What's the point of these things? They're not useful for anything. They're horrible to drive, get through fuel like a burning oil well, can't tow, and can't carry anything.
If you need something to haul building materials around, get a van.
I am a landscaper and would absolutely not be able to do my job without a large truck. I agree that for most cases a truck is not needed, but some jobs simply require their use.
One of the downsides to using a van for these heavy duty use cases (speaking from experience) is that they're typically not equipped with powerful enough engines. So you end up straining the engine when towing heavy loads, which reduces the life of it considerably.
Also for a lot of vehicles, a GVM/GCM upgrade is needed to be able to tow certain loads.
Not defending these large american trucks. I think there are valid use cases for them (in smaller bodies), but the majority of the ones I see driving around are just for peoples pleasure and not utility.
I understand that most people want to move to other more modern tools, it's up to you. However, what baffled me is why the author's choice not to move is a problem? Did we pay them to move and they did not move as promised? Was there some crowd funding to move that was not fulfilled?
I just didn't think Sourceforge was still running. There was a mass exodus from it about 20 years ago when it became a massive ad farm that started injecting ads into people's tarballs.
It was never as good as freshmeat.net even in its heyday.
It wasn’t always scummy… but there was a definite shift after they got bought. It’s kept getting worse since then.
Then again, this was something like 20 years ago. Back then, Sourceforge was something closer to GitHub today. It was the de facto public source repository. You could even get an on-premise version, IIRC.
Actually, this is sounding a lot like GitHub these days… not sure what that means.
For project discovery, definitely -- but not as a source code repository.
Wow, we're dating ourselves on this, but I remember when it was a big deal that SF.net added SVN support. They apparently didn't turn off CVS until 2017!
Yeah, I remember introducing a web dev company to SVN in about oh maybe 2006. Prior to that their "version control" was a webroot full of shit like "index.php", "index.php.old", "index.php.broken", "index.ryan.donottouch.php", "indexTUESDAY.php" and so on.
Yeah no, guys, that's not what I meant. Let me just show you this real quick...
I wonder if enough of freshmeat still exists on the Wayback machine to make a clone, maybe a skin for forgejo?
> However, Phase 5 (deadlock demonstration) is entirely faked. The script just prints what it _thinks_ would happen.
I see this a lot in AI slop, which I mostly get exposed to in the form of shitty pull requests.
You know when you're trying to explain Test-Driven Development to people and you want to explain how you write the simplest thing that passes the test and then improve the test, right? So you say "I want a routine that adds VAT onto a price, so I write a test that says £20+VAT is £24, and the simplest thing that can pass that test is just returning 24". Now you know and I know that the routine and its test will break if you feed it any value except £20, but we've proved we can write a routine and its test, and now we can make it more general.
Or maybe we don't care and we slap a big TODO: make this actually work on there because we don't need it to work properly now, we've got other things to do first, and every price coming up as £20+VAT is a useful indicator that we still have to make other bits work. It doesn't matter.
The problem is that AI slop code "generators" will just stop at that point and go "THERE LOOK IT'S DONE AND IT'S PERFECT!" and the people who believe in the usefulness of AI will just ship it.
Think about the "failure mode" of the aircraft that won World War II, the Supermarine Spitfire.
There was a fuel tank mounted between the engine and cockpit so if it took enough of a hit to puncture right through (not hard, in practice) the failure mode was that the cockpit was now full of a 350mph jet of burning petrol.
> and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years.
I hope not. We're currently getting shafted by National Grid pricing, and this is only going to mean we get to pay even more for electricity where it's generated while the south coast of the UK gets it cheap.
> OK, call me too synth nerdy, but have you guys ever longed for a project that allowed you too match stuff like envelope times and between synths?
Yes actually. I thought about doing something like this to convert Juno 106 patches to Novation Xiosynth patches, because I have a 106 and a Xiosynth 49 sitting beside me, and a pretty viable Juno 106 emulation.
Getting the times for the Juno is easy because the lookup tables and code for the envelope is a known quantity but I'd need to actually just measure the envelopes in the Xio. They might also not have quite the same response "shape" but they'd be pretty close.
Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now.
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside.
I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.
as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East.
The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.
Farming communities have already had these things, the broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the same land.
Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.
As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated workings.
Fewer people are needed to work megafarms, but the basic needs for these services don't go away entirely. As a result, moving people to the urban centers still leaves you with all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
Perhaps reread the upstream and pay close attention to the usernames and who said what.
> all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
I spoke about the actual real in this moment trend that is already happening; increased urbanisation, I said nothing about wanting to see the end of roads or rural communities - although I'm a big fan of seeing less human impact on larger areas of managed land - land that includes agriculture, mining, native reserves, cropped treelands, etc.
We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+ global population across all seasons and weathers.
Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and loading, transfer, loading times add up.
Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.
There are points to be made about the lower tonnages of picky people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current need to transport food from source to demand.
The costs of global shipping transport is iron mining, steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967 absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald they chose to call Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new crop (which many countries have done historically and still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world already today.
> And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
Potatoes and barley both grow pretty well in the UK.
The problem with eating things like soya over here is that you can only do it if you burn a city's worth of diesel every single day to power a container ship to bring it, and it's farmed using horribly unsustainable methods.
The stuff I eat (he says, drinking a cup of Colombian coffee, okay okay, hypocrisy) is grown using techniques and ecological impact more-or-less unchanged from the dawn of agriculture. We use Massey-Fergusons now rather than horses or oxen but there would be nothing stopping you going back to horses, and indeed with diesel at nearly two quid a litre it might well be worth looking at that.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.
But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.
I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).
What's the point of these things? They're not useful for anything. They're horrible to drive, get through fuel like a burning oil well, can't tow, and can't carry anything.
If you need something to haul building materials around, get a van.
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