, are plenty fast for what they’re used for. On the other hand, I’m very much annoyed when “user-facing” software takes way too long to load or do simple tasks. Java in particular is pretty bad at this: JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap editor) takes longer to load than my entire desktop startup, including a window manager and browser. Unfortunately it’s also the best editor around, so I pretty much have to use it to edit OSM, but it still annoys me to no end. Unnecessary computations, IO inefficiencies and layers of wrapping also affect the power consumption quite noticeably.