OpenStars

In the past, let's use the USA as an example, we've had both "business" side-by-side with "government", with the role of the latter often thought of as to balance and foster the true spirit of the former. Keeping the worst excesses of business at bay, and doing things like scientific research that spurs innovation within the realm of business, were both considered the realm of government.

But times change, and now the role of government is getting smaller and smaller, while the roles of corporations are looming larger and larger - there are even businesses that provide a place to live for their employees!

Anyway, businesses were never democratic, but it used to not matter so much when business was merely the place where you worked, while government took care of you at home. Whereas now, they are taking on increasing prominence in people's lives in terms of dictating every single aspect of life - e.g. government healthcare (Medicare & Medicaid) is dying (being killed) off, leaving only business as the provider of "healthcare" available to people - which is what ObamaCare was trying to fight against.

So we still "have" democracy... technically, it's just that it matters less and less as the role of government is continually diminished, and powerful corporations greedily take all the power available unto themselves.

Always has been.

Perhaps.

Though the people involved may not recognize it as such, bc who actually stops to think prior to acting? Or even does so afterwards? And especially not during.

And those who do, do not act. While again, those who act, do not think.

It's hardly even their "fault" bc the skills involved are entirely distinct. Should we blame the professor or philosopher for not conveying what they "know" to others? Some very few are taking up that charge, e.g. Kurzgesagt, and John Oliver, but even the more intellectual audience here on Lemmy downvotes those as much as upvotes, with both being single digits so really, on the whole, nobody cares (I get it: people here primarily like Linux, and everything else is mostly a side show:-). (Also even this much of what I've said reveals a further layer of complexing: are these "actors", in the political sense, or "thinkers", or really are they not enactors of the thinkers, specializing in the conveyance of information? anyway it's definitely not a binary distinction here, even if it may not quite be a full spectrum either)

Or should we blame the politician for not thinking? But it's really not their job - as the skills required to motivate others, plus get elected in the first place, in a "democracy" and especially a plutocracy, are again entirely distinct. That's what counselors are for.

Similarly should we blame the front-line battalion commander for not winning the war? Their job is to do, not so much to strategize - it is the tactician who devises those, but in absence of actual facts, how can those tactics be adjusted to the real-world situation?

Mostly I keep coming back to it being "our" fault - as in all of us - for allowing things to happen. A true team effort of fuckery. But when we aren't distracted by wars externally, we turn our lusts internally and eat our own... and we know that, so then... why didn't we account for such? And that's as far as I can see. Others who see farther, more clearly, seem to be running the show. So perhaps it was always going to be thus? Our naivety constantly being burned away in confrontation with real-world facts, never willing but nonetheless always learning, not desiring to yet always changing,

I am not smart enough to understand what is going on. And therein lies the rub: every smart person realizes their ignorance and failings, whereas the actors who are not bothered by pangs of conscience are free to move forward without hindrance, hence can go so much further and faster than their competition.

Not always, sometimes they are merely useful idiots who legitimately do not know. Which makes them all the more dangerous bc they don't come across as supporting Nazis, and they don't even realize themselves what agenda they are furthering.

Some of them see it, and approve.

Others are old and mentally ill, and care only for what power they can gain in their remaining few years, regardless of what that will bring later.

Others are merely useful, and go along with whoever is currently in power.

Others are afraid, so they do not oppose the changes, for fear of losing what they have, and desperately cling to hope that something else will stop the worst from happening.

Others...

and on and on it goes, just as it did before, just as it ever was, and quite frankly, now I see that so will it ever be.

Fair - and in fact doubly so bc even code that is readable in a language that someone else does not know (well) isn't so "readable" by definition. i.e. "readable by someone who knows the language" != "readable by most developers".

Though having to rediscover how our code works is something shared by all languages. Perl does allow the worst there though.

Python is not better in every way, it's just more general-purpose, so has a wider range of applicability.

Also more people use it, though by that logic we should all be forced to use Windows bc everyone else does as well?

