@hjk101 Farmers growing Monsanto rice aren't trapped in a philosophical sense, they literally have no alternative, and in absence of choice, no leeway or profit margin. The only reason any business can make profit is that there is either competition among the providers they depend on or they aren't fully dependent. Monsanto turned seeds from a product into a service their customers are fully dependent on, and they don't have much competition in markets like Africa or India.

@hjk101 right but there's a difference between "trapped" (forced to spend a large portion of your time developing business relationships and executing strategies to secure food and resources) and trapped (forced to perform a single role under a single provider in a single specific way year over year for the rest of your life to survive while they optimize the only offer you get to minimize your surplus)

I definitely need glob imports in Orchid in some capacity because DSL authors should be able to create their own preludes, but I'm tempted to only allow a loop-free glob import chain, maybe even turn preludes into a special kind of module that can be targeted by glob-imports but isn't allowed to contain glob-imports itself.

@galena sounds fun, every afternoon I see the shop floor employees tearing through the compound in the basket of motorized scissor lifts, remote in hand. No worries though, ops requires all white collar employees to wear high-vis vests so we're all safe :)

@jestdotty Monsanto controls 25% of the seed and pesticide market. That means about 2 billion people are affected if a health risk associated with their products is deliberately ignored, even if that 25% is total domination in 25% of the consumer market and complete irrelevance in the other 75%, which is very unlikely.

@retoor Aurelia.io crashed Firefox mobile, that's kind of impressive.

I'll rather say that you don't need GMO to make plants everso slightly carcinogenic, and due to all the scrutiny, it's probably not the best avenue anyway. Pesticide or fertilizer is a lot less regulated

I definitely wouldn't bet that there isn't at least deliberate ignorance involved, because these things can absolutely happen, but there are many potential conspiracies that are either too risky for the conspirators or just simply don't happen for lack of initiative, so the handful that we know about are only evidence of the possibility, not the probability.

@jestdotty Monsanto's strategy isn't secret and is completely legal although immoral. Suggesting that there is a secret highly illegal conspiracy involved with thousands of perpetrators and billions of victims is a huge leap, even if the incentives are there.

and the insane part is that thanks to the free market they didn't need to promise some kind of Faustian bargain for unimaginable power, just slightly better rice, and within like 2 generations everyone who didn't take the deal went out of business.

this is the case pretty much everywhere. Monsanto, and the capitalists who own it, have the world by the balls.

@jestdotty probably, since this is an artificial problem that's easily solved with a little bit of planning much more accurately, cheaply, and with additional benefits, like most problems AI is applied to.

@retoor you're a gem

@blindXfish but I also appreciate that everything, however simple or complex, has meaningful docs. Obvious is subjective.

@blindXfish it's what newbies use, so it's what you use if you want to deal with newbies.

@Chewbanacas they deal with corporate and they're good at that. That's why they manage to be dominant despite their garbage attitude towards users; if you're a customer but not a user in the same capacity, i.e. corporate IT picking tools on behalf of their users, MS really is a good deal.

@Chewbanacas yeah, my organization prevents me from never using Microsoft again.

@Lensflare I switched immediately because I prefer my actionables in a big fucking list, but knowing that makes it even funnier.

@kiki ideally yes, realistically there are far too many positions of power involved for none of them to be on a delusional power trip and/or get misled by an overambitious designer with a "vision" on any given project.

@kiki my bad, companies of any size have specific projects where they care about this, they don't care about how you would like their flagship products to be distributed; MS Office, VS, Windows. Plus, VSCode is OSS bait so it does almost everything the same way an open-source project would.

Adobe CC is literally the stable equilibrium option 1 inevitably settles into. The thing is, Adobe is not interested in how you would like their products to be distributed. Neither is Microsoft, Autodesk, Google, Intellij, or any of the other giants. The only point where a decision like this can be made is the OS distribution. And Windows' choice to leave it up to the vendor leads to Adobe CC. Package managers are far from done innovating, and I'll grant that it's very possible that they'll lead to something equally bad or worse, but the idyllic form of option 1 you describe only exists as an intermediary step towards an eCo|SyStEm full of Adobe CC.

@tosensei Extension methods are the perfect example; they read like an instance method, but there's no corresponding vtable entry in the original class so they can't implement interfaces and can't be overridden. The things you can do with an extension method are the same things you can do with a static method, because they're pure syntax sugar over a static method. For instance methods the same category is nonvirtual, which isn't explicit, you just have to not opt into any of the features that require virtual calls.

@tosensei well no, if a method participates in dynamic dispatch then that means that the implementation can be modified by derived classes, so converting it to a static method without loss of functionality involves reimplementing a vtable.

I'm pretty sure C# generates some glue to ensure that any method can be cast to predicate, but it makes sense to distinguish nonvirtual methods exactly because they are always convertible to static methods without removing previously valid use cases, since their only use case is to call them on a value of statically known type.

@tosensei A nonvirtual method is a method that isn't marked virtual, abstract or override, and isn't implementing an interface, so it never appears in a vtable and never participates in dynamic dispatch. I borrowed the term from C++ where it makes sense to name these because they are isomorphic to a loose function with the first argument equated to "this", and as such can be safely cast to function pointer.

@Demolishun for my use cases it got really good in 2021-23, but I'm using and supporting old cards

@iiii that list is looking way better than I expected. how wonderful news!

@kiki I don't have a car, my vision is far too fucked to drive, I agree, but we would need a different world for this to be an option for everyone.

@iiii So do people not need cars, or does the need for cars emerge from poor urban planning? We're talking about this planet, not a theoretical better world where the car and oil lobby don't dominate the dialogue even in their own criticism.

the problem systems like this solve is that a young person has no history to be judged on, no achievements to show, and no money to bridge the gap in credibility so they rank lower in queue for finite resources than basically everyone else. The idea that young people get to do whatever they want comes from an age when the limiting factor was the comfort of habit and not cash and connections, both of which only accumulate with age. Modern youth desperately needs crutches like this to broaden their horizons. And no, not having insurance, getting into an accident and racking up thousands in debt before your CV fills an A4 page is not an alternative.

@iiii it's a box full of accelerometers, a GPS tracker, some storage, a cellular link, and a huge battery, provided by the insurance company, that reports entirely too much telemetry to identify reckless driving such as speeding or sudden braking. It sounded dystopian to me at first but apparently young drivers in the UK who couldn't previously get low premiums like it a lot.