Huh, surprising to hear that at least “officially” SD’s gotten slightly less… well, nazi.

Also, love the Stafford Beer quote 😀 Honestly “the purpose of the system is what it does” is an excellent heuristic.

Yeah but that’s exactly it though: they’re not very moderate if they really have no qualms about collaborating with the likes of SD.

It’s the same here in Finland too, the “moderate” and “fiscally conservative” National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) is suddenly pretty much indistinguishable from the far right Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) now that they’re in a 100% right wing government. They’re eg. loosening the punishment for denying the Holocaust, blocking the progress of a law that would ban “conversion therapy” (ie. psychological violence to turn people straight), their MPs are now openly racist, and so on.

Feels like “moderate” conservatives are just waiting for an excuse to drop their masks. One of my former acquaintances who is supposedly a moderate KOK voter told me straight up that the world would be a better place if gender minorities (like me…) didn’t exist.

I’ve always found it a bit funny that one of the Swedish conservative parties is called the Moderates. They pretend they’re “centre right” like every fucking conservative seems to, because for whatever baffling reason they lack the spine to call themselves right wing. “Nooo you can’t call me right wing, that hurts my feelings – I’m centre right and a moderate! But anyhow, Hitler was right and trans people and leftists should be put in death camps, and here’s some Russian propaganda for you that proves all this”

Oh don’t worry, we’re working on fixing that. There may be life on Earth, but no intelligent life.

Oh I wish it was. Eg. here in Finland sharing movies etc. among friends or downloading them off the internet used to be legal as long as you weren’t doing it for profit or distributing stuff to a huge audience, but that changed in 2006 because the new EU Copyright Directive required it, and that directive was hugely influenced by the likes of WIPO.

Governments rarely realize anything related to IP that the copyright mafia doesn’t spoon-feed them, unfortunately.

Far as Swift’s syntax goes, I really like argument labels too, but it’s just that there’s SO. MUCH. SYNTAX. Lots of sugar, yes, but sometimes that’s part of the problem in my opinion, because it often adds to the syntactic and semantic “noise.” Also, there’s 98 keywords (more if you count eg. try, try! and try? as different keywords, and this count is missing eg. sending and other new keywords) – compare this to say Rust’s or or Python’s 35. Java’s got 68, while C++ also has 98 and it’s notorious for having way too many of them. And then there’s all the symbols – some of which have different meanings in different contexts.

It’s true that ARC only applies to reference types, but even with value types you can often get some fairly surprising performance problems due to implicit copies, for example in getters and setters – and the _read and _modify accessors that can sometimes help with that due to returning (well, yielding) a borrowed value instead of a copy aren’t meant for “public” use (which doesn’t mean many libraries etc. don’t use them, much to the consternation of core devs).

Yeah I doubt those particular comments have anything to do with “AI”. It just seems fashionable to blame AI for absolutely everything nowadays

Swift is… not a great language. It’s got some promise but goddamn does it have a “designed by committee” feel to it; they just keep throwing on features like they’re going out of fashion and it’s getting ridiculously complex. Just the syntax alone is a bit of a nightmare – soooo many keywords and symbols. It’s also extremely hard to predict how well Swift code will perform, in large part due to ARC (automatic reference counting) memory management, which is a huge downside for game development. And don’t even get me started on the new concurrency stuff…

Just as a side note, it’s not purely an Apple project nowadays. They’re still the “project lead” but it’s not exclusively theirs anymore. Still, regardless of that, at least personally I really couldn’t recommend it especially to someone looking to get into game development.

Yeah it’s the same here, they and the younger gens have apparently gotten very polarized; the ones who are “good eggs” are really decent folks, and the shitty ones are really shitty.

So while the extremist reich wing party PS (Perussuomalaiset or “Finns Party”, because naturally only a nationalist wank is a real Finn) was their most popular party, as a proportion of their cohorts more young people voted for the Left Alliance than older ones did. Here’s a handy table from our 2023 parliamentary elections (source):

• KOK: National Coalition Party, fiscally conservative
• PS: Finns Party, extremist right wing
• SDP: Social Democrat, liberal / marginally left
• KESK: Centre Party, what it says on the tin
• VAS: Left Alliance, democratic socialists
• VIHR: Green League, liberal & green
• SFP: Swedish People’s Party, right wing
• KD: Christian Democrats, nearly as bad as PS
• LIIK: Movement Now, nominally center right but about as right wing as KOK

Actually based on that study the claim that gen Z is more conservative than older gens doesn’t seem to hold up. Seems like they’re about as conservative, but also more likely to vote Left

Hmm, I wonder if Gen Z’s politics are different over there compared to here, because at least in Finland the 2. most popular parties they voted for were a right wing extremist party and a “fiscally conservative” party that is essentially indistinguishable from the extremist one (the joke is that the way to tell them apart is that the “fiscal conservatives” wear more expensive suits.) Sure, many do also vote for eg. the Left Alliance who are democratic socialists, but on the whole the generation is more conservative than the older ones

I’m not entirely convinced putting the US in charge of it would make things any better. It’s not like eg. Facebook or Twitter aren’t full of reich wing bullshit on purpose

Honestly I think we’re thoroughly fucked at this point

Same shit happened here in Finland too, our extremist right wing party is very active on TikTok and the under 25’s voted for them in droves. That generation is more conservative than Millennials or even younger Gen X, which is a bit fucked up. Especially young men and boys have gone off the deep end

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

Where on earth did I say or even imply anything about men being one way or the other? And what does it have to do with anything that you were “replying to a comment”?

More of a tragicomedy, really