@ebassi@mastodon.social
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

ebassi

@ebassi@mastodon.social

Geek, husband, lover, software developer, Londoner. Not necessarily in that order.

he/him

Proud #GTK and #GNOME dev; member of the GNOME Foundation.

You may remember me for my work at OpenedHand, Intel, Endless, and the GNOME Foundation. Otherwise, you heard about me being a scary person on the Internet.

Opinions are always my own, but if you don't like them that's too bad.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ebassi, to random
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

Finally landed a bunch of changes in JSON-GLib that I've been working off and on for the past three months, mainly dealing with proper JSON conformance.

Had to undo a lot of generic/extensible code in the tokeniser I lifted out of GLib, in order to get to a decent state; I've also added a whole conformance test suite to ensure that we don't deviate (too much) from RFC8259.

Can't wait to see bugs getting filed because the parser got stricter.

federicomena, to random
@federicomena@mstdn.mx avatar

Dear C programmers,

/* The following static variable is declared 'volatile' to avoid a
possible multithread problem in the function get_charset_aliases. If we
are running in a threaded environment, and if two threads initialize
'charset_aliases' simultaneously, both will produce the same value,
and everything will be ok if the two assignments to 'charset_aliases'
are atomic. But I don't know what will happen if the two assignments mix. */

Please. FFS.

ebassi,
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

@federicomena @pwithnall atomic compare and exchange was introduced in the '90s, but full atomic ops are from the early '00s, alongside the 64bit migration. AFAICS, GLib got its first atomic ops in 2004

cassidy, to GNOME
@cassidy@blaede.family avatar

A conversation that keeps popping up in my mind since FOSDEM centers around open source projects and “AI,” and I still don’t know what I think. So let me share some thoughts here on the famously nuance-friendly Internet. 😜

During a chat w/folks from several open source organizations, someone suggested GNOME could attract funding by “sprinkling some AI on it.” Several folks laughed at the topical joke, but then realized it was in earnest. 🧵

ebassi,
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

@cassidy funding isn't attracted to "AI" alone, especially if it's local-first/local-only. Funding is attracted by the ability to send data somewhere, doing some magic process remotely, and then send back the result—because this is all the Scooby Doo meme:

tml, to random
@tml@urbanists.social avatar

Watching on Netflix. Absolutely brilliant. Excellent dialogue. Smashing acting. Gorgeous locations. Highly recommended. (Have not seen the film it is based on.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentlemen_(2024_TV_series)?wprov=sfti1

ebassi,
@ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

@tml the movie is also a great Guy Ritchie joint

alatiera, to random
@alatiera@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

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    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @alatiera @nekohayo symlinks should already be illegal: https://lwn.net/Articles/899543/

    ebassi, to random
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    On the one hand, it’s nice that people equate GNOME to something designed and built with a specific purpose; on the other hand, not everything you see is the result of a conscious decision: some times a bug is just a bug

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @raven667 I've had people describing to me what I actually meant when I wrote specs or software nearly 20 years ago, or explaining what happened in discussions where I was present and they most definitely weren't, all in an attempt at winning an argument. It was almost like they were trying to gaslight me, it was hilarious.

    mcc, to random
    @mcc@mastodon.social avatar

    So I wanted to install a font on Linux and Google said the way to do that in Ubuntu Gnome is to double click the font and click "install". So I did that and it worked

    Except

    On the italic variant (just the plain italic; italic bold worked fine) if I click "install" it thinks for a moment and instead of reading "installed" it goes back to a plain "install" button like I hadn't done anything?? What's happening??

    video/mp4

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @mcc it’s a known bug: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-font-viewer/-/issues/64

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @mcc some times a bug is just a bug

    ebassi, (edited )
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @mcc in general, it's true that "don't confuse users" is a guiding principle, but mainly in the sense of "if the user can't do anything about it, then what's the point of offloading a shit job to them".

