colonial

colonial, 8 months ago

Here’s my most recent one… from last year, LOL.

Built using Hugo, hosted on some Hetzner server in Virginia. I would have more, but I’m still working on implementing my own site generator.

colonial, 9 months ago

Good soldering gear already makes me wince. I couldn’t imagine paying $500+ for an oscilloscope.

Fortunately I’m more interested in the software side of things… thank God nobody charges for programming toolchains anymore.

colonial, 9 months ago

I mean, my time came around long after the age of hundred-page software manuals. But I’ve spent a good portion of my life knee-deep in man pages and Google searches, which kinda counts?

colonial, 9 months ago

I’m a broke ahh college student, so my PC is in my bedroom. No RGB + Be Quiet everything, so it’s not disruptive, even when my scheduled jobs kick in around midnight.

I don’t just use it for gaming, though - it’s nice to do schoolwork on a real computer (big keyboard, dual monitors etc) instead of a laptop.

colonial, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

It’s blockchain garbage. Avoid.

Also, the only good creator on there is Mental Outlaw. And he’s also on YouTube for the foreseeable future, so…

colonial, 9 months ago

I’m not a fan of Go from a language design perspective, but it does have plenty of technical merit (cheap coroutines, compiled) compared to using a scripting language for your backend.

Some pointers on other languages:

• Don’t sleep on Java/Kotlin or C# for your backend. They’re good languages with powerful, well-developed ecosystems. Kotlin even compiles to JS!
• TypeScript is saner JS. Highly recommended.
• If your backend is CPU-bound, Rust will let you squeeze out every ounce of performance at the cost of a relatively steep learning curve.

colonial, 9 months ago

I let FOSS apps collect crash reports and the like. Proprietary stuff though, no chance.

colonial, 9 months ago

Consider ZRAM/compressed RAM swap, maybe?

colonial, 9 months ago

copilot is terrible in general.

I concur. I took the free trial and was not impressed - most of the time the suggestions aren’t any better than LSP autocomplete.

And if I asked it to implement something or let it autocomplete part of (say) an expression, it tends to go tits-up completely. (Which is especially odd considering I use languages with abundant static context - It’s not like JS where the type of a function parameter is “who the fuck knows until runtime.”)

Spend your $10 a month on supporting OSS devs/projects.

colonial, 9 months ago

Yeah, I’m always afraid of this happening. Too much of my social life is connected to Discord - all my friends and family are on there.

The fact that I have to use BetterDiscord (soley so I can use my patch for a four-year-old Wayland bug) doesn’t help my paranoia.

colonial, 9 months ago

Why in God’s name would you use a 6-bit signed integer for anything on a spacecraft? I know space-certified chips are pretty barebones, but surely not that bare bones…

colonial, 9 months ago

I still use it. When GitHub first forced it on everyone, it broke one or two of my scripts - so I ended up just changing the default back to master out of spite, and haven’t touched it since.

colonial, 9 months ago

I was still a somewhat-clueless high school student at the time, and I had to create new repositories for every assignment in my CS electives. Niche, I know, but someone has to be the edge case…

(They used a dumpster fire home-grown autograder that couldn’t handle concepts like “assignment X is in directory Y.” Or any sort of file structure that deviated from the IntelliJ project layout. Supposedly they didn’t want to pay for a commercial service…)

colonial, 9 months ago

This is why I can never get into microblogging/Twitter-type platforms. Character limits and one-click reposting mean that what little discourse you get is shallow, and ragebait is consistently pushed to the top.

I’m not going to say that Lemmy or (especially) Reddit completely avoid this, but you generally get much more insightful conversation and can opt-in to political communities.

There was a thread on !asklemmy recently asking people for their unpopular political opinions, and it actually wasn’t a total shitshow!

colonial, 9 months ago

Actual unpopular (but not extremist) opinions.

colonial, 9 months ago

It’s a shame that sum type support is still so lacking in C++. Proper Result types (ala Haskell or Rust) are generally much nicer to deal with, especially in embedded contexts.

As is, there’s only std::expected (which can and will blow up in your face if you forget to check has_value) and std::variant, which I have heard nothing but complaints about.

colonial, 9 months ago

I would consider language support essential for “good” sum types. AFAIK, stuff like exhaustive pattern matching can’t be accomplished by a library. Perhaps you could do some cursed stuff with compiler plugins, however.

(There was a library that implemented non-exhaustive pattern matching that eventually morphed into an ISO C++ proposal… so we won’t see it until 2030 at the earliest /hj)

colonial, 9 months ago

I’d bet five bucks some desperate Haskeller or Rustacean has implemented exactly that. You could also probably use nested functions for GCC C or lambdas in C++ to move everything inline?

colonial, 9 months ago

Can confirm, I chew nic gum when I don’t feel like taking my ADHD medication. Gives you a little kick and (at least for me, YMMV) isn’t addictive.

colonial, 9 months ago

I use DisplayPort on principle. It’s an open standard, while HDMI is controlled by an extortive cabal.

colonial, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Re: CSS and Javascript being obvious - I’m planning to do this entirely server side, since I control the whole stack.

Regular users (and good bots) get regular pages, but if a GPTBot user agent makes a request, they just get garbage back. (Obviously this relies on OpenAI not masking the user agent, but if they do that, hopefully bigger webmasters will notice the lack of hits and call them out.)

I like your idea with the sentence fragments. Because the LLM check would happen before I actually look up the requested resource, I think I could combine it with fake links to lead the scraper on a wild goose chase.

colonial, 9 months ago

I won’t be using CSS or JS. I control the entire stack, so I can do a server-side check - GPTBot user agents get random garbage, everyone else gets the real deal.

Obviously this relies on OpenAI not masking their user agent, but I think webmasters would notice a conspicuous lack of hits if they did that.

colonial, 9 months ago

Oh boy, do I have some C++ codebases I wish I could show you.

colonial, 9 months ago

No. You are not entitled to an instant response.