And Perl both still exists and is actively maintained, so it "lost prominence" rather than "died".

Or "Fedizens" if we want to be inclusive of other members of the Fediverse, like Mbin, Piefed, Tesseract (well, technically that's just a GUI for Lemmy iirc), and soon Sublinks.

But it does seem less playful than Lemmings:-P.

Good advice:)

Or if only pieces are left, you can "make" some new friends!? 😜

So *I* who am careful to write readable and safe code, have to use a non-preferred language preference b/c someone else cannot handle using it properly?!

Sadly, that is the realization that I have come to as well. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and all that... but no, really, that's true, b/c modifications are likely to be made at some point (kinda biasing towards production there but even so, answers with perl one-liners on e.g. StackOverflow are ubiquitous, but someone would have to know the language to be able to modify them to suit their specific use-case, so also not at the same time).

Fwiw I really did not think that Perl was hard to learn - though that was coming from the likes of assembly, various Basic styles, C/C++, and having already learned regular expressions via Unix e.g. grep and awk and sed. "Regular expressions" are quite a steep learning curve, though that's not the same thing as Perl, and quite frankly Perl is the undisputed (iirc?) master of them all, so whether someone wanted to write Perl without those, or wanted to do try to do regular expressions without Perl, either way Perl seems good for having included regular expressions, not something to penalize the entire language for. Also, C/C++ (and Rust) has a bit of a known learning curve as well...:-) Though indeed it's entirely fair to say that if someone were to pick just one language, then I would be hard pressed to find any justification for that being Perl. C/C++, Java, Python - all of these, depending on the situation, are fine choices, whereas Perl is absolutely niche.

But even so, why would it follow that it would necessarily be a good thing if Perl, or let's say awk, would fully "go away"? I kinda see Perl and awk as being in the same boat these days - both niche and powerful, yet both steadily becoming obsolete? Just b/c something else is "better" doesn't mean that everything else must die. Except, as you mentioned, for reasons of collaboration and thus code-reuse. Even there though, putting all of our eggs into a single basket scares me: what if tomorrow Microsoft, or Google, decides to purchase the rights to Python and suddenly control that entire industry sector in one fell swoop?

I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then...

I noticed that at work I would say something "snarky", which they did too but even so it's like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn't block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I've blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don't want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but "behead all landlords" seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like "okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!"

Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then... I can't even remember how long it's been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.

Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit's toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where "flatten the curve" was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to "pwn the libs" or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the "easy doomscrolling", rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.

Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).

I have never quite understood this mode of thinking - I think it must be an imprecise statement. Yes, improper usage of Perl coding can be bad, but then so too can C/C++ with e.g. improper memory management? Yet, I don't see people knocking down doors to learn the memory-safe Rust (and e.g. thereby be able to contribute to the Lemmy codebase), probably bc despite it being "better", it also has a steep learning curve (and I don't even know but I would assume: even for someone who already knows C?). Instead, people seem to want to learn Go, or Java - okay so that's a rabbit hole b/c they are for entirely different purposes, but anyway I mean that each language has its own balance of trade-offs.

So while on the one hand the worst-case scenario from a poor coder for Perl seems significantly worse than for Python, there are also benefits too: doesn't Perl run up to 20x faster than Python, which is why many places e.g. booking.com have chosen to use it? In the hands of an experienced person, perl code is quite readable, while in contrast, I just absolutely HATE aspects of Python such as whitespace delimiting and the package management, plus I don't know if I am imagining things (is is likely) but the code just seems to me to look obtuse, by comparison.

Sometimes I'll use awk, other times I'll bump that up to a Perl one-liner or even full script, still other times demand Python or for number-crunching full C/C++, or Java for whatever reason, but... for things that you want fast & easy, I don't really see Perl as "bad"? Granted, it shouldn't be someone's first language these days, compared to C or Python, but what is wrong with it, like awk, continuing to exist these days? Especially if it's not in a production environment.

I'm listening.