zygo_histo_morpheus

@zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
0 Post – 112 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Well right now most people develop apps supporting x86 and leaves everything else behind. If they're supporting x86 + arm, maybe adding riscv as a third option would be a smaller step than adding a second architecture

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I think that it's quite bad if Microsoft puts peoples family photos on their servers without the user realizing it. That's not a niche privacy nerd sentiment, I think that a lot of people would find that creepy. Having the option easily available can be really good for a lot of non-techy people but it should be very clear what stays on your computer and what doesn't, and how to keep something private if you want to, which I'm not sure that it is if Microsoft quietly backs up Documents, Pictures etc.

Looking at the example

Why does the generated bash look like that? Is this more safe somehow than a more straighforward bash if or does it just generate needlessly complicated bash?

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As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:

  1. It's faster to type than to navigate menus
  2. If I don't know where something is and can't guess it instantly, it's usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
  3. You can combine commands with each other with pipes or $()
  4. You can search through your command history to find previous commands
  5. You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
  6. The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis

The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you're editing an image) it's easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.

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Another accessibility reason for tabs: when using a braille display, each space takes up one character cell, so indenting with four spaces eats up four cells. Indenting three times with four spaces each eats up 12 characters already. Tabs only take one character cell each, so three indents = three character cells used.

The fact that there (I assume?) isn't a braille oriented text editor that can handle space-based indentation in a smarter way is a bit depressing. Maybe the solution should be better tools based around accessibility rather than convincing everyone to switch to tabs, which is a project that will just never succeed.

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Is there any way mastodon stands out from other self hosted websites? Would the CSAM material be harder to distribute or easier to prosecute if they ran, say, a self-hosted bulletin board for it instead?

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Dark UX is more like features that are intentionally misleading, enchitification is making your product worse in order to be able to make money of it.

I think that there are many potential causes, but I would like to add monopolization to the list.

Usually, a bad release spelled the demise of a company, because release times were so long that competitors could take advantage of a bad software release.

People aren't going to switch from windows because they release something bad or buggy, in that case it would already be dead. Windows isn't technically a monopoly, but they have a lot of inertia and there are many programs that only run on windows that people depend on. There is perhaps a limit to how bad windows can be before people abandon it en masse, but they can get away with a lot. The tech world is full of different companies and programs that are in monopolistic-ish positions.

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Haskell. I think that more people being familliar with Haskell concepts would be good for programing culture and it would increase the odds of me being able to write Haskell professionally, which is something I enjoy a lot when writing hobby code at least. Having more access to tooling and a bigger eco system would be nice as well.

I'm not a 100% sure about my answer though. For one, I might grow to resent Haskell if I had to use it at work, and there's also a risk that it would be harder to do cool innovative stuff with the language when more big companies depend on it.

Don't know anything about this particular case so while "social engineering to create a backdoor" is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it's dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.

Download a popular movie and keep your computer on for a while 🤷‍♂️

Although, seeding stuff that isn't popular is also important. I don't know what you're seeding but if no one is leeching maybe there aren't a whole lot of other people seeding either. When someone does leech, they might be very happy that you're there keeping that one torrent alive.

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think I'm gonna give this a try but the style of writing in the blog post isn't making this easy

👩‍🚀 Spacebar

Not the one on your keyboard, silly 😜

shudders

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Peak dishwasher is a great concept and I think it highlights something important in the way we think of technology. There's often this underlying assumption of technological progress, but if we look at a particular area (e.g. dishwashers) we can see that after a burst of initial innovation the progress has basically halted. Many things are like this and I would in fact wager that a large portion of technologies that we use haven't actually meaningfully developed since the 80s. Computers are obviously a massive exception to this - and there are several more - but I think that we tend to overstate the inevitability of technological progress. One day we might even exhaust the well of smaller and faster computers each year and I wonder how we will continue to view technological progress after that.

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A monad isn't "a thing", it's a common interface shared by several different types that have a common mathematical structure that happens to be useful for structuring programs around. I think that's why it's so confusing to people, other programming languages tend to not have as abstract abstractions front and center.

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My spontaneous reaction is that making some sort of braille oriented setting for some or hopefully most editors used by people with braille displays (I have no idea if using a "normal" editor even makes sense if you're using a braille display) is the most pragmatic solution to their screens being taking up by spaces.