    We also have bounced between extremes—dumping obscure error messages in the UI, or hiding everything under a generic "sorry, you're fucked" message (and I complained about both), so it's not like we're consistently choosing the "no feedback" route.

    ebassi, to random
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    I fucking hate the fact that I can't mute the sound made by GMail's chat notifications, and I have to mute the whole conversation. Can't even put my desktop in do-not-disturb mode, because Firefox doesn't know anything about that…

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar
    • "Change the sound": there is no "silent"
    • "Mute the conversation": no, I don't want to completely ignore a chat, especially not across devices
    • "Disable notifications": see above

    I literally have to mute the tab because Google doesn't conceive the possibility of not bothering me.

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @dvogel I think it's all javascript, and to be honest I don't want to gaze into that particular abyss. I have enough cosmic horrors to gaze into to last me for a few lifetimes…

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @matbme yeah, that's what I do, but it's incredibly annoying

    user8e8f87c, to GNOME
    @user8e8f87c@berlin.social avatar

    People dislike for the fact that it uses more disk space than native applications. I don’t think it is that big of an issue. But couldn’t it be solved be letting the base system, the DE (like and ) use the flatpak runtimes from outside. I mean you can’t break out of a container, but can’t you break into it?

    Could for example use which comes packaged in the flatpak GNOME runtime?

    Why would that be a silly idea?

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @user8e8f87c it would only work if:

    • the whole OS is stored inside the ostree repository also used by Flatpak
    • you built both the OS and the run time from the same sources, producing the same artifacts

    We did that early on in Endless OS, to save space and reduce the update sizes when dealing with connectivity with high latency/small bandwidth.

    Turns out that it's not worth the complexity, and does not save you when you have multiple run times installed anyway.

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @gnomelibre @user8e8f87c a sandboxed file manager is a pretty useless thing, unless you widen the sandbox to the point of being pointless.

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @gnomelibre @user8e8f87c of course it's not just about security, but security is a big part of it, and it wouldn't do anybody good to just wave away that aspect just because you want new and shiny stuff.

    Some components are system components: file manager and settings interact with a lot of underlying system functionality—network, admin, removable volumes. They don't lend themselves to sandboxing.

    ebassi, to random
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    It was a Dune double bill at the IMAX kind of night

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @vixalientoots beautiful; if you liked Part 1, Part 2 is similar but better

    alice, to random

    I literally can't read the word vent with a straight face anymore

    I don't even play that game (I don't have enough people to play it with)

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @alice tried to organise an Among Us game two years ago during GUADEC, but not enough players because of the time zones…

    NinaMarie, to random
    @NinaMarie@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

    starting my first playthrough of sekiro on stream tonight~ woo!

    http://twitch.tv/ninamarie

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @NinaMarie faster than Twitch's email notification!

    ebassi, to random
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    Oh, nice: the first SEO spam comment filed by an AI has hit the issue tracker of a project I watch on GNOME's GitLab instance

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    Should have burned the whole Web down when SEO started out, but we didn't, and now we've reached the inevitable end of the race to the bottom fostered by search engines and adtech

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @whot to clarify: this wasn’t a templated spambot comment—saw and reported way too many of those—but it was something that looked like it was produced by a ChatGPT prompt. I was waiting for them to appear, to be honest…

    ebassi, to random
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    TIL that Jenkins switched its own internal XML files to version 1.1, a spec that was declared DOA pretty much on the day of its publication, 20 years ago.

    This has the hilarious side effect of preventing validation of XML files generated by Jenkins from anything that parses XML that is also not Jenkins. Well, it's one way to get people not to poke at your state files, I'll give them that…

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @jamesh when all you have is Java, every problem looks like XML…

    And yeah, I honestly don’t understand the motivation either, especially when coupled with the justification of “it’s a spec from 2004!”: my sibling in Cthulhu, if no widespread XML parser supports it, why do you think it’s a spec worth pushing? Why not invest in sanitising the input?

    ebassi,
    @ebassi@mastodon.social avatar

    @jamesh that would not surprise me in the slightest. Or maybe some weirdo pipeline that takes the job description and sends them over to some sort of teletype or VT and embeds a bell character

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