whoever decided to implement clickpads in modern laptops by just placing a normal trackpad on top of a mushy tactile switch needs to answer for their crimes
hey fedi, I have this 85 year old neighbor who fell for one of these tech support scams and got his PC encrypted. to prevent this going forward, is there a Linux that looks like Windows? something like Windows XP might be best.
the gentleman needs some Windows things, like his (Windows/Mac) tax software, still running on Linux.
preprocessors are poor software design that doesn't belong in this century
all of modern frontend webdev is essentially done with a rube goldberg machine made of glorified preprocessors because while evidently the w3c is a bunch of clowns that doesn't know what people use websites for, nobody designs a system that's actually fit for purpose instead of just giving google unlimited and exclusive power over nearly the entire software industry
@pixel i almost never see these leveraged in the wild but that's details anyway.
my point is html/css/js/wa are a bad fit for many modern applications of web technology. building interactive interfaces using markup intended for documents and beating it into compliance with scripting that has to do so much work just to implement things basically every site does and that e.g. qtquick/qml can express purely declaratively, doable in few lines by someone who has spent 10 minutes reading the documentation and way more efficiently than is possible with current web tech -- it really makes me wonder why so many man hours are allocated to literally anything but building a better platform
@pixel i mean i know why -- “does it make the line go up” is how the tech industry determines its course, not “does it solve a problem” or “does it make people happy”
is induction cookware truly the best and most efficient way of heating a pot or something in this day and age
the tech sounds cool as shit but it's like, space age kinda stuff. you just heat the cookware directly instead of by proxy. it's so fucking fancy it feels like something should be wrong but like i also use a microwave to heat my food sometimes so that's just the world we live in
@phoenix yeah an argument that came up a lot when EVs were just hitting the market was “oh but you gotta consider the efficiency and environmental footprint of energy production”
but yeah, even if we ran all our power plants on dead dinosaurs they’d be more efficient and have less of an environmental impact than a billion infernal combustion engines getting boomers to walmart and back every day
@phoenix there are valid points to be made about opaque supply chains, children in cobalt mines and rivers full of battery juice… but what are we supposed to do considering what the future has in store for fossil fuel empires
@phoenix yeah LiFePo was the chemistry that doesn’t contain the 11 rare earth herbs and spices that are incredibly toxic to everything that lives and also isn’t as prone to thermal events (“oops the battery exploded”), albeit with the unfortunate property of being far less energy-dense which is a tough sale when people look at the range they get out of a charge
blows my mind that some people pay for AWS when it offers less and costs more than 10 dedicated servers with the amount of traffic you may get with something like a file hoster or a popular fedi instance
like, 0x0.st gets 40 TB or more of egress traffic during peak months (and rarely less than 15TB). that’d cost over $3500 with AWS :neofox_googly_shocked:
@mischievoustomato i briefly looked at gitlab’s CI (which doesn’t support anything reasonable for isolated runner environments) and i was shocked how long it took the container system to install required packages. literally orders of magnitude slower than a VM due to syscall filters, and only marginally better for privileged containers (which sacrifice security)
@mischievoustomato it’s that bad for everything that runs docker but i assume microsoft has enough dough to make up for it in hardware, considering they’re willing to boil oceans with datacenters full of A100’s for their AI scams