On our trip a few years back we got some simple pastries, sandwich supplies, and snacks from Bonus to save money and I never felt like we were missing out on good food. Even as a discount grocer everything we got from there was super good.

I agree with all of this. Except I would probably buy all the stupid shit I want because I have no concept of how all the stupid shit I want could amount to more than a rounding error.

It’s been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn’t changed a ton since I last looked at it.

You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it’s a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn’t consider it an issue if you don’t use them. Using new in C++ isn’t like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.

For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you’re relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you’ve never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that’s where many of these issues come into play.

C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.

Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.

The irony kills me on this one. I would like to imagine that if you send your ID in they auto-fail you, but I’m sure they’re not that clever.

I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

Unciv works perfectly fine on a phone if you feel like risking significant amounts of your time (:

This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can’t 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I’ve managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and… well, I’m sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.

There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.

I’m curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn’t expect they’d be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there’s some more niche target they have.

Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don’t know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it’s not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.

As a wee lad I rented it a few times. I never actually figured out how to play it, I just ran around and died but I liked the vibe of it.

Having seen the tube the chicken nuggets are extruded from at a meat plant, at least in Canada they’re pretty much just chicken. Looks like refried beans, sure, but it’s chicken.

It’s tricky for sure. The plain text is great, and all the functionality is built off of plain text (even the canvas!), but replicating the functionality isn’t trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Migration is easier because of the text files, but will it be as easy to see the links between notes? Or query all the notes I need more detail in? Or map it all out visually?

I think reimplementing the core obsidian functionality in a FOSS clone would be fun… except I already have a queue of projects and not a lot of time, so here I am complaining instead 🤷

It’s a good philosophy, to be sure. It doesn’t take many migrations to realize that keeping your files in open, easy to read formats is preferable.

I also use obsidian, but I do sometimes worry that the linking and metadata will be difficult to work with in the future when the software goes away. It’s all there in the files, but my vault is slowly linking together in interesting ways that rely on obsidian functionality.