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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t really speak Finnish, so probably someone can expand better, but AFAIK they don’t have a word for Please. When I was in Finland I went to a coffee place with a friend, and noticed he said “yksi kahvi” which literally means one coffee, when he got his coffee he said “Kiitos” (thanks), I noticed no one used any recurring word that could mean Please, so I asked my friend and he said something like “They’re all being polite, we just don’t have a word for please, one could say something like: I would like a coffee, Thanks. But that’s just overcomplicated”




  • Languages I’m fluent:

    • Spanish (Por favor, Gracias)
    • Portuguese (Por favor, Obrigado/a)
    • English (Please, Thank you)

    Languages I can mostly understand but I’m a disaster speaking:

    • Italian (Per favore, Grazie)
    • Catalan (Si us plau, Merci (Technically Gracies, but most people use Merci))

    Languages I can speak small child like phrases and express some simple things (although I’m very rusty in both of them):

    • Russian (пожалуйста (Pajalsta), спасибо (Spaciba))
    • German (Bitte, Danke)

    Languages I can say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak X, do you speak English?” (Which I think is more important than just please and thank you)

    • French (Si vous plat, Merci)
    • Dutch ( [don’t know this one], dank je)
    • Finnish ( * , Kiitos)

    Languages I can say Please and thank you (because I’ve seen enough TV in this language):

    • Japanese (Onegai, Arigato)

    * There’s no word for please in Finnish, which you’d think makes the language sound harsh, but I think it’s the other way around, it makes everyone be polite by default, when going into a coffee shop and saying “one coffee” is the equivalent to “hello, can I please have one coffee, thanks” it’s hard to be rude.


  • I love the fact that Finnish doesn’t have a way of saying please, so you just thank the person instead. The first time I was in Finland I learned to say “excuse me, I don’t speak Finnish, do you speak English?”, and because that was the only thing I learned I wanted to learn to pronounce it correctly, so I took the time and effort to learn how to pronounce it. The problem when I do this, is that most people don’t learn basic niceties, and even the ones that do tent to mangle pronunciation, so native people think I’m kidding because it sounds like some native saying they don’t speak the language. Also because the majority of interactions with people are simple “hello”, “thanks”, “bye” I like to pick up on those by listening to people, but not by studying it or anything.

    All of that setup for this stupid story: One day I go to a supermarket and the lady tells me “Moi” (hi) and with the same cheerful tone of voice I’ve seen people use I replied with “Moi Moi” (bye bye). I had seen people use both Moi and Moi Moi, but hadn’t noticed that one was hi and the other was bye, so I was accidentally cheerfully rude, and I still feel bad about it. If you’re out there, I’m so sorry supermarket lady in Helsinki, I’m just a dumb tourist trying to be nice.


  • Mixing up correlation with causation. A while back I was having a discussion here on Lemmy because people were saying pitbulls are dangerous and pointing to the disproportionate amount of deaths caused by pitbulls vs the percentage of dogs that are pitbulls. The argument goes something like this “Pitbulls are responsible for 55% of killings, but they’re only 12% of all dogs, therefore Pitbulls are dangerous”.

    Oh, and BTW if you agreed with that argument above, congratulations, you’re officially a racist, because those are the numbers of murder convictions and demographics for Black people in the USA. The argument is the same, and the reason why it’s flawed is the same: correlation does not imply causation. Just because there’s something seems disproportionate out of context doesn’t mean it has the most obvious cause, in both cases the reasons are much more complex and mostly have to do with education and opportunity (or lack thereof).






  • I was going to say VR, I almost never get motion sickness, never got motion sickness from reading on vehicles nor roller coasters. But the first time I put on a VR headset to play roller coaster simulator I almost threw up. Nowadays I can play Sairento doing backflips and wall running comfortably, but that first roller coaster simulation took me by surprise.


  • So I’ve heard, and AFAIK Rust has a lot of other similarities. That being said last time I tried to look at Haskell I gave up very quickly, It seems like a great language for mathematicians who want to code, but it’s a very different paradigm from what I’m used to, so I would need some time to dedicate to actually learning it properly. Plus, if the person I’m replying to thinks Rust is confusing he probably puts Haskell, Lisp and Brainfuck in the same category.


  • Yes, you can have a OnceLock<RWLock<T>> which is something that will get initialized at some point, and then you can acquire a lock on it for either read or write. To use it you need to check and handle both conditions, so it’s really secure.

