I don't think most people realize just how important that distinction is.
Open, non-product protocols are the whole entire reason why the Internet succeeded, and proprietary networking solutions like IPX/SPX and DECnet didn't.
It's also what brought us successful Internet applications like email, IRC, and the web, and it's the reason Gopher failed.
Now we just need to send commercial social media platforms like X and Discord to the dustbin of history where they belong.
Just a reminder, if you're in a state without access to abortion, there is a network of care, providing safe, effective, and free abortion pills and information.
Rapper Meek Mill is wondering out loud if Africans have access to streaming music apps like Spotify, and if so, if they listen to his music.
There aren't enough stories about the Africans working at big tech companies, but there are a lot of us. There are many Ghanaians, South Africans, Kenyans, and Nigerians 🙋🏿♂️, working in tech.
I often remind folks that Nigerian 7th grade math curriculum includes binary, octal, hexadecimal, statistics and data, algebra, and geometry.
Something I've noticed a lot lately, is that especially Boomer women, but honestly, women in general, don't seem to ask for what they want or need in a direct way. I notice this a lot with my Mom and her friends. Instead of just asking for what they need directly they tell a story, to ask in a roundabout way. For instance, my Mom needed help this morning, and Instead of just saying, "Hey, I dropped my remote, can you pick it up for me?" She tells a one minute story about what happened, no ask, and eventually I get the point, and then suggest that I come pick it up. Or if one of her friends wants to do something like have a birthday party for a friend, they don't say "We should have a party!" They say, It's Sarah's Birthday coming up, you know she likes surprises, what does everyone think we should do?"
I often wonder if this is why older people think younger women are rude and demanding, because younger people often just ask for what they want and need in a more direct way. But also it's probably just straight up sexism, because men are supposed to make decisions, and women are supposed to make suggestions.
What do you all think? Is this just me? Have you experienced something similar?
That feeling when you have a look at Linkedin and see a former boss write about how LLMs mean the end of coding and programming as a job. That now the only thing needed to get working software is to describe clearly what you want, something they were always manifestly incapable of doing
The LLM prompt is the worst #programming language ever invented, because it has no guarantees whatsoever. Literally all behavior is undefined behavior.
Side note: these people are also weirdly forgetful of their own childhoods.
Notice how they're always freaking out about kids these days doing some new thing, like video games or social media? Always with the damn moral panics. Have they forgotten what it was like when they were kids, rolling their eyes while their elders freaked out about them listening to rock-and-roll music?
I learned as a kid that moral panics are stupid. Why didn't they?
I know the next 3-7 days will be filled with exaggeration and doomsday talk, but IMHO the #xz backdoor, though seemingly meticulously planned for a long time, failed miserably as it was caught at a stage where it wasn't widely deployed but only in testing/prerelease distros. Yes, it made it quite far in the supply chain but it ultimately failed. The mess is being cleaned up, no cases of actual use of the exploit in the wild are known thus far. The immune system of FOSS has worked. Again.
The back door was discovered by serendipity. It could easily have gone unnoticed, if not for one person randomly noticing that logging in via ssh had gotten slightly slower, and then actually bothering to investigate why.
We're relying on luck to detect these attacks, and luck eventually runs out.
If a #politician tells you that #VoteByMail is a bad idea, that politician is trying to stop you from #voting. #Vote that politician out, with extreme prejudice.
xz maintainer: fell victim to social engineering, reportedly due to ill health
xz co-maintainers responsible for code review: don't exist; nobody's getting paid to do that
Corporate security impresarios in the near future, probably: “Three-factor authentication is now mandatory. This will solve everything for sure this time.”
EU government: “Open source is now illegal. Use proprietary software instead; it never contains malware.”
Which memory management strategy do you want? Stack? Heap? Heap with reference counting? Region with bump allocator? Full GC? Rust can do that, safely and without leaking.
Which concurrency strategy? Message passing? Shared immutable data? Thread local? Atomics? Mutexes? Rust can do that, safely and without data races.
And you make that choice for each datum. Want one message-passed and another mutexed? One on the stack and another ref-counted? Can do.
I don't feel strongly about #trans people themselves—their gender identity is their business, not mine—but I do find it entertaining to watch the smoke billow out of regressives' ears when reality shatters their childish Sunday-school delusions and forces them to understand that nature doesn't cleanly organize everyone into two tidy little boxes.
I wonder if anyone has ever written an embedded #RDBMS in which there is no run-time #SQL interpreter, and all SQL queries are translated into machine code at compile time.
Kinda like #Rust sqlx, except queries are fully compiled at compile time, not just checked for correct syntax and types.
I'm guessing this would be extremely specific to one #programming language, and outright impossible in most programming languages.
I have just learned that Visual Studio Code on Mac/Linux not only supports, but expects .sln files, and now nothing in the entire world makes sense to me anymore. Your cross-platform open source editor for your cross-platform open source command line toolchain relies on the pure-text proprietary container format for your 30-year-old single-platform GUI IDE? … what does it even do with it? A VSCode popup says C# code completion won't work without it. What does it expect to be in there?
How are you even supposed to create them? As far as I know, the usual way to create a .sln file is with Visual Studio. Which I thought VSCode was supposed to replace.
Provocative statement. But not unexpected given the rise of #LargeLanguageModels and their ability to transform one language to another. In fact, this capability exists now and is being built into products, increasing productivity and sprint velocity.
How are you leveraging these technologies to realize the same benefits?
