lotanis

lotanis, 5 months ago

There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

lotanis, 7 months ago

It absolutely discusses phone size - in some detail both in the intro and as part of the reviews.

lotanis, 7 months ago

Isn’t dust what you get when things disintegrate?

lotanis, 8 months ago

Yeah, the ROG Ally particularly makes zero sense to me and misses the point. It runs Windows and it doesn’t have the touchpads.

The touchpads really broaden the utility of the console, from being able to select small UI elements in normal programs to being able to play more mouse enabled games (FTL being the most recent for me).

And Linux is the real special sauce - nobody seems to get why Valve did all that work rather than “just” putting Windows on it. Windows isn’t a selling point (you can put it on the Deck if you want), it’s slow, the UI doesn’t work well on that screen and you lose out on being able to suspend games etc.

lotanis, 8 months ago

You can update your version of Fedora through the updater software as well but it’s a very clear separate process that is initiated manually.

Distro version updates bring major updates to key packages - the one you’d notice most would be to Gnome, the desktop environment. There will be other things too that get only bugfix and security updates during the life of that version, and then after a while that version will lose support and you won’t get any updates at all (docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/).

Updating is very safe and reliable. I’ve had my Fedora install at work for 3 years, updating periodically and it’s working extremely well.

lotanis, 8 months ago

Context: I am an embedded software engineer. I write a lot of low level code that runs on microprocessors or in OS kernels, as well as networking applications and other things. I write a lot of C, I write some Rust, I write Elixir if I possibly can, I write a lot of Python (I hate C++ with a passion).

I don’t think you want Rust. Python is unbeatable on “idea to deployment” speed. Python’s downsides:

• Painful packaging/distribution if you want to get a load of people who don’t have Python installed to run your thing (e.g the GUI program we currently maintain for talking to our hardware)
• Performance under some circumstances. There are some things that are not quick in Python. They’re not always the things you expect because Python actually drops down to C modules for a lot of the number crunching that you might do. E.g. for ML you are basically using Python to plug a load of bits of fast C code together

Rust is good when you need at least one of:

• High speed
• Control over use of memory
• Low level systems programming (drivers etc.)
• Can’t cope with a Garbage Collector
• Compiling to a microcontroller

If you’re doing one of those and so have become expert in Rust, then it is actually excellent for a lot of other things. E.g. you might build your data processor in it, and then distribution is easy because it’s just a single binary.

One option you might look at is Go. You get a lot of performance, you get good parallelism if you need it, it’s designed to be easy to learn, and it also compiles programs to a single binary for easy distribution.

lotanis, 8 months ago

One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level “direct control of memory” language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don’t have to “fight the borrow checker” - it’ll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn’t know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there’s a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn’t work, or it has a security hole because it’s possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.

lotanis, 9 months ago

This is like the physical product version of the Nigerian prince scam - have something so shit that the only people who engage with you are idiots.

lotanis, 9 months ago

I think we need to separate the system from the product. With Reddit they’re the same, with a single owner. With Lemmy/ActivityPub, just like with email, there’s an underlying system that nobody owns. It’s an ecosystem of pieces created by lots of different people.

It is a good thing that people are building products on top of that. Some of them are FOSS and some of them not. As long as no-one gets too much control of the underlying system then that’s great! Users retain choice and can choose FOSS apps if they want, or they can choose something like Sync.

I agree it would be sad if the only apps were paid, but I think a mix is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

lotanis, 9 months ago

I personally think that a sign of a healthy technology platform is one where some people can make money from it, while the platform itself remains open. To use Linux as an example, it’s wonderful that it’s open source, and it’s great that Red Hat can be a profitable company based on Linux. It’s a good sign and it helps the Linux ecosystem thrive due to RH’s contributions.

For Lemmy there are plenty of free apps - no-one is being forced to use Sync. I’m happy to pay for something that provides some more polish to my Lemmy experience, and doesn’t require anything of anyone else.

lotanis, 9 months ago

I just refreshed the page expecting to see progress on a few and it’s actually “14 closed”. Nice work!

lotanis, 9 months ago

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

lotanis, 9 months ago

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

lotanis, 9 months ago

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

lotanis, 10 months ago

Proton is a fork of Wine. It was created by Valve and they have done amazing work getting it to support basically everything. It’s made the steam deck and amazing machine.

lotanis, 10 months ago

Someone once told me “if you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports”. I think about that a lot in a lot of other contexts - sometimes being too safe comes with more of a cost than the risk!

lotanis, 10 months ago

The Steam Deck shines as a handheld because you only have middling graphics power but it’s only trying to drive a small screen (small in both size and pixels). If you plug it into a TV then that tradeoff stops working and it’s going to look worse than any console (except the Switch).

I do use my Deck on the TV and it isn’t as bad as I was expecting, but I’ve got a PC as well for demanding games.

lotanis, 10 months ago

This the Cara Delevigne thing on the Silverstone grid walk?

These people are not just “attending a race”. They are on the grid minutes before a race, a grid that is heavily covered with cameras. As Martin says (www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ3lKU8JpMo), it’s an explicit part of the deal now (after Miami) that if you want to be on the grid that you have to be willing to be interviewed. That seems a reasonable exchange for an amazing privilege. And if you’ve made that deal, you should hold up your end of the bargain.

The above argument didn’t apply in Miami because the rule wasn’t there. It was a more understandable incident. That said Miami still annoyed me. If you’re going to attend an F1 race and be granted these privileges, surely you should have a little respect for the sport, the people that are involved and the TV coverage? Most of us would jump at the chance to be on the grid, that opportunity felt wasted on someone if they’re only there to look cool and don’t care about where it is they’re doing that.

lotanis, 10 months ago

I bought it to play in hotels while travelling for work, but what I most use it for is playing games while sitting on the sofa.

There had always been this separation between PC gaming and handheld/console gaming. With the Deck that separation goes away. The things I would normally go upstairs to play on a PC on my own are now things I can play anywhere.

It works well with almost any game, but it works particularly well with games with control systems designed for gamepads. A great use case are the former Playstation exclusives ported to PC - Spiderman, God of War etc.

lotanis, 10 months ago

That’s so beautiful! Perfect yarn colour too.

lotanis, 11 months ago

The way I see it everyone naturally assumes we're trying to recreate Reddit but with distributed computing.

I think instead we should be trying trying to create something that gives us the community and communication that Reddit gave us, but democratically and without reliance on or control from any one organisation.

This is going to result in some things that work differently from Reddit. We should work to make the experience smooth and intuitive, but it can end up with a different way of working.

lotanis, 11 months ago

I've started using newsminimalist.com It's one of the most useful LLM based services I've seen. It's an aggregator that uses ChatGPT to identify the significance of stories and group the articles on different sites about that story together and then summarise them.

I don't want to spend hours every day reading news, but I do want to keep up to date with major events and it's been good for that.