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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

    But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

    A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.




  • And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

    This is facile.

    According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.

    Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there’s still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I’d rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%…

    Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.



  • Not particularly, but I can at least recognize that electing a third party practically requires getting rid of the electoral college.

    If no one gets a majority of EC votes, the winner is picked by the house of representatives. So any third party president needs to get a majority of the vote in a majority of states to win. No third party candidate has ever come remotely close to that.

    Under STAR, score, condorcet or IRV? It’s unlikely but possible. With the EC? It’s essentially impossible.




  • This is specifically talking about mitigation for highly pathogenic avian influenza. HPAI kills chickens fairly quickly, so to contain the spread and minimize the risk of zoonotic spread to people, they kill every bird on every property that it’s detected on.

    This is one of those situations where no one thinks it’s a great solution, it’s just a pragmatic one that minimizes the risk towards workers while quickly depopulating the barn. The problem is that this is one of the cheapest and least humane ways to depopulate a barn, and shouldn’t be allowed. We should insist that barns allow humane depopulation, or at least less inhumane methods.


  • The problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine overnight. The good thing with that is that we use much less power overnight than we do during the day.

    If you’re relying a lot on solar, you need to build a big-ass battery that you charge during the day and use at night.

    Alternatively, you build a nuclear or gas plant sized to overnight usage and run them 24/7. Then, you build way smaller batteries to handle dispatchability and smoothing demand over the course of a day. Nuclear is good for baseline power, and doesn’t come with the environmental costs of a gas plant. It has a niche.