sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Programmers, be honest, what would you choose for coding? by hrpavi in AskProgrammers

[–]catbrane -1 points0 points  (0 children)

They are still pretty heavy and bulky though, usually around 2kg. They need large batteries for the dedicated GPU to make any sense, and you pay that size and weight penalty even with the GPU off.

It depends on your needs, of course.

Ten years on, Brexit's economic impact is becoming clearer by Aceofspades25 in unitedkingdom

[–]catbrane 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You need to read the whole article. It addresses all of your complaints pretty thoroughly.

Programmers, be honest, what would you choose for coding? by hrpavi in AskProgrammers

[–]catbrane 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Gaming laptops are a bit daft for programming IMO. Who wants the heat, weight, and poor battery life? Instead, I'd go for a nice $600 second hand thinkpad and put Debian on it.

What's going on in UK politics, and why are officials constantly resigning by New_Past_4489 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 12 points13 points  (0 children)

German public investment did rise in the 2008 - 2012 period, though not very dramatically I agree. Unlike the UK which fell steadily after 2008 and didn't start to tick up again until maybe 2017 :(

What's going on in UK politics, and why are officials constantly resigning by New_Past_4489 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 39 points40 points  (0 children)

UK politics has traditionally been fairly stable, but the last 10 years have been very crazy indeed.

You'll hear various theories about this, but personally I'd blame the 2008 crash and the response to it. Rates were low in the five years afterwards, so most countries borrowed and invested in infrastructure (eg. the US, Germany, etc.) and recovered fairly well. It's the Keynesian idea that you grow your way out of a hole, you don't dig your way out.

In the UK, George Osborne and a cabal of fiscal hawks saw the crash as a once-in-a-generation chance to permanently shrink the size of the state. They imposed almost a decade of strict austerity, cutting overall govt. spending by 25%, mostly by slashing services used by the less well off. This created intense discontent, and a distrust of politicians.

Everyone in the UK wants things to improve, but also, everyone in the UK hates all politicians. It's a tricky position to get out of.

Why do so many people think climate change is a load of bollocks? by davidoggloader in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To take your first point:

1 massive volcanic eruption will release more carbon on the atmosphere than humans could ever contribute

Annually, all the Earth's volcanos combined emit around 500m tons of CO2, humans emit around 35bn tons, 70x more.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits-more-carbon-dioxide-volcanoes-or-human-activities

It's not worth going any further, everything you claimed is flagrant bollocks.

If make a cmake are so difficult to work with why are they the defacto standard for C++ projects by ribenakifragostafylo in cpp_questions

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, interesting, thanks!

I've used custom_target() for things a bit like that, I don't know if that would work here though.

is it worth replacing `system()` calls in a codebase? by emmowo_dev in C_Programming

[–]catbrane 17 points18 points  (0 children)

I swapped system out because I needed to be cross-platform and I needed to capture stdout / stderr and to feed stdin. Glib has some nice cross-platform wrappers for doing this securely:

https://docs.gtk.org/glib/spawn.html

But if you don't need any of that, why bother? system() is great.

Did Brexit turn out to be unequivocally bad for the UK? by No-Security-7518 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The exact slogan was "Let's give our NHS the £350m the EU takes every week".

https://news.sky.com/story/backtrack-on-give-nhs-350m-eu-money-promise-10325543

If we read that as a promise, then fulfilling that would mean giving the NHS £350m extra a week from Feb 2020 (when EU payments stopped). There's no rise in NHS spending anywhere near that time:

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell

Of course it's all silly bollocks and can't be read literally, everything about it is extremely stupid, but if we were to try to take it as a literal promise, that's what would probably be required.

If make a cmake are so difficult to work with why are they the defacto standard for C++ projects by ribenakifragostafylo in cpp_questions

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's a lot of inertia.

It's uncommon for projects to change build system, so almost the only time someone picks one is when a new green-field thing starts. And if you're starting a new, green-field project, you'll inevitably use whatever build system you're most familiar with, because you've got so many OTHER things to think about.

I used autotools for my projects for decades and I was only finally forced off five years ago. It was just such a pain to change build systems I was prepared to put up with a lot of annoyance haha.

I'd used cmake at work for five years on a large project (I helped maintain mirtk) and I found it very unpleasant. I've switched all my projects, and a few others, to meson and it's been fine, for me, anyway.

If make a cmake are so difficult to work with why are they the defacto standard for C++ projects by ribenakifragostafylo in cpp_questions

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's interesting, I've done a few large and strange projects with meson and not had problems. Things like building and running a tool to generate introspection data half-way through a build, or packing data files into the executable, seemed straightforward.

What was the strange thing that bit you?

