Indeed, that is precisely the case for some folks - with social anxiety. Or autism. Or a number of other mental states.
Maybe they're tired to their bones and barely have energy to even have one meal a day? Maybe they lost a loved one and never quite recovered since then?
It costs nothing to be polite and assume best intentions from the other side.
In this particular case, there's someone whose most precious moments are their breaks during the day, and rather than saying "good on them for finding a way to do the thing they are most passionate about" the response is "gee they should have used that extremely limited free time to.... have the most shallow of conversations"?
Pleasantries are fine, but that was never going to be a long term solution for him. He needed a space that was always available to him, where he is always welcome. For better or worse, that's not the site office. (Even if it worked on that job, you don't stay in one place as a contractor)
And as a comment on an article written by, and about, a man who works a manual labor job because he can't support himself as a writer despite having published novels.
The vast majority of authors, even most those who were quite prolific, have never been able to support themselves on that income alone, throughout the modern history of novels. This isn't new with LLMs.
The EU is a parliamentary democracy. Von Der Leyen was proposed by the democratically elected heads of the member states. She was approved by the democratically elected parliament.
The chancellor in Germany is also not directly elected by majority vote but by parliament.
Its a reasonable criticism that the EU structures make democratic legitimisation very indirect, but that is at least partly a result of the EU being a club of sovereign democracies. The central tension was extremely evident during the Greek debt crisis, you have a change in government in Greece, but due to EU level constraints they can't enact a change in policy. More independent power ininstitutions less dependent on the member state, means the sovereign democratic national governments can't act on their local democratic mandates.
FWIW EU members are sovereign. If they disobey EU laws they can have benefits withheld but they won't be militarily invaded for ignoring EU law the way a US state would (unless they do something military themselves like invading another country).
Except the are a couple degrees of separation between the democracy part and in the running the EU institutions.
The EU parliament is also a very superficial imitation of a real parliament in a democratic state. It has very limited say in forming the “government” or decision making.
> result of the EU being a club of sovereign democracies
So either revert to it just being a trade union or implement fully democratic federal institutions. The in between isn’t really working that well.
In parliamentary democracies the parliament is elected directly and is generally sovereign (optionally constrained by a constitution or some set of basic laws and powers delegated to regional governments and such).
In no way does that describe the EU. It has no equivalent body. Its imitation “parliament” is extremely weak and barely has a say in who forms the closest EU has to a “government”.
So this is typical of criticism of the EU democratic structure: It's just factually wrong. The EU Parliament can dismiss the commission. From Wikipedia:
"The Parliament also has the power to censure the Commission by a two-thirds majority which will force the resignation of the entire Commission from office. As with approval, this power has never been explicitly used, but when faced with such a vote, the Santer Commission then resigned of their own accord."
The fact that the whole democratic setup is highly complex is in itself a problem. But the concrete deficits people mention are never true or don't apply to other democracies either...
In practice the EU Parliament has been a lot more trouble for the executive than is typical in national bodies. The one valid point is that the parliament does not have the right to initiate legislation itself. That is unusual, but in practice many people who are actually close to political processes seem to say this is mostly symbolic, as national bodies can't really draft effective legislation without cooperation from the executive either... Stil definitely something I would love to see addressed.
For all the disdain I have for her, Von Der Layen is the candidate put forward by the PPE, the majoritarian party in the EU parliament. So, yes, people were indeed allowed to vote.
The parliament would have picked Weber, but nobody cared since its just there to rubber stamp predetermined decisions.
He was the leader of the party which won the plurality in the elections and had its support. EU had a real chance to move towards becoming a real parliamentary democracy if it went that way.
That was the election before the current one. She was the one out forward by the PPE this time and even then she was the second candidate put forward by the PPE after Weber was vetoed by France the previous time.
That’s the new Spitzenkandidate system. The council is supposed to pick the candidate put forward by the main political force in the parliament.
The EU is a real democracy anyway. All the members of the council are themselves democratically elected. It has a weird three parts political system but everyone in it is elected or appointed by people elected.
I use graphene not for security but because it doesn't come with any Google surveillance stuff.
