Caves of Qud. I don’t even like it much, but for some reason I can’t stop.

It’s also possible that the military had been using such a device for decades and it was actually prior art that invalidated the patent, but this was lost in the retelling. 🤔

My point is that if your variable can be None then you need the same pattern for the length check.

So for the Pythonic version:

if (foo is not None) and not foo:
   ...

For the explicit length check:

if (foo is not None) and (len(foo) == 0):
  ...

Honestly you’re probably better off using type hints and catching such things with static checks and not adding the None check.

You’d need to explicitly check for None if using the len() construct as well, so this doesn’t change the point of the article.

My ad blocker has blocked all pictures on this article, so I can’t say. 😄

We’ve had a similar ban in the Netherlands for a year or two now. Mobile phones were already not allowed in classes. Kids seem to have survived.

I looked a few years ago when a friend of my partner got a Tesla a few years ago. Picking a color cost like €2000 or so.

BSD is freer for programmers (or frequently their corporate overlords), but not for people using the software.

I always look on itch.io and GoG first!

Yes the article says to leave your phone if you can, and to use a burner phone otherwise.

$1 $2 per month is expensive? 🤣

[edit: I can’t do simple math]

The claim was “Email server owners don’t look at the content”. This is untrue since possibly the largest owner of email servers looks at the content to monetize the service. That’s all.

Yeah, the largest email company is probably Google (maybe Microsoft). Google definitely looks at every email they receive for users!

I guess we’ll never know if the system you describe here would work, since it has never existed. Companies have been using induced demand, loss leaders, cross subsidies, bundling, marketing, and a million other similar tricks to limit consumers access to knowledge and confuse them since long before Adam Smith fantasized about capital as the best of all possible worlds.

Firstly, I challenge the assumption that efficiency is the most important goal. This was addressed very convincingly almost 70 years ago in The Affluent Society:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society

This book explains that we should not use the same policies for a society which is constantly struggling on a knife edge between starvation and death. That was not the reality 70 years ago and is much less tha case today.

Even if we assume that efficiency is the most important goal, what you are actually arguing for is well-designed markets as the tool to achieve that. I question even this, since a profitable company is by definition less efficient than one that makes little or no profit, since profit is the extra wealth that the company extracts after paying all bills.

Even if we assume that a for profit market is the best way to manage resources and achieve efficiency, capitalism is fundamentally a bad model for that, since practices like hiding information from consumers or capturing regulators are great ways to increase profits without improving efficiency or managing resources effectively.

tl;dr fuck capitalism. 😉

I think this is not really true. Capitalism means that even if you are not greedy you are forced to destroy all rivals and collect all capital for yourself… otherwise you will be destroyed.

Marx identified that capitalism by necessity leads to an endless cycle of collapses. There is no way to avoid suffering under capitalism.

This feels so weird to me. I don’t know anyone who has used SMS for communication in many years.

I don’t like the implication that people working for non-profits should make less money than people working for for-profit companies.

If a network engineer makes $130k at a non-profit versus $140k at a for-profit, they are effectively donating $10k a year to the cause. Very few people making $130k are donating $10k a year.

Yes, there are always more efficient and cheaper ways to work, but forcing non-profits to grind and answer and defend every penny spent just makes them shitty places to work on top of the financial hit the employees are taking. 😔

I feel personally attacked.