There’s a nice list of this feature by language on the Wikipedia page for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator#Examples_by_languages

Yeah, you’re quite correct, it’s not exactly equivalent, I just went on auto-pilot because it’s used so much for that purpose 🤖

It’s much closer to being a true null-coalescing operator than ‘OR’ operators in other languages though, because there’s only two values that are falsy in Ruby: nil and false. Some other languages treat 0 and "" (and no doubt other things), as falsy. So this is probably the reason Ruby has never added a true null-coalescing operator, there’s just much fewer cases where there’s a difference.

It’s going to drive me mad now I’ve seen it, though 😆 That’s usually the case with language features, though, you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it in some other language!

Ruby:

a || b

(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it’s nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).

Pretty decent, although the inclusion of the last paragraph without the following paragraphpointing out that this incident shows that’s not true is a little misleading if you’re not paying attention.

That is so much better 👍

Go as the Blue Screen of Death: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death

Now that’s spooky! 🟦😱

Wear all blue clothes, and get a copy of the screen printed (not on your home printer) to wear on your chest.

Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.

I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.

The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.

I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.

That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).

Fediverse platforms:

• are highly interoperable - e.g. you can use Lemmy or Kbin and still see the same posts
• mostly FOSS, so anyone can fork them whenever they want if they don’t like some particular change
• most instances currently aren’t operated for profit - certainly if your instance started displaying ads you could switch to another instance (or set one up) and still access all the same content as you did previously

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The minotaur/labyrinth design is cool, but it feels stylistically disconnected from the background

Only very recently, and people are rightly suspicious of their motives: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/apple_california_right_repair/

Well the latest development is that Apple is now going to support the current right to repair bill in California, but people are rightfully suspicious that they’re going to get some loopholes written in or otherwise neuter the bill.

An article: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/apple_california_right_repair/

Broadly: Constructing their hardware so it’s impossible to repair or upgrade by anyone but them (or at all), then lobbying against any attempts to legislate the ‘right to repair’.

Check out the work of Louis Rossmann for details.

Way more interesting than I thought it was going to be!