Let's be realistic if some 3 letters agency really want some data about me, there's not much I can do to counter that unless I'm ready to go to extreme lengths.
>Let's be realistic if some 3 letters agency really want some data about me, there's not much I can do to counter that unless I'm ready to go to extreme lengths.
I once thought like you. You do not need to go to extreme lengths to make things difficult and that is what is important. The fact is that the 3 letter agencies are increasingly fucking with normal people in a race to the bottom. Do not be defeatist - that only hurts everyone. The more people protecting themselves the safer everyone is from these people. If people just give up on privacy it puts a spotlight on normal people protecting themselves. The current state of which is so bad I have trouble putting it into words.
I think their comment is rightly pointing out that if a TLA or other state intelligence actor takes an interest in you specifically, they can do quite a bit of classic spycraft that is considerably more expensive i.e. direct surveillance. No alternative handset OS will protect you from an agent who bugs your house, or someone firing a polonium pellet into your leg from a modified umbrella.
Realistic is that some data is impractical to protect and too late to protect if your parents chose a somewhat normal life for you but that is hardly all data.
Even Mr Assange in his embassy could have added fitness trackers to add metrics that were hard and spotty to estimate from video surveillance.
I know this is kind of the contrarian opinion and I'm not trying to be "that guy", but if you want a web app that works in 30 years you would probably be best off building a server-side rendered application. You need a server, HTTP, HTML, and CSS for any web application, but you don't always need a lot of client side javascript.
The fewer things you have in your stack, the fewer things can change under your feet.
If you MUST use a framework, then yes i would go with ember because they have a prooved commitment to following the web standards rather than creating their own custom standards that they throw away the next year.
Having said that, 30 years are very VERY long time in web development. Maybe pure js isn't a bad call, but it depends on how large it is going to be. Someone else mentioned considering sever rendering, not a bad cinsideration either.
Meh. I don't get the love Lua gets on HN.
At least version 5.1, I didn't try the others.
No first class support for OOP, you got to use tables instead.
No "continue" keyword to go to the next iteration of a loop. So you have to use some ugly elseif.
No try catch!
It's a dynamic language so everything goes. A function will return nil or a number or whatever you wish.
A function can also returns any number of variables, so obviously some moron will abuse it: looking at you Blizzard intern (you must have been an intern right?) that thought returning 20 variables on the combat event log was a good idea. Ever heard of tables???
The LSP can't do miracles when there are almost no rules so auto-completion is more miss than hit, which is quite shocking in 2024.
The IA is helpful sometimes but create subtle bugs some other times. A simple uncaught typo will create a hard to find bug (yesterday copilot auto-completed myObject.Id instead of myObject.id, there went 20 minutes of my life trying to find why some code that was running solidly for weeks was now failing silently).
So all in all, Lua is fine to write small imperative scripts of a few hundred loc.
Anything bigger and more complex you should run away IMHO.
I never realized C# was such a well designed language until I tried Lua.
For some people not being locked into one form of OOP or any OOP at all is a huge advantage.
> No "continue" keyword to go to the next iteration of a loop. So you have to use some ugly elseif.
Yeah, that sucks. Thankfully Luau fixes that and basically all annoyances I have with Lua. https://luau.org/syntax
> I never realized C# was such a well designed language until I tried Lua.
Lua and C# have fundamentally different design goals. C# sucks for embedding, you have to include a huge runtime. Godot still hasn't figured out how to support C# on web builds. Lua values minimalism and flexibility. That obviously means it lacks some quality of life features of bigger general purpose languages.
IMHO for personal workstations immutable distros are a solution in search of a problem.
In 3 years using Fedora (which hasn't a reputation for being a stable distro) I once had a bad kernel that prevented my Framework laptop from booting (solved by blacklisting said kernel). All my other Fedora machines were fine.
Why would I need an immutable distro if even Fedora is stable enough? Heck i could use Debian or a RHEL clone and never have to worry about stability.
It’s even better when you know that the proper pronunciation is essentially “soondhldlddlnl”
(Source: I speak Danish as a second language. I used to think Georgian was the language with the most consecutive consonants but then I learned how little the Danes respect their vowels so now I know better)
Oh the horror!