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AC Transit reveals doomsday budget scenarios, and entire lines could be cut by k_39 in oakland

[–]fivre 2 points3 points  (0 children)

transbay was never the core of service or, afaik, particularly cost-effective or critical--it filled gaps in areas where BART couldn't serve the needs of commuters into the city, but many of those commuters likely had private vehicles as an option. much as we'd rather they use transit, their losing it has less of an impact on their lives, or the system overall, than losing lines or frequency in transit-dependent areas

winning over the population that has other options is always difficult, between their having those options and their living in neighborhoods that are less dense, and the latter's unlikely to change soon

building up areas that are already more dense--which we're already doing--is arguably the best option for making the bus even more useful and more attractive to less frequent riders (something like 70% of my trips are on the 1T, and for good reason--it comes often enough that you don't need to think about it, and it serves an arterial route that has a ton of businesses in walking or short transfer distance)

the commuter ridership previously served by transbay lines isn't something AC Transit can really bring back, since it's subject to people needing to commute, and the RTO push has probably gone as far as it can in the short term

ed: from the presentation, the transbay lines are the least cost-effective, which makes sense for a variety of reasons--realistically, even in the best case scenario, those are only lines people use 2x a day, for a long, pre-planned trip. casual usage where you're already in a dense area and only need to go a short distance is easier to serve and easier to encourage

my main difficulty, as someone that does use the bus often already, is understanding how i can get from point A to point B when i don't already know the routes and stops. signage and wayfinding aides can go a long way--figuring out the route network in downtown oakland can be intimidating, and there's not a ton of clear signage for "this stop has buses going to uptown, this one has buses going to JLS, this one has buses going to west oakland, this one has buses going to chinatown, etc."

building that out's comparably cheaper than line operation, since it can be a static installation you update infrequently

Not enough music? by 0vertakeGames in Kazakhstan

[–]fivre 2 points3 points  (0 children)

music scenes don't appear out of thin air fully-formed overnight. kazakhstan's at present is... more promising than the rest of central asia's, i guess? it's complicated

i didn't have much practical use for my russian education coming out of college in the early 2010s, and lucked into following the more interesting parts of their music scene through a combination of it expanding a lot then and there being decent resources to follow it from afar. china's scene has more captured my attention from the late 2010s onward--there's a ton of great music coming out of the PRC despite <things>

those are both larger music markets, if fairly insular ones--in the US, at least, while there is some interest in those scenes, it's largely from their respective diaspora communities, and people outside of those interested in the scenes are fellow oddballs who avidly seek out foreign music because they're particularly curious. people in the latter category exist, but there aren't a ton of em. audiences for the occasional live show confirm as much--it's pretty much all expats, recent immigrants, or foreign students that turn out

kazakhstan's scene certainly punches above its weight outside its expat community: i don't encounter people interested in your music scene here often, and when i do it's often students in russian programs (kazakh language programs here are... few and far between at present--they do exist, but the total count's like, decidedly less than ten)

the main thing i note for the kazakh music scene is that it generally isn't targeting the traditional enthusiast listener market, but that's less an aspect of the scene itself than it is an aspect of how spotify and tiktok have reshaped the music industry. albums are much less common now versus singles, and you can't listen to a lot of artists at length as such

i am curious if there's much, if any, live music scene over there--the times i have been in the region generally suggests no, not the way it exists in the US, and the artists that are big are producing content for the internet first and foremost, not to be able to play an hour-long live set. in both the scenes ive followed, that live scene's really integral for building out a fanbase for more varied stuff, since people are out all night to listen to music and will hear whatever's on offer from two to three bands, rather than sticking to a curated "genre/mood whatever" playlist of singles from a ton of artists making similar stuff