    However if you’re writing a single threaded application a global let mut should also be safe, but Rust doesn’t know if your application is single-threaded, or even if it is, it might get imported by others that isn’t. So you’re forced to consider the safety of things that might not even be related to what you’re doing. Which was my point, if you’re writing a simple CLI single threaded app, the compiler blocking you from having a global variable seems pedantic and unnecessary, because it’s forcing you to deal with the edge case of your app becoming multi-threaded in the future.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is part of what makes Rust great, but it can be EXTREMELY pedantic.


  • You might want to take a look at C/C++ again at some point, you didn’t mentioned a single thing that I expected, I expected you to complain about memory allocation, double frees or stuff like that, instead you touched on lots of very accurate pain points for C/C++ that people who use it for years feel.

    • Preprocessor directives: I assume you mean macros like #ifdef _WIN32, macros will change the code before it gets compiled, so they allow you to write meta-code, as in code that writes code. Rust takes this to a whole new level, so you might want to understand the basic concept before looking into advanced Rust. That being said, I don’t think these are complicated in and of themselves, nor do I think you’re having problem with understanding what they mean, and it’s more likely a question of why, and the answer is that some stuff should happen at compile time, e.g. checking if you’re on Windows or Linux do define how you deal with paths or something. But the same can be extended to knowing if a given feature is enabled so you can compile only parts of the program. The lack of package manager is a pain, but C/C++ predate lots of those concepts, and there have been lots of attempts. Also if you’re using Linux your system already has a package manager so using some common standard like CMake for your projects makes it all “just work” (most of the time)… But yeah, this one is a pain, no question about it, and Rust solved it properly.
    • Essentially the compiler couldn’t find something, they shouldn’t appear randomly and that’s perhaps a VS bug, never used VS for C/C++ development so I’m not sure on that one, but whenever I had link errors I was forgetting an include or a library on my CMake.
    • What do you mean by errors? Compiler errors? You learn to read them with time, but yeah, Rust compiler errors are much nicer, although they can lead you into a rabbit hole by suggesting changes you shouldn’t use.
    • I do know that, it’s not intuitive if you’re thinking on a higher level, but if you think on low level stuff it makes absolute sense. I can’t think of why this would have caused you trouble needing debugging though, you could be occupying more memory than necessary, or you could be running into problems with unions, but I can’t think of why the order of a struct would make anything crash unless you’re naively converting between types by casting a pointer, which is a red flag on its own.
    • Well, C doesn’t need strings, what is a string? It’s just an array of characters. C tries to not impose anything on top of the very basics, so it makes sense it doesn’t have a string type, appending to a string or to an array of numbers is essentially the same, you just deal with strings more commonly. And this forces you to think on what you’re doing, e.g. my_str += "something" sounds like a very simple thing, but under the hood you’re allocating an entire new string, copying the content from my_str into it, appending something and then deleting the old one. C forces you to do that stuff manually so you have to be conscious of what you’re doing, string operations are not cheap, and you can gain a lot of performance by simply preallocating all you’ll need from the start. Rust is similar here, while they do have a String type, they make a very big difference between it and a slice of a string, so that makes you conscious of when you’re doing heap stuff.

    I spent years with C/C++ as my main language, and I can tell you that I would also not choose it for a random project. However I would also most likely not pick Rust either. Python is my go-to for “I need something quick”. Rust would be my go-to for “I need something robust”, or “I want to make sure this will work as intended”, it will mean a more tedious development cycle with a very slow iteration (much slower than C/C++, e.g. adding an enum value can mean lots of fixes on Rust, because most places where you’re dealing with that enum would fail to compile because you’re not taking the new value into consideration), but it will mean that every step will be solid (if it compiles after adding an enum value, I’m sure it’s being considered).

    Do learn Rust, it’s fun and personally I see a LOT of future in that language, but it also abstracts some of the concepts away while still requiring you to know them, e.g. heap/stack. I think learning C/C++ for the core concepts is better, but if you know those concepts Rust is a better language overall.


  • Yeah, that’s a good approach, learn it and it’s one more tool under the belt.

    That being said, I think you need to have some good level of proficient in C/C++ before lots of the Rust things make sense. I’m not sure what frustrated you about C/C++, and if you’d like to ask questions about that I’m happy to try to answer them. But a lot of concepts are the same just shown under a different light. For example, on C/C++ you chose to use stack or heap by declaring variables or allocating memory and storing it in pointers, in Rust you don’t allocate memory directly, instead you use types that store information on Heap, e.g. Box. I think that’s a lot less intuitive, and requires you to have a good grasp of heap/stack before it makes sense, but it prevents you from doing stupid stuff you might do accidentally on C/C++ like store a pointer to a stack object after it goes out of scope.

