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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Most CO2 tanks and brass fittings don’t inject money into the Israeli economy - that’s specific to Soda Stream. Also you won’t lose your warranty on a CO2 tank for fizzing things that aren’t water, but you will with Soda Stream. Also, without a real Soda Stream, you won’t be forced to stay in each of a power outlet to run an LED that doesn’t accomplish anything except giving the machine a reason to refuse to run without electricity.

    Don’t compromise - if you get a competing countertop fizzing system with a pretty case, it won’t fund a genocidal state, void your warranty for fizzing juice, or require power for no good reason. These are unique Soda Stream advantages.





  • The context: the UK ended slavery within the empire by taking out a huge loan to buy all the slaves in the empire, then freeing them. The loan wasn’t fully paid off until recently, so UK taxpayers were effectively paying for money that had been given to slave owners. However, it quickly and decisively put a stop to slavery in a lot of the world without much fuss or objection, when it otherwise could have triggered wars.







  • Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.






  • Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something’s written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don’t know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can’t know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it’s only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn’t matter either way, but if it’s used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

    Also, it’s common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn’t expect to be slow (otherwise they’d have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.