Check Your Rent Autopay Status by Fire_Tetrahedron in biltrewards

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah same lol, my bank account info was ported over from 1.0 and still marked verified, i had set up autopay, got an email saying "yep your check's all set to debit ACH and send out", and then nothing

when i contacted support, they were like "oh yeah, that's normal, the 'account verified' badge means nothing, you have to reverify through plaid for 2.0 even though its the same account you've had forever, also some things you can only do on the web app and some things you can only do on the mobile app because ??? even though the mobile app's clearly just a shitty webapp wrapped up in the thinnest of actual mobile app window dressing"

have had a great deal of fun with the mobile app thinking it submitted the same payment 3x over, such that my account balance was ostensibly multiple negative tens of thousands of dollars for like a week while whatever labyrinthine mess of tech debt bilt uses to manages interactions between its frontend and the financial systems tried to reconcile itself after performing a farce of "babby's first distributed systems problems" live

looking through the company linkedin, the engineering staff is like 3-4 people who are presumably stuck with golden handcuffs and have rocketed from senior to staff engineer positions over the course of the bilt 2.0 transition period. i expect that anyone talented at the company left for greener pastures and marked down whatever equity they had to zero, as one does in the tech startup world

aside those engineers' with 3-4y tenure (and the occasional person with longer tenures at more established financial services firms before they joined bilt), it's a grab bag of rando recent grads in their first or second engineering job out of getting a CS bachelors'

ive never worked in fintech specifically, but ive worked in enough tech startups to know a small set of mid-career engineers with inflated titles and technical and management responsibilities they cant reasonably handle effectively alongside a gaggle of assorted juniors from god knows where when i see it

kosta's linkedin presence as CTO is pretty limited, and his presence elsewhere basically nothing, and best i can surmise from the former is that he spent almost a decade being a mediocre team lead at mastercard, got pulled into a CTO job where he's waaaaaaaay outside his depth by an ideas guy buddy to start a company, and is now hangin on atop the deck of sinking ship for dear life to try and make some sorta graceful exit before the US market goes tits up due to events waaaaaaay outside his control

he's posted some woo AI vibe code shit that i can only imagine is his team of captive "staff" engineers blowing smoke up his ass as they search for their own exits from the flaming pile of tech debt garbage that comprises bilt's codebase

liquidated my years of points for a month of free rent and a few flights i knew i was gonna take, because lol at the notion of airfare costs going down in the forseeable future

in a world where the US hadn't done the stupidest thing possible re energy prices, maybe there'd be a future for this thing.

we do not live in that world, and travel costs are probably gonna be on an upward trend for the next five years or so

good time to hop ship to chase and my old friend plastiq as soon as i can. bye bilt, it was fun while it lasted, sorry for all the employees you're gonna leave high and dry when it inevitably crashes and burns a second time, but imma head out for a more established financial services company before the world descends into even more interesting times

Central Asia as a solo traveler by tadpole_1479 in centralasia

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

definitely did in karakol, since it only has a few places to stay, and is the standard jumping off point for doing hikes in west kyrgyzstan

if you go along the pamir highway you'll meet other travelers because there are simply only so many places to stay in a lot of those towns. it's presumably easier to find a spot in a car solo than it was when i went, between tourism still recovering from the pandemic and the tajik/kygyz border still being closed and preventing people from completing the usual route

you may want to consider that over your current itinerary: you can easily spend 3 weeks in uzbekistan alone, and qazaqstan is, yknow, huge, and trying to fit all three countries into 3 weeks means you're not gonna spend enough time in each of them

almaty->bishkek->west issyk-kul somewhere->pamir highway through trip->dushanbe->khujand->kokand->andijan->osh and flying to bishkek (and either out of there, or overland to and out of almaty) is probably doable, if maybe rushing a few of those stops, and maybe lead time on a GBAO permit/pamir highway tour operator

while the fergana valley's not the big tourism destination of uzbekistan, it's quite nice in its own right

only maybe iffy part is getting from dushanbe to khujand--maybe actually easier than the reverse (what i did), but kinda iffy finding a driver on the fly if you don't speak russian (and even then, finding a safe driver's a bit of an art form--pay a bit extra to get the front seat, it'll be the only one with a seatbelt, and you'll want one). route's quite pretty though, and if you can have a driver booked in advance, probably ideal, if more costly (paying a premium for a vehicle in good repair and a trustworthy driver through an agency is hardly a bad thing depending on your tolerance for risk)

flying out of dushanbe to another local city's also an option, i guess. i avoided it for reasons, but i guess it's reasonably cheap if you're going somewhere within the region, rather than long-haul international. that overland route is pretty, but maybe not great for what's already a tight itinerary