First of all, convincing everyone to use tabs is a monumental task. Convincing people with braille displays to use more convenient tools on the other hand seems pretty easy, why wouldn't you want to use more convenient tools?

Secondly, there is a large amount of code written with spaces today, so even if people switch with tabs in the future you might still want to be able to read legacy code.

Thirdly, I don't think that the choice of tabs vs. spaces is completely arbitrary because of alignment. Using tabs for indentation and space for alignment leads to a lot more micro management of whitespace compared to just using spaces. I would guess that alignment isn't very braille friendly anyway, but it does make the code more readable for other people. Having a good braille editor affordance might be closer to letting us have our cake and eat it too.

Of course, I don't know what this would look like exactly, and maybe there's some sort of obstacle that I'm overlooking, I do want to be clear that this is just of the top of my head as someone who has never used a braille display.

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Personally, the language that's taught me the most to learn has been Haskell. It has a lot of very interesting ideas and a learning curve that plateaus after most other languages. There are several ideas that have trickled down from Haskell to other parts of the programming world and learning about them in the context Haskell is in my opinion better because you'll learn about them in a context where they fit in with the rest of the language very well instead of being late additions that offer an alternate way of doing things.

Coming from Java and JS, Haskell has a very different approach to a lot of things so you'll have to re-learn a lot before you get productive in it. This can be frustrating for some but you'll learn more if you get over that hump on the other hand.

Haskell doesn't see very much industry use and arguably isn't very well suited for industrial application (I haven't used it professionally so I don't know personally) so it might not directly help you land any new jobs but it is in my opinion it's a very good way to develop as a programmer.

I find that inheritance isn't that useful when it comes to helping me reason about programs, which is more important to me than avoiding code duplication. The ability to create subclasses can be convenient for adding new code but the same extensibility also means that I have to consider all potential future uses of a class when I'm using one. It's easy to make assumptions when writing code that uses a class than can then be broken by future subclasses. You can try to mitigate this by writing clear invariants in advance and updating them when you find that you need to make more assumptions, but then this means that you have to give up the flexibility of inheritance.

I'd say that stuff like this happens less often on windows, but it's also worse when it does because you have fewer resources to fix problems when you do run into them

IIRC, it started of as a joke and an explicit nazi reference to make fun of PC gaming fanboys, and then they just embraced it without understanding the context?

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The first thing I already have problem with [...]

For the record: headers suck. There's a good reason why most programming languages don't use them. They're like a realy primitive version of setting things to public/private in modules, where public things go in the header and private things don't. Modules are a very useful abstraction over this where you don't have to do as much mucking around.

I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn't pay money to but that I've pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don't lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it's a net win.

When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I've pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn't really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It's not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.

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As a fan of functional programing, it is validating in a way to see the more functional approach being faster. The reason for not wanting to mutate is that it's easier to reason about pure code. Usually this is for the programmers benefit, but it can be good for the compiler too as we see here. Obviously there are many cases where it is faster to mutate (many data structures can benefit from mutation) but there is this general assumption that fp is slower which isn't exactly true either.

For work gitlab is fine, I'm sure your company can get the accounts verified for example. At least it's not microsoft

This might not be what you mean when you say "addictive", but since I've been addicted to it for the last half year or so, I'm gonna suggest it anyway: Morrowind.

While the original came out in 2002 for Windows and later Xbox, there's been a fan remake of the engine which runs on linux (and windows and macos) called OpenMW.

It's an open world role playing game about exploring the island of Vvardenfell, which is a strange and alien place that's easy to lose yourself in. Most of the wildlife is made up of insect- or dinosaur like creatures. There are forests made up of giant mushrooms, and ancient wizard lords who use magic to grow mushrooms into buildings that you have to be able to fly to navigate. It's a world with a rich history, featuring several different religions, cultures and overlapping and competing political structures.

Despite its age, it is to this day a game with a very active modding community which can extend and improve the games mechanics and visuals. It also features what is probably the longest running active modding project, Tamriel rebuilt which seeks to add the rest of the province of Morrowind to the game. It's about half way done and has basically another game worth of content in it at this point.

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We can distribute digital media for almost nothing, yet the way most people and companies make money of digital media is by creating incentives to not consume it. Taking part of digital media has a value and artificially creating barriers to doing this means destroying enormous amounts of value.

This is clearly a very bad system and piracy is a useful strategy for creating the possibility of something better long term and to keep companies from putting up too large barriers short term. The only reason why we have the convenience of e.g. spotify is because of piracy, without pirates we would likely have something more expensive and less accessible instead.

