sping

@sping@lemmy.sdf.org
0 Post – 148 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Kids often don't know the difference between "wifi" and the Internet. It's not an age thing these days.

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I've never understood why more people don't dry themselves in the shower, and dry their feet on the way out. Why use the bath mat as a special communal foot sole towel? It's much nicer when it's just a comfortable dry mat for standing on with bare feet.

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Lol, no mention of the fact that Ubuntu was already shipped on almost the entire Dell range, but only in China and developing world markets. This was because they had sold millions of laptops without OS in those markets, which immediately were flashed with pirated Windows, and Microsoft were pissed off. They pressured the Chinese govt to require computers must ship with an OS, so Cannonical/Ubuntu stepped in, did it for cheap (~$1/machine) and... they were still of course flashed with pirated windows immediately.

They didn't ship to the US or Europe etc., because in those markets Dell got more kickback-money than they spent, from Windows and the various crapware they shipped pre-installed. So shipping Ubuntu in the US actually cost Dell money.

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Perl is a write-only language.

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You feel that given such an amazing opportunity, that is the single most important issue on the planet?

We're doomed.

Just me. It was my job for a while at Canonical, until the work was moved to China.

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It also transformed my feelings about winter, which is long, gray and mostly charmless here excepting the occasional blizzard, but commuting by bike warms me and gets me fresh air and exercise. It makes it much more tolerable. I actually enjoy my commute and look forward to it.

So many people I work with insist biking is unappealing or borderline impossible while complaining almost daily about their commute. Obviously for some people and some commutes it really is impossible, but I'm not talking about those situations.

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I do think dropping master is absurd, since it in no way implies slavery or any such thing. master mostly has uses that are entirely inoffensive, unless post-graduate degrees are racist, for example.

But I do think there is some merit in moving off the idea of white is good and black is bad. There are some good arguments that we shouldn't bestow magic powers upon words, but there is also a lot of merit in the idea that these words affect our perception in negative ways and there is really nothing lost by shifting to equally good alternatives.

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And yet Emacs users don't fight vim users. Emacs users decided vim's interface was pretty cool and added it to Emacs. Somehow people still call it a war though.

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But use type annotations everywhere and make sure your code is always checker clean (with checkin or PR CI hooks). And don't turn off any lint checks through laziness, e.g. docstring checks. Even for a solo dev it's always worth having everything typed, checker clean, and docstrings (even if they only effectively say "this thing really is what you'd assume"). It all saves time and effort in the long and even medium term.

I've worked on serious large scale Python projects and frankly it's been very pleasant and productive, but only with the above conditions.

I feel like this would be a question best addressed where the online blind community hangs out (er... I don't actually know where that is), and there may be plenty of blind users here (?) but I also wouldn't be surprised to hear there are not. I certainly would tear my hair out if I had to work through comments audibly to try to work out what might be worth reading. But I don't know and I'm not trying to speak for blind people.

The one blind developer I knew was heavily into Emacs, which has historically had a speech interface and can operate very well purely text-based, that I think made it a good choice. His ability to be productive was awe inspiring. I don't know if anything else has taken over, but I expect if I lost my sight it might become my entire environment since I already know it. But I wouldn't be surprised (and hope) there are more suitable options for less technical users.

It was some hacked-together sound output that was terrible quality compared to a real sound card output, AFAIK. You could make it make sounds, but if you care at all about quality it was a non-starter, which is one reason a whole lot of audio hats exist.

Many political questions are reasonable to disagree on but many others are also ethical ones with gaps that cannot be bridged.

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I don't even now how anyone keeps track of them and finds the ones they want. And how can you possibly do that quicker than just going to the page afresh.

Part of working on a project for me is assembling links to important pages. It may be days, weeks or months later that I want to come back and there are the links. And of course, anything generically or regularly useful is just a bookmark as you say.

It really seems like people keep tabs open just to keep a list of useful pages. There are much easier and more effective ways to do that.

Well lvm makes a shit filesystem and btrfs is useless at volume management.

Or they avoid the need for that solution by avoiding that problem in the first place?.

Ubuntu Mono since it was in beta and I heard the designer from Dalton Maag — the typeface design studio commissioned to design it — give a talk about how excited he was to be able to create a comprehensive, carefully thought out, and truly free/libre font.

I've never seen another one that I prefer the look of, and now it's imprinted in my brain. People love to crap on Shuttleworth / Canonical / Ubuntu, but there are a lot of great things they've contributed over the years.

I'm the UK England and Wales you can't be required to carry ID at all.

If the police ask you for them, you have 7 days to present them at a police station.

(Edit: really not sure it extends to Scotland where such laws often vary, and pretty sure it doesn't apply to NI, where they vary even more, especially on driving/licensing, so UK was inaccurate)

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Plus most desktops default to a needlessly fat dock/launcher at the bottom.

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I feel like this is well named (run as user 0) so then I'm wondering what else you dislike and what you think would be improvements?

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I've had buffalo wings, and American barbecue. Also I've been to American Thanksgiving meals with weird things like sweet potatoes with marshmallows on. So I've had some American ethnic food for one thing.

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I hit the Compose key and then =/ gives , but I don't seem to be able to enter . For that and more obscure characters I'd open Emacs and run insert-char.