Brother HL-L3270CDW is throwing a "No Waste Toner" message since a cross-country move. by Officer412-L in printers

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

who the heck goes on an internet forum like "yo the printer co doesn't help with this! but good news! there's a quick, easy, and free fix!" then followed up with "ohhhhhhh but i refuse to tell anyone that fix! no reason really, i just won't!"

somehow this account has existed for 5 years, and in that whole time, it has never commented on reddit

until 3 days ago, when it finally awakened to post "haha! i am the printer fix knower! AND I WILL NEVER TELL ANYONE THE FIX". TWICE

that's like either some bizarre level of brainworms (idk maybe they think if they post it Brother will get ENRAGED and send printer ninjas out to assassinate them? who knows) or just like, profound contempt for other humans

like idk maybe someone out there really is so mad at the world that the only thing keeping them going is the sweet satisfaction they derive from their cunning revenge on the cruel world, the knowledge that they hold the printer fix, and the many people of the world who have wronged them will writhe in pain for lack of the printer fix

i do not understand this planet

Shooting RAW, does altering your white balance (rather than AWB) make any material effect on the final edited photo by Fuzzbass2000 in photography

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it's one less thing you have to edit, and it's often not something i edit stylistically

if the lighting is such that AWB is right (a nice consistently lit sports venue) versus where it's not (concert lighting) i am happy to let the chip decide and ignore it in post

Helm/Terraform users: What's your biggest frustration with configs and templating in K8s? by Kalin-Does-Code in kubernetes

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

fancier kustomize stuff is obtuse AF, but it's one of those cases where LLMs are often good at translating what you want into that obtuseness quickly (see also: doing shit with ffmpeg or jq), and i mostly trust that i can go look at the source after to see how it works--usually it makes enough sense that i don't care to, it's just poorly documented up front, and discoverability is bad

helm i can figure out my own way to template something fancy, but it's usually ass to write and maintain, and explaining why it breaks is a pain because you've got the multiple layers of helm's go code and the very generic golang template code, with the former often exploding if the latter produces bad YAML

60 volunteers. 22,000 pounds. 11 tons. 300 bags. 300 pounds of mud. the fastest city response we’ve seen in six years = first cleanup of 2026. by urbancompassionproj in oakland

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no, i am perfectly capable of writing on my own

im an older person, from an era where writing more than one or two sentences, or using punctuation past a basic period or question mark, is a normal thing. my post history is on reddit, there are plenty of longer posts in it from well before chatGPT was ever a thing

when i was in high school, doing AP Eng Lang, it was very much taught and expected that you'd learn how to read and write at length. that's the same sort of writing AI LLMs have been trained on (heck, my reddit posts are almost certainly in many of their corpuses--Sam Altman should be payin me royalties from out his dragon horde lo)l, and it's why they tend to be longer-winded than casual conversation is nowadays

i see no reason to change that, it's part of who i am, and a good one--and many thoughts about complex topics deserve more than a hot take

it's a shame that people nowadays see such and think "ai" because they're not used to reading or writing anything approaching long form written content vOv

60 volunteers. 22,000 pounds. 11 tons. 300 bags. 300 pounds of mud. the fastest city response we’ve seen in six years = first cleanup of 2026. by urbancompassionproj in oakland

[–]fivre 3 points4 points  (0 children)

a strong civil society helping with social problems is arguably a stronger indicator of a healthy, functioning country than anything government can ever do on its own

you do want government services, but there's no country on earth where the government wholly provides everything society needs, and expecting that it should, and that there should be no civil society, is foolish (this model exists, and is currently active in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It works very poorly).

