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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Codex@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlSting
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    2 days ago

    In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s concept for a Dune film from the early 1970s, each house has their costumes and architecture designed by a contemporary artist. Giger was the designer for the Harkonnen, and several of his ideas persisted beyond the failed film.

    The Harkonnen Castle

    A Harkonnen chair

    I assumed Villeneuve was calling back to those designs.




  • Codex@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 days ago

    In the US system, you can receive various certifications, called “degrees” indicating how much education you have received. Most US teenagers attend “high school” until about 18 years old, which completes primary education. Then, some go on to secondary education, called university or college in the US.

    Most universities offer several degree programs. Typically, a 2 year “Associates degree” for trade work, 4 year “Bachelors degree” programs for white collar work. And then longer “Masters” degrees for advanced topics and even longer “Doctorate/Doctoral” programs for getting into academic research.

    An MBA is a Masters of Business Administration. Typically, a 2 year program on top of a 4 year Bachelors degree in some business field like accounting, finance, management of information systems (MIS), etc. The stated purpose of an MBA program is to educate a person in the many facets of successfully running and operating a business.

    However, in the US, our education system is deeply stratified by loans, and also just broken. Each higher tier of education is almost exponentially more expensive than the previous, so only fairly well off people can afford the time and money to get an MBA. And/or they go deeply into debt on loans to finance the degree. In addition, universities (which are all now run as for-profit businesses) are seen less as institutions of learning and more like indoctrination centers for training up workers while also infusing them with American business values.

    This is most prevalent in Economics, which is treated like a hard science of business but is nothing of the sort. It used to be Keynesian economics, which at least has grounding in statistics, but now actually teaches a very specific interpretation of economics called Modern Monetary Theory. In this way, almost all American middle managers are indoctrinated into this, who are by that point either in deep debt and thus beholden to the MMT system, or are already wealthy and thus defenders of that system.

    This has created an economic crisis in the US where MBAs are taking over companies and then applying these theories to cut labor costs, over-leverage debt, sell off assets; all to boost short term profit. All of this is at the expense of the business’ long-term viability but MMT is all an elaborate con to ensure wealth (profit) is funneled to owners while systematically pushing the costs onto the public.







  • Codex@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneFrench rule
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    7 days ago

    People don’t know what words mean in English either yet continue trying to force their made up definitions on others.

    Language is objective, because a language is an immaterial object. The opposite, subjective, would impy that language itself has an experience of the world as an entity in itself; that it is a subject.

    People’s understanding of the languages they speak is subjective (the subject is the person), but their use of language is objective, because they create objects (words, sentences) in the air or on a screen. When another person, a subject, reads those objective words, they then have a new subjective understanding of them. But the words, and the language, remain objects.





  • I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.

    You’re right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.

    JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don’t really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I’m sure something like XLT exists, but there’s no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.

    That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there’s no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.



  • I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it’s automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with // comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.

    I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.