I am just regurgitating one of my favorite Perl jokes for a laugh. Though for me the joke contains some truth. Most of the Perl code I've ever seen is pretty impenetrable for non-Perl programmers. I quite literally have returned to my own Perl efforts after just a couple of weeks and had some trouble working out what the code is doing (in ways I do not experience with other languages).

When Python was trying to unseat Perl, that in my view was reason alone to prefer it: I didn't know Python but I could read Python. Though at that point Perl had the benefit of loads of libraries and ubiquity, and Python hadn't got there yet. But it was enough to have me cheering for Python's success at the expense of Perl. I get that Perl has many virtues, but they're nullified by the ugliness and relative inaccessibility of its code in my eyes.

I really hate the magic side-effect variables where you do a pattern match or something and then various obtusely named variables have meaningful values with relation to the last match. To me that's just flat out bad coding, and it's built into the language.

The above was my second-favorite Perl joke. My favorite being:

Perl is the vise-grips* of programming languages. It's a tool that can do most jobs, and it's the wrong tool for all of them.

*BrEng: mole-grips

Less profound, but it destroyed my remaining lingering faith in any mainstream media sources and confirmed The Guardian had completed it's transition from a bunch of socialists in the 70s to a neoliberal establishment mouthpiece today.

Though as a non-embedded dev who has interviewed embedded candidates I like to ask them to talk about the issues around C vs C++ for embedded and the first point 8 out of 10 of them make is C++ is bad because dynamic allocation is bad. And while they could expand to almost sort of make their point make sense, they generally can't and stumble when I point out it's just as optional in each.

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EVs probably have around 1/10th the lifetime emissions of a gas car

Do you have a source for that because that's radically better than any number I've heard. Most analyses I've seen have been more like 40-60%.

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Yeah, the whole observation needed the adjective American.

Long so I noticed US soaps we're all wealthy people being miserable, while British soaps were all working class people being miserable, but Australian soaps were all working-class people being happy (after resolving some minor difficult situation).

The sort option by "orders" is good for this. Far from infallible but still useful.

Yes, I entirely agree. A masterpiece, or mastering an art, or more relevant to software branches: master tapes. None of these imply any sort of subjugation etc..

But... that's just about the word "master". I do think there are other terms that it's a good idea to migrate away from.

And for no charge.

However, having had a voice chat for an hour this weekend with someone 200 miles away, I can tell you that 30 years ago it worked so much better it's not even funny; it was just expensive.

My phone provider (Fi) gave me an internet connected call rather than use the cell voice network (proudly telling me it was encrypted). It was full of dropouts and there was a serious latency that really inhibited conversation. I switched to a few other options like WhatsApp and the audio quality improved but the latency did not, and even got worse. Young people may be barely aware that a 200 mile phone call had tiny latency - you would not know there was any - because there was a literal wire connection between each end and communication was at the speed of light. Even transatlantic calls had minimal latency unless it went by satellite.

Sure today we can do it with video, but frankly, for a chat, I don't even see much benefit. I'd certainly choose voice-only if it meant zero latency, and sadly I seem to have chosen a mobile provider that does its best to prevent that.

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Huh, to me, YW is much more gracious and positive that you're happy to do it, while NP is more like "it was a tolerable burden".

Though for paid service I don't like expected faux enthusiasm. I think "of course" is classy and not demeaning then, meaning "it's what I'm here for".

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Avoid categories where a lot of items have fake specs (storage devices, LED bulbs, anything that claims a runtime on a Li-Ion battery)

I'd say be aware rather than avoid. E.g I bought a $10 camping lantern that claimed 2.5 times its true capacity, but it still runs for hours and is a great, well designed, if flimsy, product for the price.

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I feel like I'm getting more and more on a limb using Linux as a dev. I'm working on a Linux only product and yet I'm the only one not on OS X and all the rest of them have to jump through hoops to get things to work, and can't run our system locally like I can. My last job was the same except 2 of us used Linux.

I can't even work out what they're getting out of it apart from the hardware. But when I tell them that developing from Linux is easy and comfortable they don't believe me.

Only from beehaw.org, right? I'm still seeing this from sdf.org.

Am I misunderstanding or does this not just mean you'll have to choose your registered instance to match your needs, and if some instances you like are too widely considered problematic to access from a broadly useful instance you may have to have another identity there.

Somewhere like beehaw.org appears to be an instance that's likely to exclude fairly aggressively, so that's a consideration for whether you want that to be your home.

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I didn't understand the question so came to read the replies out of curiosity but couldn't work it out so searched the web for what wax-on-wax-off meant. Now I think nobody else understood the question either.

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So when you said sucrose you really meant various sugars. Because sucrose is a molecule and all the same, and what it comes with is what makes the difference, as per OP's question.

I'm skeptical - I was recently eating outside literally watching three of them come at my ankles while people sitting right beside me were being left alone.

But our ignorant misconceptions are ubiquitous so they have become truth!

You don't execute C source files. They have to be compiled.

First point as someone else commented, that driver is already present in any mainstream kernel. It's very unlikely you have any need to build it.

But if you really want to build it the command will be make that will get instructions from Makefile on how to build the driver. But there will be other tools and libraries needed.

That's a much broader term.