The problem isn't the availability of lower quality versions of a high-quality product, it's the transformation of a formerly high-quality product into a shitty-quality version, meanwhile, maintaining the same price, or worse, a higher price, than the former high-quality version of itself.

The price tags on tools don't go down with time, but the quality of the tools certainly does.

I'm all for tiering product lines, harbor freight is doing it right by offering their top-of-the-line in the Hercules brand, a "pretty good for non contractor" line with Bauer, and then there's lower tiers for one-offs. But if I look for, and buy, a Porter Cable tool, I'm buying it because I expect a certain performance and quality, but it's in fact a rug pull right now. That should be fraud.

You're not the only one. In college I took a compilers course and we used the dragon book, to me it sucked the joy out of the magical concept of making a compiler.

Some years later I (re-) discovered Forth, and I thought "why not?" and built my own forth in 32-bit Intel assembly, _that_ brought back the wonder and "magical" feeling of compilers again. All in less than 4KB.

I guess I wasn't the right audience for the dragon book.

Do you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.

If DCs can be harmful because of subsidized power, wouldn't the natural reaction be to stop subsidizing their power, rather than banning them?

Because the companies that are pushing for DC constructions are corruptors, and some politicians are easy to corrupt.

This right here is the right take.

Might have the effect of making it uneconomic, though, and then they wouldn't get built.

This is to laughably misguided that it leans toward malicious.

I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?

Opposed to mass surveillance??

And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").

No thanks.

It is malicious, and you shouldn’t be downvoted for calling out someone who is so obviously arguing in bad faith.

If it's impossible for a service provider to even talk to its customers, why is it in operation at all?

This was a very sweet video card.

On the other hand, EVERY young person in my circle (my kids and their friends) is insanely privacy aware. All of that means ... we're not part of the young people anymore?

I think there's more than enough evidence that Zuck has not grown to see others as human beings.

Have you tried Nim? Strong and static typed, versatile, compiles down to native code vía C, interops with C trivially, has macros and stuff to twist your brain if you're into that, and is trivially easy to get into.

https://nim-lang.org

That looks very interesting. The code samples look like very simple OO/imperative style code like Python. At first glance it's weird to me how much common functionality relies on macros, but it seems like that's an intentional part of the language design that users don't mind? I might give it a try.