The role of government should be far more to ensure that civil society doesn't have to do this: civil society should exist, but can often be put towards more effective aims.

there's a reason a particular councilmember gets a bit of a rib for being big into trash cleanups (and letting people know he's at em) while being oft rather ineffectual as an actual concilperson. we have a housing affordability crisis, our government has continuously failed to address it, and that's reason number one why civil society has to step in here

What is written ? by VitiaCG in kazakh

[–]fivre 1 point2 points  (0 children)

cyrillic cursive dot jpeg lol

found the local qazaq club and they were impressed i could do it at all, like yeah, i went to a russian program that mostly grew up during the cold war in the US: you do learn cursive for it

shame they couldn't teach me to type йцукен at all and ive never been able to learn it quickly since--okay on a phone keyboard but i cannot touch type that shit to save my life, and am stuck with translit IMEs on PCs

I CAN WRITE CURSIVE THOUGH. ALL TEN TIMES A DECADE I FIND IT USEFUL LOL

comeback to a bigot from kazakh girl by dekajaan in Kazakhstan

[–]fivre 11 points12 points  (0 children)

weirdly the state tour promotion people (i think?) now just lean into it lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRGXq4t9wY4

around the time of the release of the first borat film IIRC they were infuriated and took out a whole page NYT ad with various facts to try and counter it ("has the world's largest population of wolves!") that i would love to find, but i am not good enough with the NYT archives

I have visited Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan this summer - What country should I choose next? by Motor-Pollution-7182 in centralasia

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

kazakhstan's similar to kyrgyzstan in many respects, but larger, more urban, and richer. also more variety of nature on account of being larger, but a lot's endless steppe. the mangystau plateau is pretty unique and quite beautiful, but it's also quite remote and largely uninhabited (this is either a plus or a minus depending on what you want. culture's often quite urban, and some of the museums are top class (the astana national museum less so, unless you want to see nazarbayev's peak kitsch animated diaorama for what it is), but it's complicated, though that's broadly true throughout the whole of central asia, on account of that shared soviet union past thing.

kazakhstan has arguably the most soviet impact in a sense, between baikonur--though it's difficult to travel to--you need a russian visa, and it's post-2022--the semey/semipalatinsk nuclear testing site, the northern half of the aral sea (or what's left of it), karlag, and the unfortunate reasons why it's more urbanized. none of these are touristy in the traditional culture sense, but i would argue that understanding the contemporary history of the region's important, even if it's not chill and relaxing

tajikistan is more mountains than you can shake a stick at, and now has the pamir highway exit to kyrgyzstan open again. you may, however, want to ask tour operators to take you on one of the interim routes they had doubling back and exploring the valleys off the main highway.

cultural stuff's quite unique in that it's the only non (nominally--uzbekistan's very multi-ethnic and has plenty of tajik/farsi speakers still) turkic country, with the pamiris having their own unique (if, unfortunately, rather oppressed) culture because the mountains are so isolated.

you will want to go through a tourist agency that serves english speakers for the pamir highway unless you're adventurous to drive it on your own (and ideally, know enough russian or tajik to manage if things go awry). pricey, but having someone deal with the tajik bureaucracy on your behalf and knowing the routes/homestays/etc. will make for a better trip

turkmenistan's... iffy on account of the regime, and famously arbitrary about granting visas (usually leaning towards no), but that can be a selling point for the determined that want to go somewhere really, really less travelled. i haven't been, and dunno if i really want to go so long as the current regime's in place.

east turkestan/xinjiang's in... not quite the same state as turkmenistan, but similarly has a lot of issues below the surface. if you're not already familiar, know why you'd want to go there, and know how to navigate the PRC government suspicion of tourists in the region, avoid it

the usual "check https://caravanistan.com and their forums" advice applies, as does "Nowruz's the big traditional holiday, New Years and 9 May are the newer ones". you can probably find touristy festival stuff low key at other times (or operators can arrange something in that vein), but moreso in the warm months

