A relative was talking about ordering stuff from Temu. My response was that the products sold through them (they're just a marketplace) are so cheap that there's got to be slavery involved.
From what I hear, it’s also Chinese manufacturers trying to “break in” to the western market by initially operating at a loss. But I doubt how effective of a business strategy that would be, given that there is basically zero brand loyalty on marketplaces like temu. Am I getting my USB dongles from CKXLKY or TOPK? Fuck if I care! Idk tho, maybe the experience is different for people who buy stuff other than cheap electronics.
But yeah, there is 100% slavery involved. It’s like the cacao/coffee/chocolate industries, down to the “don’t blame us, we’re just buying these goods at market prices, like everyone else” excuse. Brother, you are the one setting the market price.
Ironically I have had good enough experiences with one or two Chinese brands to probably look at their stuff first whenever I ultimately replace/upgrade what I’ve got from them, but they certainly aren’t the “spam random letters to game Amazon’s systems” sort of brands and are really only slightly cheaper than the equivalents from elsewhere.
My country made it illegal to sell at a loss (for that exact reason) and IIRC wish and/or temu got in some kind of legal trouble for it. So did IKEA when they tried to use their restaurant as a loss leader - illegal here!
Then there’s the matter of shipping subsidies from the PRC, ain’t no way cross-continent shipping is 0.02 € on a 5 € item for which the last mile is handled by the national postal service which I know for a fact charges anyone more than one euro for delivering a damn envelope.
Those reasons sound retarded. Having a loss leader product or line just means you are recouping it elsewhere. It’s a draw-in, like $1.25 hotdogs at Costco. It’s different than if your whole business operates at a loss for a certain time in order to squeeze out competition. The only way this would make even marginally sense is if say both IKEA and JYSK had a cafeteria and IKEA decided to sell food at a loss while JYSK would not be able to afford in that segment.
From what I know, it’s not actually China subsidizing shipping, but the individual target countries instead, mostly on taxpayer money. This wouldn’t be bad in practice, except that goods not originating from China do not have subsidized shipping, thus the unfair advantage.
Especially because devs actually have to go out of their way to exclude Linux these days. Proton makes it so damn easy to support Linux. If you don’t, it’s because you did not even try or you intentionally added some bloat to your software to make it incompatible.
Not only proton, but unless you are rocking custom engine, pretty much all of them support Linux out of the box. It’s usually middleware that poses an issue and most importantly developer’s inexperience with the OS, which means they can’t provide tech support for their product.
That’s true but they usually spoof some person I don’t know. So if I google it and it’s some Betty from East Bumfuck, I know not to pick up. Now, if they spoofed someone I know, that’s different.
The thing is, there are legit reasons to want to spoof numbers. My use case is that if I'm not reachable via sip I send the call over the normal phone network and set cid to the calling number.
I guess a middle ground would be that you could spoof numbers to phone numbers you've registered and verified with your provider.
To be honest though, the scammers and spammers will always find a way round it and spoof anyway.
I think this is also an archaic model from before smart phones and the early days of smart phones. In the early days of apps, most attempted to limit data usage because most network providers charged a premium for data and the networks were much slower and smaller.
While you could tether in these early days, even before smart phones, the computer was capable of much higher data usage than the phone. These limits were put in place to protect a network that wasn’t really built for this level of load.
Old rules with good purpose turned into a way to charge more money.
What, it seems stupid to you that monopolies created using copyright and patent laws designed to benefit domestic companies I call mercantilism? Bailing out companies “too big to fail” is regulation too. Health in USA is so expensive because it’s regulated to work this way.
There are plenty of regulations, just not those you’d want, too bad.
No no, they’re desperately looking for that, because gating infinite abundance away from the plebs will be amazing for quarterly profits and entertainment! Think of all the reality shows you can make by pitting the poor against themselves!
For all intents and purposes, a markup document is a script that outputs a document. There’s no point in saying the HTML isn’t a programming language. Not all languages have to be general purpose.
The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.
You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.
HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.
The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.
Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.
The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”.
Saying “it’s not programming it’s coding” is like engineer “it’s not dirt it’s soil” levels of pedantry that are silly to expect people outside your profession to know.
Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.
Coding is, like, the smallest aspect out of all of programming. And unfortunately the part that’s the most fun.
But if you’re a coder, I assume you don’t know how to design complex systems, just (maybe) implement them or parts of them. That’s not what defines programming.
(Disclaimer, in all fairness: that’s in my personal, layman opinion as someone who doesn’t know much theory. I might just be very very in the wrong here, lol.)
No, my question does not imply a pure functional language at all. Pure functions exist in languages which are not purely functional. Most of the functions I write are pure functions. I could have a workflow where I work with another programmer who handles the minimal stateful pieces, and I would only write stateless functions - would that make me not a programmer?
(There are also purely functional languages, by the way. I just didn’t remotely imply there were, or make any claims about them, at any point in this thread, prior to this parenthetical.)
The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state, or functional languages. Declarative languages are a whole different thing. Of course declarative languages handle state. The comment I was replying to said “Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow”. Declarative languages don’t involve juggling control flow.
Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don’t hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn’t do anything.
In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you’ve declared. You don’t query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.
HTML ““has state””, as in it has a DOM, but it doesn’t do anything with it. You don’t mutate the DOM after it’s built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren’t trivially evident from the state you declared.
You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.
Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow
Sure, stateless functions deal with and impact state in some way. If that’s what you meant by your previous comment, that’s fine, but that’s honestly not what would typically be meant by “juggling” state.
