Not a gamer but as an open source participant IRC is the main chat room technology my distro uses. All of the conversations are easily archivable and searchable due to the pure text format. Main devs can use tools like quassel to make sure they never miss an @.

RustyTrombone: An unusual musical instrument. (Urban Dictionary)

Java class names look like German compound nouns though

I agree with this. Communist like systems where there is central control of resources encourages corruption as people vie to get closer to the central control of the resources. Capitalism is just more honest about the fact that many people - not all of them - are fundamentally self-interested and entices them into cooperation with others by offering the carrot of individual rewards. Those are probably the same people that would try to exploit the system if it were more centrally controlled.

I remember looking at charity jobs when I was graduating with my humanities degree before I got into tech. Revealingly, the alumi I was speaking to who worked in the sector said something like, “At it’s core you need to remember that working for a charity is essentially a sales job.”

Made me nope tf out of there lol.

I used to work in adtech and the most we could do was track locations. Even that didn’t work properly for our purposes because most shops are in malls where several different stores co-exist on the same coordinates. It only worked for outlets in retail parks which were separated from one another.

I was talking to that guy on IRC yesterday. He was saying he still stands by his defence of Kovid in that thread. The people asking for the change were not submitting patches, just demanding that he undertake a multi-year porting effort because they wanted him to. Ultimately it did end up being ported to py3 and the process did take several years in the end.

Is Goyal still trying to maintain python 2 by himself? That thread was very funny a few years ago https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

Depends how interested you are in the infrastructure I suppose. Obviously it’s not essential for any project. I see a few that have both self hosted resources and additionally a Github mirror.

An advantage to the “old school” approach is that you don’t end up tied into a large SAAS platform like Github.

A server hosting a copy of the repo, git send-email, a mailing list and a bugzilla instance is all that an open source project really needs.

The advantage of github/gitlab et al. is that it merges all of the above functionality to one place, however it’s not absolutely essential. Git itself is extremely versatile and can be as useful as you are want it to be if you put in the time to learn it.

lol we used to call it Buttbucket at my old work where we used it. Should be a relatively easy product to deliver but Atlassian just couldn’t keep it up and bug free

I think we agree about the nature of scientific enquiry, how it is all based on inductive reasoning and cannot provide the certainty of mathematics. Additionally, it looks like we agree that the Laffer Curve has been used to justify bad policy in the past.

However, I don’t think that the theory has been debunked in the way you are describing. There is broadly a difference of opinion between Keynesian economists who are skeptical of the theory and then Supply-Side economists who endorse it; and then a whole spectrum of views in the middle from Behavioural economists or other schools of thought who are more ambivalent.

Academics who do support the view have done empirical studies over the years that they believe suggest that the Laffer Curve is real, see:

• Romer & Romer, 2007: The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks
• Mertens & Ravn, 2013: The Dynamic Effects of Personal and Corporate Income Tax Changes in the United States
• Trabandt & Uhlig, 2009: How Far Are We From The Slippery Slope? The Laffer Curve Revisited

It’s a matter of live debate in the field regardless of your opinion of the theory.

All economic theories are unproven, approximations about how economists think people might behave. There’s a reason it is often referred to as the ‘dismal science’. Quite often they are based on counterfactuals and projections of what might have happened.

The Laffer Curve is not a rule which always reflects reality but it has explanatory power in certain situations, since logically there has to be a point where avoiding taxes becomes more appealing than paying them.

Regan, et al deploying the theory as part of their political rhetoric - potentially in bad faith - shouldn’t discredit the concept itself because doing so would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. It’s an ad hominen attack against an economic theory; a bit like saying capital controls are always bad because President Xi in China frequently uses them.

That’s interesting - I had read it being described as a cliff in various places online where people were discussing personal finances. Double checked now and you are right that it is less of a cliff than I’d thought. Good to know in case I ever get close to that tax bracket!

It’s especially bad with the recent inflation here causing fiscal drag. People are being dragged into higher tax brackets by their incomes rising in line with inflation (if they are lucky) but the tax bands are remaining at their pre-inflation levels so in real terms we are taxed more while earning less.

I think “the cliff” ended up being introduced in better times when £100k was an extremely good salary. It still is a good salary but it seems like when they introduced the policy they were likely thinking that folks earning it were making so much that it wouldn’t be worth their while to put the effort into avoiding it. However with recent cost of living challenges the demand for avenues to avoid the cliff rose and employers started to respond by offering schemes like the salary sacrifice pension one I mentioned in order to keep their employees happy.

Edit: There are many ways to avoid taxes such as creating your own limited company, paying for your lifestyle as a business expense and then only paying corporation tax on those expenses (currently 20% in the UK). At the same time you draw a “salary” from your own company which is substantially lower than what you would be getting if you include the expenses and then pay income tax for a lower band. The reason most people don’t do this - aside from the obvious moral implications - is that it’s usually more effort than it’s worth for them. At a certain point though, tax avoidance becomes so worthwhile that the temptation is too great for many to ignore.

Back in the 50s and 60s after WW2 the UK had a 95% tax band for the highest earners. This was due to the country struggling to pay off its debts to the USA after WW2. The Beatles even wrote their song Taxman about it in 1966.

Ultimately there is a problem with these super high taxbands whereby countries that try them will often encounter something called the Laffer Curve whereby overall tax take decreases as the tax rate increases. This isn’t even necessarily tax evasion, all it takes is for wealthy people to be suitably motivated to avoid taxes.

In the UK now if your income breaches £100k then you are paying a higher rate of tax on everything earned over that amount but also you lose the £12.5k tax free allowance that all citizens are entitled to. Overall breaching £100k leads to you paying a marginal rate of tax of 60% even if you don’t earn much over it. Because of this high earning jobs often let you put money into salary sacrifice pension schemes to avoid breaching the £100k mark. It only becomes worthwhile earning over £100k when you reach the region of ~£130k, which is substantially more. Essentially the system encourages tax avoidance by having this cliff which people who are behaving like rational agents will do anything to avoid. If it were less punative then some economists argue that the government would raise more money.

This is the main development path for most distros - Debian, Gentoo, etc.

Issues are tracked on bugzilla and then the patch is sent to the developer mailing list citing the bug ticket with git send-email. Not sure about Debian but in the case of Gentoo they accept contributions via their git mirror and email. The developers keep both in sync so that new contributors (who likely use github) are encouraged but more established users can stick to the mailing list.

She was also supposedly complaining about the judge and jury on her recorded phone calls. The judge sounded incandescent with rage while sentencing her to the maximum of 18 months. In another jurisdiction manslaughter could land you many years in prison.

In GNU coreutils the implementation of rm doesn’t allocate memory however I believe alternative implementations do.

Here’s an example from the OpenBSD source code - https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/222e275fb89ffb67abe0726dee2b107220092dc3/bin/rm/rm.c#L335

Presumably other *BSDs use something similar? Didn’t check out FreeBSD or anything.

Edit: So I suppose if you are using a BSD-type system (maybe including macOS?), and memory safety was important to you (to the point of extreme paranoia), then you might want to look into this rust project. Or just use the GNU implementation.

I had it on an old thinkpad for years but swapped back to Debian on there recently. It’s a neat OS for hobbyists but the desktop experience is rough around the edges.

It’s similar to how linux used to be 15 years ago in terms of software compatibility.

One positive thing about it is that the source code for their corelibs is beautiful (!) GNU corelibs have been optimized to within an inch of their life to make them as fast as possible at the cost of legibility.