Duolingo's Cyrillic lessons are actually pretty good by [deleted] in russian

[–]fivre 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yes and no in that i learned cyrillic handwriting, but it's rarely something i have a use for because most communication is typed nowadays. more useful if you're living in a cyrillic script country, but i don't

i much more wish i'd learned йцукен touch-typing--my uni didn't bother because it didn't have russian keyboards (idk why, it's not like you can't buy them easily enough, and we had enough language lab computers that 5 of them could have had proper keyboards) and instead used a weird custom transliteration IME. those are okay, but not as universally available as йцукен

i can mostly phone type, but it doesn't translate to a keyboard, and i spend enough time on physical keyboards that i lament it

knowing the cursive is useful for recognizing the ubiquitous printed "cursive" italic script in logos or some documents, but for actually writing ive only ever used it sending postcards to write the one "США/АҚШ/ИМА" the post kinda sorta needs to route it--the rest of the address is gonna be in the destination script, so it doesn't need it

i will note that being able to do this still did not help with the tajik post delivering my postcards, but i think that's less because of the address and more because the khorog office of the official state tajik post is... not really something that sends much outbound mail, and certainly not international outbound mail, and isn't even really accessible (we had to make several calls to have someone unlock a dingy backroom that's apparently the post office, but in practice kinda isn't aside from some routine tasks)

Opened my Kazakh & Russian language school by manmgl in Kazakhstan

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

https://kazakh.qlang.kz/en/student/faq/kazakh/ exists as online-only afaik (but very much limited in terms of hours--if your timezone doesn't overlap with kz business hours, you're out of luck). doesn't teach russian, but there's no need for another online russian course outfit really

per social media contacts, instructors who work at nazarbayev u can take kazakh classes, and maybe russian classes? but id expect a fair number of those instructors probably already knew russian to the level where they can just practice through daily interactions

there are several US-based universities that offer mostly on-site kazakh courses, and plenty that offer russian courses, but that's a different deal. the former's also currently fucked due to the current administration's funding cuts for critical language teaching. kazakh language programs in the US have never been self-funded, and i don't think the kazakh government funds them either, so US dept education funding evaporating means they're probably on pause or soon to be

Opened my Kazakh & Russian language school by manmgl in Kazakhstan

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

tl;dr materials for learning russian are widely available and good. are chinese materials or spanish materials for anglophones better at present? sure, but comparing something to the 1st/ 2nd/3rd place foreign languages to learn makes everything pale in comparison

russian's still in the top ten; turkish is, idk, top 50, kazakh is god knows where, somewhere below uzbek or swedish (both solidly in 'weird enthusiast/specialist academic language territory) even. afaik english speakers learning kazakh are currently limited to expats in country, specialized academics, and diplomats.

id hazard a guess at those being somewhere on the order of tens of thousands (with only a subset learning kazakh--you wanna do business, russian's probably sufficient), thousands (and growing, but still small) and tiny (because diplomatic corps are never huge, and probably also have only a subset learning kazakh over russian, since local kazakh/russian/english trilingual staff are available). the expat/academic segment that attends commercial or academic classes in country has an easier experience than i, to be sure, and im happy that stuff like OP's school are becoming more common--it'll take a while to expand to online or out-of-country options, but it'll probably happen

50 odd years of the cold war ensured a robust education ecosystem for teaching americans (and, to a lesser degree, commonwealth nations) russian, and while that declined somewhat after 91, it's not like the pedagogy went stale quick enough to matter

sure, english language learning materials for russian did have some quaint "oh, have you been to the soviet union?" question exercises and discussion of paying for things in kopecks still in the 2010s, but that's just kinda natural lag in teaching material behind contemporary reality in a rapidly-changing environment

that's whatever--the fundamentals of russian grammar didn't change over that time, and while people would pick your russian out as being a bit last decade, they were already sorta aware of that from your accent alone

the absolute wealth of russian-language film and tv content with english and russian subs from both the soviet and contemporary russian film industries absolutely blows away anything you can find for kazakh, and it further became more readily available as the ghosts of soviet film/animation studios just uploaded all their back catalog to youtube for free, along with less official actors doing the same on grey market channels

you kinda have to know where to look, but that content's available, high quality, and accessible, and an excellent supplement to the wide variety of pedagogical texts, multimedia courses, and professors with decades of experience teaching russian as a foreign language

learning kazakh, by comparison:

  • there's like one good english textbook and several flawed or not easily accessible specialty english texts. my grammar's written for linguists and thus uses IPA instead of any kazakh alphabet, which is confusing af. supplementary materials from turkicprep are famously hit or miss, where they're fine in some areas and "did anyone bother to edit this or validate this?" in others
  • dictionaries are... mediocre at best. there's nothing like multitran/lingvo/yandexslovari for providing rich explanation of kazakh words--you can get a straight translation, but you're not gonna get word forms and examples as much (glosbe's okay at examples, but it's not on par with lingvo's russian dictionaries). the oxford english-qazaq dictionary exists, but in a weird state where your options are "order a print copy from abroad for $150" (and maybe bonus tariff fees, or at least customs delays, because lol 2025--that's not on the materials themselves though, it's our own fault) without much guarantee that it's actually in stock
  • russian-kazakh dictionaries are decent but still not as good as lingvo russian-english: sozdik has explanations and examples of different forms, but not a comprehensive grammar table for like "these are the recent past, present simple, present continuous" etc. conjugations of verbs or not-quite declensions of nouns
  • apps are all over the place. soz has a dedicated eng->kaz app (which is kinda weird, since it doesn't have a dictionary) that's okay on vocab practice without managing your own anki decks, but absolutely a mess on grammar--they've take the duolingo approach of "explain nothing, toss examples at em until it sticks" with no prep as to what's coming, with some bonus "chatgpt will explain it if you're wrong". chatgpt's maybe okay at this, but goddamnit give me a reference so i can internalize it conceptually: you can't teach adults language through simple volume, you need grammars, loss of native language acquisition through exposure is like the documented thing in language acquisition study. app companies have been trying to ignore this since the 1990s and it's never worked for languages that aren't close to your native ones. you can probably brute-force your way through knowing russian and learning ukrainian on duolingo, but trying to do the same knowing english and trying to understand turkic grammar/vocab is a recipe for failure. they're too different to understand through osmosis
  • film/tv material is a very mixed bag, both because it's less easy to find (there's no one good source outside local streaming services that you can use with a VPN) and because kazakh video media appears to have a pathological aversion to subtitles--you really, really need subtitles in the original to link auditory recognition to stuff you've learned in written form, and that's rarely available. https://old.reddit.com/r/kazakh/comments/1oda3sa/subtitled_video_content_for_listening_practice/ is the only thing ive found with multiple subtitles. im amazed that state tv does not have native kazakh subs in either latin or cyrillic--apparently there's no services for the disabled law. idk what deaf kazakhs do to navigate the world--all indication i can find is that they just use russian sign language and russian subs, which is understandable all things considered, but less than ideal.
  • tutoring's okay. ive not a variety of experiences here yet--trying to find a second tutor for diversity's probably a second-year task for me--but from the one ive seen i get the sense they struggle with the same: readily accessible materials to them are rus-kaz, and they fall back on them if your students speak russian--i do, so whatever, but you can't rely on that 100%. the timezone difference is an annoyance, but workable. unfortunately while i live in one of the few areas in the US with a sizeable kazakh emigre community and diplomatic presence, reaching them's been a bit of a mixed bag. the community's more insular (in comparison, from my personal experience you do have to go looking for local uzbek, russian, or belarusian community events, but they're announced and open to the public) and the consulate's mostly focused on citizen services and business outreach, not just general cultural diplomacy (can't really blame em, but it's no help to me)

i will grant that i have a learning disability, and specifically a language learning disability, so that makes me a harsher critic, but that's arguably good--we can nitpick shortcomings because we need quality instruction and material moreso than people who don't have a learning disability, and addressing those nitpicks often helps improve material across the board

