The only people with this take are people who don’t understand it. Plus growth and decline is an inherent part of consciousness, unless the computer can be born, change then die in some way it can’t really achieve consciousness.
I don’t drive but if the engine is off while the clutch is disengaged engaged wouldn’t that produce a braking effect. Maybe not enough to stop the roll on a slope but enough that normal foot braking would stop the vehicle?
I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers....
Similar thing in ubuntu, something required a newer python version than the system installed one. I thought I’ll uninstall the old one bcoz why have two versions. Ended up reinstalling ubuntu.
It’s not a standard but still its an interesting software so I’ll post this here:
Joking aside, I love and hate it. Its paradigm is almost like using the C preprocessor to build a really awkward Turing-machine. TeX/LaTeX does a great job of what it was intended to do; it applies high quality typesetting rules to complex material and produces really good results. I love the output I can get with it and I will be eternally grateful that Donald Knuth decided to tackle this problem. And despite my complaints below, that gratitude is genuine. Being able to redefine something in a context-sensitive way, or to be able to rely on semantics to produce spacing appropriate to an operator vs a variable etc; these are beautiful things.
The problem is, at least once a day I’m left wishing I could just write a callable routine in a normal language with variables, types, arrays, loops and so on. You can implement all those things in TeX, but TeX doesn’t have a normal notion of strings, numbers or arrays, so it is rare that you can do a complicated thing in an efficient way, with readable code. So as a language, TeX frequently leads to cargo-cult programming. I’m not aware that you can invoke reflection after a page is output, to see what decisions on glue and breaks were made; but at the same time you can’t conditionally include something that is dependent on those decisions, since the decision will depend on what is included. This leads to some horrible conditionals combined with compiling twice, and the results are not always deterministic. Sometimes I find it’s quicker to work around things like that by writing an external program that modifies the resulting PDF output, but that seems perverse.
At the same time, there’s really nothing else out there that comes close to doing what LaTeX does, and if you have the patience, the quality of documents it can produce is essentially unbounded. The legacy of encodings, category codes, parameter limits, stack limits etc. just makes it very hard for package writers, and consumes a great deal of time for a lot of people. But maybe I am picky about things that a saner person would just live with.
A lot of very talented people have written a lot of very complex packages to save the user from these esoteric details, and as a result LaTeX is alive and well, and 99% of the time you can get the results you want, using off-the-shelf parts. The remaining 1% of the time, getting the result you want requires a level of expertise that is unreasonable to expect of users. (For comparison, I wrote an optimising C compiler and generally found it far easier to make that work as expected, than some of the things I’ve tried, and failed, to do properly in LaTeX. I now have a rule; if getting some weird alignment to work takes me more than an hour, I just fake it with a postscript file, an image, or write an external program to generate it longhand, in order to save my sanity.)
I think (and certainly hope) that LaTeX is here to stay, in much the same way that C and assembly language are. As time moves forward I think we’ll see more and more abstractions and fewer people dealing with the internals. But I will be forever grateful to the people who are experts in TeX, and who keep providing us with incredible packages.
Hi guys! So, yeah…Which games are good for a nice gaming session while on a flight? Last time I played one of the newer Tomb Raider games, and while performance was good, it decked (heh) the battery in less than 1h… So, while I like these too, if the flight doesn’t have a socket under the seat I might want to play games...
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
I have a dumb work related chrome thing, i’d like to make it so that when a certain notification sound plays in chromium, my computer does a few things automatically for me...
Plus if anything Debian is more stringent regarding proprietary packages than Arch. Arch package manager will let you install open source drivers or proprietary drivers equally. If adhering to “extreme” moral values is the joke about being labelled vegan, then debian is the vegan one.
"I want to live forever in AI" (lemmy.ml)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/14869314...
Friends matter (mander.xyz)
shrimp is bugs (mander.xyz)
Fedora Linux 40 Officially Released with Kernel 6.8, Gnome 46 & KDE 6 (9to5linux.com)
Sadly, DNF5 and the new Anaconda installer didn’t make it to the party, in case you were wondering.
Linux is now an option for safety-minded software-defined vehicle developers (arstechnica.com)
What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?
I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers....
Firefox 125 Released: Here's What's New and Improved (debugpointnews.com)
Which communication protocol or open standard in software do you wish was more common or used more?
Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!
Brb (mander.xyz)
teachings (mander.xyz)
colepotera are our real masters (mander.xyz)
Best deck games for a flight? (as in...possibly running on batteries)
Hi guys! So, yeah…Which games are good for a nice gaming session while on a flight? Last time I played one of the newer Tomb Raider games, and while performance was good, it decked (heh) the battery in less than 1h… So, while I like these too, if the flight doesn’t have a socket under the seat I might want to play games...
Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
happy pigmy hippo day!! (mander.xyz)
a booty that makes it rain (mander.xyz)
Does anyone know how to execute a script when a certain sound plays?
I have a dumb work related chrome thing, i’d like to make it so that when a certain notification sound plays in chromium, my computer does a few things automatically for me...
Steam Deck: 2 Years Later! (www.youtube.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/13796193
Simple as (lemmy.world)
Oh Snap! Canonical now doing manual reviews for new packages due to scam apps (www.gamingonlinux.com)
The installation process of different Linux distributions (feddit.de)
Majestic (mander.xyz)