    But I might be wrong, it might be that for me all of that made sense because I knew C/C++ but that to you it will make sense regardless, and might even teach you those concepts that are useful on C/C++ too.


  • While I agree with you that OP shouldn’t migrate to Rust, the language is not illogical nor a mix of any of those. There’s a lot of stuff that Rust does extremely well that can’t be reproduced in any of the other languages, such as Options or Result types. And while it can become confusing when lifetimes get thrown at it as a general rule it’s not. Also the compiler messages are so thorough, I don’t think I have ever seen anything come close to it.

    Rust is not for everything, nor for everyone, but saying it doesn’t have it’s merits is dishonest.


  • Let me start by saying I love Rust and think it’s great. I’ve been writing some personal stuff in Rust and it’s all that I’ve been looking for.

    However there is some stuff you said that makes me think Rust won’t be something you would fully appreciate Rust. Firstly every project, regardless of language, when it becomes big it becomes a hassle to maintain, especially if you’re not experienced enough to have set up a good architecture from the start.

    But more importantly, a lot of Rust benefits are stuff you didn’t mention, and some of the stuff you mentioned is not that important.

    • Speed: Performance gains will be minimal, most of the time your server takes on an API call is read/write disk/Network, and that takes as long as it takes regardless of language. Sure synthetic benchmark will tell you it’s twice the speed for a hello world, but the moment you start relying on outside stuff the line gets murky.
    • Less resources: Again, unless you have at least 10 instances of your service or are trying to get it to run in very minimal hardware conditions, you’re not likely to see any meaningful improvement. Sure your service now uses half the amount of RAM, but the hardware where you’re running it likely has a couple orders of magnitude more RAM than that anyways.
    • Garbage collection: You say that like it’s a bad word, but at the same time admit to have problems with C/C++, whose main differences are related to that.
    • Compilation: I don’t think you’re taking compilation into consideration, from line change to retest we’re talking a couple of minutes depending on the change. That can be annoying really fast, especially if you don’t understand the reason. Also, the Rust compiler is EXTREMELY pedantic, it will not let you compile stuff that you think should work because there’s an edge case that you’ve forgotten to consider because it’s not something you cared about, e.g. you can’t have global mutable variables because that can cause race conditions on multi-threading applications.
    • Security: you didn’t mention this but it’s one of the largest advantages of Rust, things like the Option or Result types as well as the match statements and the borrow checker are amazing and unmatched by anything else out there.
    • The Rust price: Rust is not free, you just pay beforehand, you win execution time at the expense of compiling time, you save on runtime errors at the expense of pedantic code checks, etc, etc. Rust is excellent if you understand why, and are willing to pay that price. Rust is for people who when the compiler says “you can’t do this because it will cause problems with X edge case” say “of course! Thanks!”, if you think “ugh, that’s never gonna happen, stupid compiler” then it’s not for you. To add to that, Rust can become quite complicated because of it.
    • A different way of structuring: Rust does not have classes or any OOP paradigms, it’s different from other stuff you’ve used and requires changes in how you structure your hada and application. Whether that’s for the best or not is very personal, but it’s definitely different.

    Finally I would like to finish up saying that Rust has the most excellent documentation: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ read that, then maybe do these https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings if you get to the error types and are not drooling over the language, it might not be for you.


  • While I sort of understand your point our society already contradicts that. If a person were to die under suspicious circumstances, an autopsy would be performed regardless of the dead or any relative’s wishes, and that would violate the integrity of the body as much as an organ donation would. Therefore we as a society understand that there are limits to one’s personal beliefs.

    I also disagree with the person you’re replying to, I think the system should be opt out with the following conditions:

    • You must opt out yearly, on the 366th day since you last opted out you become an organ donor again
    • You must not have opted out of it over the past 5 years before you’re allowed to undergo any surgery that would jeopardize the integrity of your body, including organ transplants but also blood transfusions and potentially also any foreign object such as pins or bone grafts.
    • You cannot opt out if you have ever received an organ.
    • Your body cannot be autopsied, embalmed or cremated, as all of those would also violate the body. This includes police investigations.
    • Any family of anyone senile/old/incapacitated enough not to be able to keep renewing it (or the person himself if possible in a moment of lucidity) can be added into the permanent no donation list.