otl

otl, 6 months ago

Agreed. I didn’t know about these features - I’ve never written any Perl before - and I do find them kinda interesting and cool. But not really surprising.

A less clickbaity title might be “Exploring Raku’s built-in shortcuts for CLIs” or something. Still 6 words. And I still would have clicked and enjoyed the article! Really appreciated its positive tone and clear examples!

otl, 6 months ago

I think I’m missing something. Don’t the police or whoever check the license number, name etc. against a central record? Is this just about the convenience of not carrying around a plastic card? I feel like there’s more to it but I don’t know what.

otl, 6 months ago

Of all the articles to copy and paste without attribution, you chose this one…?

otl, 6 months ago

Sorry my comment was really snarky - I apologise. Long day! I’ll do better in the future :)

There has been criticism of this listicle format. Critics claim they are clickbait and machinated recycling of information/ideas. Listicles seem to exist to just get more ad impressions over entertaining and informing the reader.

The original article on the original site feels a bit like that. Loads of ads, with just one link to the actual nixos website, mid-sentence, towards the bottom of the article (where the majority of readers never get to).

otl, 6 months ago

They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

otl, 6 months ago

Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

More ideas if you’re interested at upspin.io

otl, 6 months ago

Now I do convoluted shit by hand and not knowing I’m gonna fuck it up ;)

otl, 6 months ago

Getting old, “broken” computers running Linux was the first thing when I was about 11 or 12 years old. Then:

1. needing a way to keep them running
2. wanting ways to make running them easier
3. wanting those ways to be easier/simpler

Often this involved programming. Eventually I found out that companies pay money for this kind of thing.

But now I’m finding it difficult to find work which aligns with those original values. Getting paid means delivering what people will pay for, not necessarily solving problems. What got me into programming is probably what will get me out of it (profesionally, anyway).

otl, 6 months ago

This sounds similar in spirit to me, but I did make a career out of it. If you don’t mind me asking, what is your career? You can also email me; see “Contact” at www.olowe.co

otl, 6 months ago

Thanks for sharing.

otl, 6 months ago

Good to see development effort going towards actual Firefox and not those random Mozilla products that I can’t keep track of

otl, 6 months ago

Looks like that will happen later. From Mozilla’s original article:

Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox.

otl, 6 months ago

Ah yes good point. Fingers crossed.

otl, 6 months ago

What products are the sides really wanting to trade? Are they after our dirt?

Seems so. I found this article from DFAT much more informative: dfat.gov.au/…/australia-european-union-fta-fact-s…

otl, 6 months ago

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

– Ken Thompson

otl, 6 months ago

Maybe there’s some IP address ranges to try block?

It’s difficult because, for example, blocking the addresses OpenAI’s crawlers use may inadvertently block addresses from Azure used by Bing or whatever.

otl, 6 months ago

A listicle? What is this, 2008? Get with the times. Give us a TikTok video with recycled ideas.

otl, 6 months ago

I’m still super confused by this user’s posts lol. I get that (some? most?) of it is satire… but then why all social media engagement farming hashtag nonsense? Or is this all part of the satire…?

otl, 6 months ago

[…] and this is a huge project.

This makes me skeptical too. I’d be interested to hear about smaller projects to replace some creaky system relying on the output of some long-gone contractor’s overengineered software being faxed around.

Those projects have no cool name and are probably really hard to get funding for. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that might be more effective than these “big bang” projects.

otl, 6 months ago

I was so impressed with the similar 110cc Honda Scoopy in Indonesia. Fuel-injected. Couldn’t believe the tens of thousands of kilometres on the clock of these things, going round and round islands and up and down mountains on way worse roads and sand than most BMW GS1250s ever see.

otl, 6 months ago

CNCF projects themselves are indeed FOSS, but “the cloud” as it is most commonly interacted with, by tech workers, are enormous collections of closed-source systems run by Amazon, Google or Microsoft (all under antitrust investigation either now or in the past).

otl, 6 months ago

I won’t speak for the OP, but yes it is a fair question about the automatic red-flag. There are characteristics of software described as cloud-native that are considered undesirable by some.

These could range from things as high level as an objection to how projects are funded, down to things like distaste for code complexity required to support opaque HTTP APIs over standardised protocols.

otl, 6 months ago

For me, mpv writes a bunch of debugging info to stderr when playing something. Have you seen this output? Can you try running it from the command-line (if you haven’t already)?

otl, 6 months ago

Isn’t the Slack/Electron resource utilisation screenshot enough to prove an important point?

For most people: no.

They work around it. They buy new hardware and they’re not sure why. There’s massive business in selling people new computers (I’m including smartphones here).

For most in the tech industry: no.

Their job depends on them not understanding and/or not caring about this stuff. If they did care and acted on it, they risk losing a job to the next person who is happy to go “yes, sir”, write more shit, and add it to the pile.