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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Terrible idea for a few reasons.

    • The example in the OP does not need anything but the country. GPS coordinates are less efficient than ISO codes
    • GPS coordinates don’t map 1:1 to countries or even street addresses. There are infinite different coordinates for each address, and it’s very non-trivial to match one to another. Comparing whether two records with country codes are in the same country is trivial. Doing the same with two GPS coordinates is very difficult.
    • GPS coordinates might be more exact than accurate. This is a surprisingly common issue: you start out only needing a country, so you put some arvitrary GPS position (e.g. the center of the country) into the GPS coordinates. Later a new requirement arises that means you now need street addresses. Now all old entries point so some random house in the middle of the country, and there’s no easy way to differentiate these false locations from real ones.

    I guess you meant that as a joke, but people are really doing this and it leads to actual problems.

    I saw a news report a while ago about something like that being done in a database for people with outstanding debt. If the address of the debtor wasn’t known, they just put “US” in the form, and the program automatically entered the centre of the US as the coordinates.

    Sucks for the family that lives there because they constantly get threatening mail and even house visits from angry lenders who want their money back. People even vandalized their house and car because they believed that their debtors lived in that house.


  • Tbh, immigration isn’t the worst “solution”.

    We do have an overpopulation problem. Well, an overconsumption times overpopulation problem, really.

    We could fix that by either consuming less (which we apparently, as a species, really don’t want) or by having fewer people (which we apparently really want).

    So, in the end, reducing population isn’t a real problem. Even if the population shrinks by 50% each generation (~25 years, for the sake of the argument), there will still be 250mio people left even after 5 generations. The trend should probably be reversed sometime then, but until then it’s really not an issue on the species survival aspect and it would actually be really good for the planet and our long-term survival.

    But until then we have mainly one problem: our economic system is based on infinite growth, which can’t work. So again there are two main solutions: either we bring in people from other countries, who benefit from a higher standard of living here while supporting our economic system, or we get rid of the real parasites and freeloaders in our societies: the ultra rich. And again, for some reason we really don’t want to get rid of the rich.






  • Totally correct.

    XYZprinting didn’t fail because of the DRM per se. They failed because they had an expensive priter with average quality, average learning curve, average reliability, and on top of that, they had stupid, expensive DRM cartridges that would frequently tangle and that you couldn’t untangle without breaking the cartridge. And they didn’t even have a decent selection of filaments and colors.

    They were a below average product to begin with, and being the first company to slap DRM on the filament was just the nail in the coffin.

    If it had been one of the big players of the time (Ender, Prusa, …) who slowly snuck in DRM, it would have been much more likely to succeed.







  • A friend of mine was applying for a job where they required “at least 5 years knowledge with Angular version X.Y.Z” (can’t remember the exact version, but they asked for all three numbers).

    He said “I’ve got 7 years of knowledge with version X-2 to X+2”.

    The HR person was like “But you don’t have 5 years of knowledge with version X.Y.Z, so you don’t fit for the job”.

    The real fun part was that version X.Y.Z had only been out for two years at that time.