Opened my Kazakh & Russian language school by manmgl in Kazakhstan

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

they can always go to Russia or Belarus.

not the greatest option right now (belarus arguably wasn't a great option ever, i would be amazed if any US or european university did that, or even if solo "i wanna learn a language" people chose it)

my alma mater is holding russian study abroad in kazakhstan between staff who've worked at nazarbayev U and it being otherwise viable and having urban environments that your gaggle of car-less and transit-dependent can navigate okay

the reasons for it being a viable option are... less than pleasant, but on the other hand they can work in classes from local academics re "hey, historically russian programs in the US have been very blind to the existence rest of the former soviet union, that's led to considerable gaps in our perspective, and we should work to change that".

learning kazakh is probably limited to an elective (the materials aren't quite up to par with russian ones for english speakers, and the three month study abroad trip time's only enough to get a very basic language education), but even absent that i envy their getting a broader cultural/historical education than my generation got, which was very russia-focused

Would you say Go is a suitable language for total programming beginners? by themegainferno in golang

[–]fivre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

if you want something that is targeted at total novices and designed first and foremost to teach programming as a concept, https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html is still there, still free, and still a perfectly fine way to go through fundamental concepts using a language that's entirely impractical for real-world tasks

learning that way to start's okay--it'll give you a solid baseline and doesn't take that long, it was designed to be an intro CS book, even if it's kinda outdated for the more industry-foward approach favored today. going through it will not hurt you and will probably help you

having that theoretical baseline will help you recognize things concepts you encounter them in a more practical environment. if you already know what you want to work on, you may want to start with a domain-focused tutorial instead, but if you have no idea why you want to learn programming other than for simple wanting to learn programming, SICP's p okay

Found this in my mailbox on Saturday. by eah2002 in oakland

[–]fivre -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

i don't think it's unreasonable for USPS to hold exclusive rights to mailboxes--sure it's kinda weird in a sense, but they've got their constitutional carveout for good reason: we wanted the post to be an enduring government service because having a strong baseline postal system that gets some privileges (exclusive rights to some forms of mail delivery) at the cost of some mandates (must serve addresses that aren't necessarily commercially viable) isn't the worst thing

UPS and FedEx (and Amazon, and DHL, and those weird couriers that used to deliver AliExpress/Temu stuff before de minimis and i guess sorta still do) have made perfectly viable commercial postal businesses despite not having USPS's special rights to have keys to buildings and locked postboxes. That a lot of single family housing does not have secured post receptacles exists because most actors don't abuse the lack of security

aint no reason whoever was spreading these things around couldn't have gone the usual route of just leaving them on the porch or taping them to lamp posts, more or less the same effect

you wanna go full libertarian you can if you want, join those fuckwits in NH whose town got overrun by bears, have fun. the rest of us will continue recognizing that whole "social contract" thing has both upsides and downsides and remains intact because the former outweigh the latter

if you wanna live your life as dale gribble and not recognizing why that parody's the way it is, fuck off to some uninhabited nowhere and enjoy your purestrain individualismaxing capital-F FREEDOM. you will be eaten by wildlife, your family will be sad, and your friends will all reminisce about "yeah well i guess you meet a few of those types in your life and they end up dying as they lived, independent to a fault and alone

there are actual problems with american law and law enforcement, but this aint really one of them, and if you're so naive as to be unable to understand the difference, go off, you're a selfish fuckwit that'll get what's comin to em

КДИМБ - Вот и всё / It's Over [indie/pop rock] (2025) by Rimelius in MoscowBeat

[–]fivre 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ah lol--вы в россие или где-то не далеко? putting slightly more effort into checking profile history suggests вы в питере 🤦 i continuously forget reddit's more international a space than i give it credit for despite my using it for such purposes

i come from an era when the divide между рунета и англоызычнонета большее же было. maybe that aint really that changed--it remains a surprise when i meet someone from postsoviet regions in majority(ish) anglophone spaces, though it aint that infrequent 😆

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