Many "AI generated" images are actually very close to individual images from their training data so it's debatable how much difference there is between looking at a generated image and just looking at an image from its training data in some cases at least.

One downside with the code on the right is that it's not obvious where the different functions might be called from. In the example on the left, we know that we're not, say, adding toppings to a pizza that we've already baked. If we notice a bug in the topping adding function on the right, we might get tempted to reason about adding toppings as a general process that needs to handle all kinds of situations when in practice is doesn't.

When you have single use functions like this it's good to limit the scope of the function using whatever language features are available so that you can more easily reason about where it's being called from

I might be suffering from stockholms syndrome here, but my prefered ways of working with git are the cli and the fugitive vim plugin which is a fairly thin wrapper around the cli. It does take a middle ground approach on hiding the magic and forcing you to learn the magic which I suppose can be confusing for beginners when you work collaboratory and something happens that forces you to go beyond pull/add/commit/push

Sometimes it's better to ban things before they get out of hand than after, tends to be a lot less dramatic at least.

The article mentions AI. 16gigs feels far too little to run a LLM of respectable size so I wonder what exactly this means? Feels like no one is gonna be happy about a 16gig LLM (high RAM usage and bad AI features)

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Part of Linux culture is customizing your system. Linux allows you to do much more with your computer, but some of these things require tinkering or might cause you to break your setup. If you don't tinker much things will most likely be stable, but having the ability to tinker is for me a major part of the appeal. What are you hoping to get out of using linux? It's a good alternative if you wanna make an old computer run more smoothly, if you care about privacy or if you don't want to have to pay for your operating system, and if any of those are your main reason go for it and it will probably work out smoothly. If you're interested in linux because it seems "cool" or "fun" you're probably gonna have to do some tinkering so in that case you should be prepared to edit some files, read some instructions and possibly ask for help online.

I think he was still on the board after he closed his account, him leaving the board might be much more recent

Do you think that you can't take a critical view of "technological advancement" without understanding it? I understand if you think the title is too clickbaity or something but it sounds a bit like you're dismissing criticism about AI out of hand.

You're right that this propably doesn't make much of a difference to the average windows user, but this is a step towards normalizing data collection in broader areas of computing and I think that it's good to keep up to date with stuff like this and where appropriate call it out (although it propably doesn't make a huge difference to complain about it on lemmy to be honest)

Dorsey got bullied off bluesky by its userbase so there's that at least

Bluesky has the most twitter like user base of all the twitter clones that I've tried, and it's up to you if that's a good or bad thing. It's not all segments of twitter though, there isn't really any of right wing twitter or crypto twitter for example (a lot of furries on the other hand) which is quite nice actually. It isn't really active or important enough to get a lot of the big drama or main character moments and there aren't really any celebs, journalists and politicians posting there. So it's a bit like twitter without many of the lows but also many of the highs.

There’s a difference between doing something that’s “easier” and what’s right.

The way I see it, there are two competing strategies for improving the experience for braille screen users: making tabs more widely used and improving braille oriented editors. Without knowing for sure, my guess is that improving editors is a better strategy and this is in part because it is easier.

As a matter of principle it might be "more right" for people without visual disabilities to adjust themselves to people with visual disabilities than vice versa, but I also think that it's important to care about what is actually likely to improve braille screen users experience and not default to the more principled goal without any consideration for how realistic it is.

(Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors, but since you referred to this as the "easy" solution it doesn't sound like you're disputing this specifically.)

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I'm not in charge of many open source projects but the last one I actually put up on gitlab instead. We use gitlab at internally at work and it's completely fine. I mostly use my github account to interact with repos that other people host on github.

You probably don't have to worry about the compatability of #pragma once so just use that. The only reasons to not use it is if it's important to only use standard compliant c for whatever reason or if you need to support some arcane compiler that doesn't support #pragma once. Realistically, neither of these are situations that you'll ever be put in and if you are you probably have much larger things that you need to worry about.

It's weird to have something that verbose for using in the shell. I don't want to use verbose commands when just doing stuff interactively, so I never learn how to really use its features as a concequence. Bash, while it has more footguns, is more readable to me because I'm more familiar with the individual commands. For most programing you spend more time reading it than writing it, but that's not the case for the shell so there it's the wrong tradeoff imo.