The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state. Declarative languages do not give the programmer control over flow, the other part of your definition.
Learn Lisp, and you will never again be so certain about the difference between a programming language and a data format.
Not really. If so, you might as well consider the stuff you can use to format a comment here on lemmy, as “programming”. That’s conceptually more similar to HTML as what programming actually is.
To my knowledge, Scratch can save information away and retrieve it later. That’s enough to be programming. There are Theory of Computation reasons for this; it’s not an arbitrary distinction.
That’s such a weird point to make. Is it because to you, it seems like the line drawn is arbitrary? I cannot imagine any other reason. Certain words just mean certain things.
Markup languages are exactly as much “programming” as you marking a word and hitting “bold”. Which is to say, nothing at all. People are wrong all the time, and I have a very limited amount of fucks to give when it happens.
As for Scratch, it is a programming language. So, why would you think it’s a logical next step for me to say otherwise? Next, you’ll say something remarkably dumb in response. Resist the temptation, and do something more productive.
If he had said “LaTeX” or “roff”, that might have been a good example of something that blurs the line between the two. They aren’t specifically intended to be programming languages, but with a powerful enough macro system, a markup or typesetting language can be used in the same way as something like Brainfuck.
Absolutely. Those you suggest there are good examples.
Good enough that, instead of “is/isn’t” programming language, it would be more a “ah, so, how do you define that then?”. Now that I’ve had some sleep, one could argue that I could have been nicer and suggested that approach for HTML as well. After all, it’s just words that mean stuff, and transfer a concept between people, that translate to the same (ish) idea. The moment the latter isn’t the case, it’s no longer very useful for the former.
Most disagreements, I find, are just cases of different understandings. Discussions worth having is when both are correct but different, and both want to figure out why they differ. So, on second thought, I think I was appropriately rude ^_^
Both LaTeX and roff are Turing complete, but they are also DSLs with a somewhat narrow “domain”. Sounds exactly right that these blur the lines between what is/isn’t. You could even argue that claiming one or the other is just one way to express how you understand that difference.
As I said, not all programing languages are general purpose. Just because there are problems it can’t solve does not mean it’s not a programming language.
No. A form can’t do anything except send data to a server or get handled in the browser by Javascript (or Typescript or whatever). In either case, HTML is not capable of storing or retrieving anything on its own. It only provides an interface for potentially doing that.
True. Once I was working on a WPF app and someone looked at it and then showed me a simple YAML file they put together for Ansible and legit thought ‘YAML was better’ and what I was doing was dumb. They considered themselves a programmer.
Actually, there are plenty of interpreted programming languages, for example Perl or Shell Script so that definition is incorrect.
HTML is not a programming language because it only defines form (how things look), and does not control action (executing operations by itself).
The language for Web Development that controls the execution of operations (say: if the user fills a certain field, fetch related data from a server and display it in certain page areas) is called Javascript and is separate from HTML (which existed before Javascript and can exist without it).
Modern Web standards have also moved a lot of the form stuff to yet another language - CSS, Cascading Style Sheets - which is more powerful and reusable, so HTML is more used for the visual structure of the page and less for things like the fonts of the various pieces of text, though it still contains support for that stuff and you can still use it.
While looking it up, I’m pretty sure I read that Kool Desktop Environment was changed to K Desktop Environment. Either way, it’s absolutely Konfusing regardless of how you slice it.
Not sure if this is directly aimed at us but, I don’t know much about different desktop environments (with this being the maybe 2nd or 3rd one I’ve used), but I l just like plasma because it looks good without much tweaking. I’m still learning Linux, so I just want something that looks good out of the box.
Grey cat likes to lie to get into the room you’re in, if the door is closed, by pretending there’s a horrific emergency on the other side of the door. “Help! Help! Let me into the bathroom with you! My agony shall not subside until I have access to this room! I am ill! I am dying!”
Stripey cat likes to open cupboard doors, cardboard boxes and then hunt, kill and eat pouches of wet cat food, then pretend it wasn’t him at all, and he is hungry and hasn’t eaten for days.
Black cat likes a more traditional “I’ve not been fed yet, I am starving”, and also “I have no idea how the water bowl ended up upside down, but it looks like we’re out of water again”.
Thankfully, none of them will scratch or bite (at least not me or my partner). Black and stripey will both gently push your hand away when they’ve had enough tummy-tickle-time. Grey cat can be tickled for at least ten minutes. He just waits for you to get bored.
I love that someone wrote a poem about our cats. Thank you.
I think they’ll like it too - I fear they’re growing tired of me singing “Who’s a little black/stripey/silver cat with a fluffy little nosey-wose, who is a cat with a fluffity tail” to the tune of “Ride a White Swan” by T-Rex.
Hey, you’re welcome! I just thought it would be a logistical nightmare to get past the cats without disturbing them in your picture, and my brain ran with the idea.
On a related note: Check out the book “I Could Pee on This, and Other Poems by Cats”. It’s a little book of poems from the perspective of cats.
Slowly going away. I remember, when I was a kid, out during the summer in the backyard. You would see so many of these little fuckers in every direction you look. Just all over the place. Now, during the summer, you are lucky to see one every few minutes.
Where I live they seem to come and go. Some years there’s literally zero, then a few years later there’ll be so many you almost don’t wanna go outside because they might get in your mouth. Although admittedly I haven’t seen the usual swarms lately either. It’s long overdue and yet they’re not here.
It’s a big change from when I was a kid, still living in this same area, but we had a consistent, manageable number of fireflies every year.
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