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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • You always have to balance: Do you want the user to have “some” user experience, or none at all.

    In the case of image viewers or browsers or stuff, it’s most often better to show the user something, even if it isn’t perfect, than to show nothing at all. Especially if it’s an user who can’t do anything to fix the broken thing at all.

    That said, if the user is a developer who is currently developing the solution, then the parser should be as strict as possible, because the developer can fix stuff before it goes into production.





  • SLAPP suits are where a bad implementation of that system struggles. The US is a mess in many places and this is one. That doesn’t mean that the concept of rule of law is an issue, but that rule of law is implemented badly in the US.

    In other places, e.g. most parts of Europe, if you lose a lawsuit you have to pay for the legal council of the winner. That makes SLAPP suites much less attractive and much less dangerous, and thus they are pretty rare.


  • The Nigerian understanding of religion is fascinating. They just take what they need from any place they want. In the western world most people stick with the faith they were born in, or maybe switch once or twice in their lifetime. In Nigeria it’s common to switch very frequently, always taking the parts they like best and leaving behind the rest.

    It’s a very open and interesting way to look at things, not so much tied to their own personal identity (“I am protestant, so I must hate catholics” as it used to be common in the west), but instead they build their own faith from all the best sources they can find.




  • This.

    Just from the features and the convenience, Reddit is better. It’s bigger, it’s got more content, it’s easier, it’s more stable (or at least used to be). You don’t have to worry about your instance going under or anything like that.

    The reason for the devs to invest their time to make lemmy and the apps and for admins to invest money and time into hosting and running the instances and for users to use this instead of Reddit is mainly the politics of wanting to have your own space with your own data.


  • Yeah, could totally be a regional difference.

    I had the same thing when negotiating for salaries too, so it wasn’t just when talking to people, but it was in a more official way as well, and I even got it in my contract like that.

    When I was working as a tutor, my contract listed my pay in hourly pay, because I worked varying hours and I was paid by the hour. On my entry-level job my contract was in monthly before-tax pay, but negotiations were with monthly after-tax pay. And my later jobs were all in yearly before-tax pay, which might also have been relevant that way because in some of these jobs I had yearly bonuses and/or part of the payment in stock I got once a year. So with these yearly figures in there, probably it just made sense make everything yearly.



  • In Europe people use annual gross salary when they earn enough too.

    Monthly after-tax is usually used by lower income people, where low short-term numbers really matter (“Can I make my rent this month?”, “Can I afford to buy/do this small thing this month?”), while annual gross salary is used by people who make a lot of money, where the day-to-day financials don’t matter, but long-term stuff does, and where you also generally have much higher tax pay backs.

    I used per-hour salary when I was in university and only worked a few hours per week. I switched to monthly after-tax when I got into an entry-level job that paid quite little, and when I got to higher-paying senior/expert level jobs, I started using yearly figures.


  • The problem is that people just accept a continuous drop in quality.

    I once had a conversation with an old woman who told me that it would be unheard off for someone with some level of status or self respect to wear ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing back in the 50s, and nowadays even TV news anchors are wearing cheap off-the-shelf suits.

    The same thing applies for everything. When I was a kid, the transition from small, independently owned shops with qualified stuff who’d give you proper consultation to chain stores in malls was just under way. Old people would complain all day that the staff in chain stores had no clue about the stuff they were selling. And yet everyone went to the chain stores in the mall because they had a bigger selection and were cheaper.

    And now there’s the same thing happening with the chain stores in malls getting replaced by online shopping, and now not only is there no one to consult you on your purchase, you can’t even trust the product listings because they are riddled with errors.

    For a while you could trust reviews, but that time is long gone, but still everyone just happily shops and consumes away, because online shopping is cheaper, there’s a bigger selection and it’s more convenient.

    The same process is happening all the time everywhere. Stuff just gets gradually shittier, but we just accept it, because we get used to it.


  • Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don’t lose out on modern technology development.

    (For clarification, with “war time” I mean “being in a war that actually threatens the country”. The US hasn’t been in a war like that for a very long time. They’ve essentially being in “peace time” while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.




  • This.

    People keep confusing “can sue” with “be successful in court”.

    You can sue anyone for anything at any time. I can sue you because I don’t like your default avatar. But that doesn’t mean that I would have any chance in a courtroom.

    And this is exactly how it should be. The decision whether a lawsuit has merit or not should be taken in court, not somewhere before court. Because that would mean that some police man or someone else with only cursory knowledge of the law would have to decide whether a lawsuit has merit and that would be catastrophic.

    No, anyone should be able to sue for anything. And garbage lawsuits should be thrown out of court by a judge and/or jury.




  • You basically defied the whole NaN thing. I may even agree that it should always throw an error instead, but… Found a good explanation by someone:

    NaN is the number which results from math operations which make no sense

    Well, technically this is the explanation, it really isn’t a good one.

    x + 1 with x not being defined also doesn’t result in a NaN but instead it throws a reference error, even though that undefined variable isn’t a number either. And x = 1;x.toUpperCase(); also doesn’t silently do anything, even though in this case it could totally return "1" by coercing x to a string first. Instead it throws a TypeError.

    It’s really only around number handling where JS gets so weird.

    Yeah but actually there can be many interpretations of what someone would mean by that. Increase the bytecode of the last symbol, or search for “1” and wipe it from string. The important thing is that it’s not obvious what a person who wrote that wants really, without additional input.

    That’s exactly the thing. It’s not obvious what the person wants and a NaN is most likely not what the person wants at either. So what’s the point in defaulting to something they certainly didn’t want instead of making it obvious that the input made no sense?

    A similarly ambiguous situation would be something like x = 2 y. For someone with a mathematical background this clearly looks like x = 2 * y with an implicit multiplication sign. But it’s not in the JS standard to interpret implicit multiplication signs. If you want multiplication, it needs to explicitly use the sign. And thus JS dutifully throws a Syntax Error instead of just guessing what the programmer maybe wanted.

    Anyway, your original suggestion was about discrepancy between + and - functionality. I only pointed out that it’s natural when dealing with various data types.

    My main point here was that if you have mathematical symbols for string operations, all of the acceptable operations using mathematical symbols need to be string operations. Like e.g. "ab" * 2 => "abab", which many languages provide. That’s consistent. I didn’t mean that all of these operators need to be implemented, but if they aren’t they should throw an error (I stated that in my original comment).

    What’s an issue here is that “1” + 1 does a string concatenation, while “1” - 1 converts to int and does a math operation. That’s inconsistent. Because even you want to use that feature, you will stumble over + not performing a math operation like -.

    So it should either be that +/- always to math operations and you have a separate operator (e.g. . or ..) for concatenation, or if you overload + with string operations, all of the operators that don’t throw an exception need to be strictly string-operations-only.