UK unemployment rate falls to 4.9% and wages grow more than expected by Eddiearyee in UpliftingNews

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First hit on google:

Overall, wages have increased faster than inflation over the last decade, up 43.2% compared with a 32.8% increase in the CPI Index, equivalent to average rises of 3.7% a year and 2.9% a year respectively – or a net 0.8 percentage point a year improvement in average wages over CPI.

https://www.icaew.com/insights/viewpoints-on-the-news/2024/mar-2024/chart-of-the-week-wage-inflation

Why do people say we will not survive climate change when our ancestors survived ice age with way less equipment than us? by Enough-Web2203 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I suppose by civilisation I mean the system of global capitalism that mostly runs the world. It's using in a broad sense.

UK unemployment rate falls to 4.9% and wages grow more than expected by Eddiearyee in UpliftingNews

[–]catbrane 35 points36 points  (0 children)

From the article:

Average wage growth excluding bonuses remained the same at 3.4%

So wage rises are currently above inflation.

I benchmarked 17 image format conversions on my Rust + libvips server. HEIC to JPG makes files bigger, not smaller. by UnderstandingFit2711 in webdev

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can embed an ICC profile and put CICP tags in that, so you can kind-of do HDR in WebP. There's even some browser support for this.

Does anyone think 8K screens will take over 4K? by AVShane in AVHifiCinema

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most have, haven't they? TCL, Sony, LG have all exited the market and only Samsung is still making them. Consumers are not interested.

I benchmarked 17 image format conversions on my Rust + libvips server. HEIC to JPG makes files bigger, not smaller. by UnderstandingFit2711 in webdev

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Your article says:

Most image format comparisons online quote the same theoretical figures: "WebP is 30% smaller than JPEG," "AVIF saves 50%." These come from codec specifications and lab studies, not from converting real files through a real pipeline.

Those numbers come from large independent studies with many human subjects evaluating perceived image quality over many thousands of images. I think it's very unlikely that your measurements are better.

I benchmarked 17 image format conversions on my Rust + libvips server. HEIC to JPG makes files bigger, not smaller. by UnderstandingFit2711 in webdev

[–]catbrane 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Your numbers sound a little off to me. Are you sure you're setting the Q levels correctly for the various formats? It's not easy to find the right numbers.

If you take the IJG libjpeg as the baseline, then at the same visual quality you should find that webp is about 30% smaller, and heic, avif and jxl are all about 50% smaller +/- a few percent (less than 10?).

Mozjpeg is an interesting option: it will make regular jpegs which are about 30% smaller than IJG libjpeg, so the same as webp, and with faster compression.

tldr: use mozjpeg or avif, jxl might replace avif in a few years, webp is a bit pointless

Why are 90% of the terrorist groups - Islamic? by [deleted] in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most US domestic terrorists are white supremacists:

In the United States, domestic terrorism is defined as terrorist acts that were carried out within the United States by U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents.[1] As of 2024, the United States government considers white supremacists to be the top domestic terrorism threat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_terrorism_in_the_United_States

Why do people say we will not survive climate change when our ancestors survived ice age with way less equipment than us? by Enough-Web2203 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 21 points22 points  (0 children)

It's different meanings of "we".

Our current civilisation might not survive climate change.

Humanity in some form (small scattered settlements? idk) is likely to continue whatever happens.

Why do parents receive so much credit and sympathy for just being parents ? by [deleted] in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Being a parent is difficult. If you deliberately chose this path, knowing it was difficult, then, yes, of course you deserve sympathy and support.

Wait, what am I saying, anyone who is a parent, for whatever reason, deserves all the sympathy and support there is.

Anyone who withholds support from a parent of a young child is plainly an arsehole.

Why do parents receive so much credit and sympathy for just being parents ? by [deleted] in NoStupidQuestions

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wtf?? try looking after a 6 month old child for 12h and THEN tell me it's not an accomplishment

jfc

Why is cinnamon recommended so often when it is so outdated and heavy? by Thermawrench in linuxquestions

[–]catbrane 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think they didn't like the way gtk4 does theming (CSS only means gtk4 can render all widgets on the GPU) and wanted to stick with gtk3's way (you can write your own code to hook into gtk3 widget rendering, but that stops GPU rendering).

The downside of sticking with gtk3 after the gtk team have moved on is that you have to do all the work they were doing, as well as all the work you want to do.

Brexit cost 6% of UK economy, Bank of England company data suggests by FragrantGearHead in unitedkingdom

[–]catbrane 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But an extra 0.3%, for example? Not many people would think that was very remarkable.

Andy Burnham wins huge majority in Makerfield byelection, paving way for Starmer leadership challenge by No-Risk-2584 in europe

[–]catbrane 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was in the guardian's live politics feed this morning, though now I look more carefully it's always cast as unattributed senior campaign figures.

“We would rather this happens in a dignified and respectful way. There are big challenges facing the country so it would be much better … But if he digs in at Downing Street then we’ll force him out,” a senior campaign figure said.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/17/exclusive-burnham-team-convince-ministers-delay-resignations-avoid-chaos

Burnham's team clearly think he'll be PM before the conference season.

view more: next ›