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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Unsafe Rust may be similar to C, though even though there’s wibbles like the borrow checker still running, you still get more guarantees about the code than with C. Safe Rust can, on occasion, look more like Haskell than C.

    Are they both systems languages? Yes of course otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about using them in the kernel. Makes no sense to extend the possible comparison candidates to include Prolog, arbitrarily making look C and Rust more similar by introducing a far-off comparison point.







  • Under these conditions what is NATO?

    Already-preexisting integration of most EU armies (and the rest aren’t completely out of the loop) as well as Canada Turkey, Norway, and Iceland.

    The long and short of it is if the US should bail out of NATO what is left is an absolute behemoth of a force with severe shortcomings in power projection and strategic airlift capacity. The latter only until Ukraine is admitted they have Antonov. Not sure whether we want much power projection but the lift capacity is a shortfall. On the upside we have more than enough stealth subs to stop others from projecting with aircraft carriers.


    From the US side, strategically, this is just a self-inflicted wound: There’s a couple of US soldiers in Europe as part of tripwire forces, relevant politically but not in combat terms, the rest is there to project force into the middle east. They’d be giving that up, I wonder what Israel thinks of that. The US would not have been capable to do Iraq or Afghanistan without European bases.







  • China will rather take a good bite out of outer Manchuria, traditional Chinese clay. There’s a reason they’ve been making so much noise about Taiwan and the South China Sea and it is not because they want you to look anywhere else. Might not even want to keep it, would be a nightmare to administer and justify, but having all of Russia east of the Ural turn into a couple of Mongolias would very much be in their favour. Mongolia is open for business and not a headache for them.

    And if taking out imperial Russia finally gets them out of their “century of humiliation” stroppiness then I’m all for it. Oh, and Russia falling is of course also more than welcome.


  • There’s a marked difference between using headphones to cancel out deafening noises while you’re working, and using them all the time to get rid of everyday noise. There’s also a clear difference in age, once you’re a pilot and start wearing those things you’re fully grown, while the affected here are quite younger, having used those headphones extensively while their brains are still way more plastic.

    “Noise-cancelling is dangerous in general” is something you read into the article. It’s not actually there. What it’s saying is “young people should watch their use of noise-cancelling headphones as the auditory system needs exposure to noise to properly develop”. That’s it. It’s a “young people, have an eye on this” thing, not “burn your headphones”.

    What are you even talking about it’s okay to just wildly speculate.

    I said no such thing. Here’s a wild speculation: You have noise-cancelling headphones and somehow interpret the article as a personal attack. Ok that wasn’t wild it has actually some basis. This is wild: You’re an alien from Alpha Cenauri trying to sow misinformation about the existence of zero-gravity space in your solar system. I’m Schizotypal, dare me, I can go on all day like that if you want to.


  • They’re reporting on what the audiologists observe and believe to be the case, and clearly label it as such: A belief, with further study necessary. People thinking they could be affected by this might take action after reading the article, true, and the action would be – easing off on using sound-cancelling headphones. That could, in the end, not help. What would be the harm done? Neither the science was misrepresented, it was portrayed as incomplete, “here’s our educated guess”, and the recommendations one can draw from that guess are quite inconceivable to cause harm themselves.

    Have a look again at what the Hippocratic oath states: First, do no harm. They’re keeping to that. Ease off. You can tell a patient to try dialling back on their coffee consumption before having conclusive proof that that’s what’s causing their jitters: Less coffee won’t kill them.


  • It’s kind of fascinating. In Germany recently the idea of a federal education ministry has been floated and the general answer was “no”. Other states don’t want to have to deal with CSU politicians trying to get “the purpose of the school is to instil fear of god” into law applicable on their turf, that BS can stay in Bavaria. The federation is co-responsible for tertiary education (university etc) because they have responsibility when it comes to research so they can set, in practice, some standards regarding secondary graduation but that’s it.


  • Even then, as a democracy, you can only do really mild tariffs as companies won’t trust the tariffs to stay high come the next government. You instead subsidise, in whatever form, including things like long-term supply contracts. If you want to push domestic ball point pen production, just order your administration to prefer buying domestic ball point pens if they’re within what 20% of the import price, then slowly reduce that rate but keep the preference to make sure your ballpoint pen industry is productive, efficient, and competitive. Make it a 10-year supply contracts the next government can’t just cancel. If you’re the US, give them to teachers to give children.


  • BIC probably produces lighters in the US, they have a couple of locations there. It could also be razor blades or ballpoint pens though and the lighters are coming in from Mexico. Or surfboards. Still can’t believe they produce surfboards.

    Or BIC might exit the US market, the French aren’t exactly known to be forgiving or accommodating. If you make their US factories pay 25% on the flints they’re importing from another factory elsewhere they might just say fuck it, let’s burn this place down, we’ll go somewhere where these lighters aren’t hit by 25% retaliatory tariffs.


  • There was never even a shred of proper science behind the autism causes vaccines thing, and it was a very very very very minority opinion.

    Does gravity exist on Alpha Centrauri? Ask any physicist, they’re going to say “yes”. You’re then going to stand there, saying “we have not actually made the necessary experiments on Alpha Centauri itself, we do not have conclusive evidence, all those people are peddling pseudoscience”. Never mind that all that we know about physics leads us to the extrapolation that, yes, gravity exists there and we have no reason to think why there isn’t gravity there. Could that extrapolation be wrong? Yes. But it’s also a silly thing to insist onto working into the plans of a colonialisation spaceship. All you’re achieving with that is having it never be built, bogging shit down in unsubstantiated scepticism.