ramin_hal9001

ramin_hal9001, 12 days ago

@louis if you want to switch servers, I fully support trying alternatives. I am sure that would be a lot of hand-wringing work, especially trying to ensure the database is properly migrated, but if you feel like it is necessary, I am in favor of it.

ramin_hal9001, 12 days ago

> "#doas : multiple security issues: Buffer overflow (privilege escalation to root) Broken UID parsing falls back to root (CVE-2019-15900), Incorrect group change behaviour (CVE-2019-15901)."

@brokenix using Rust would probably have prevent buffer overflows bugs, but not the UID parsing or group change behavior.

People who tried to sell me on "doas" often did by arguing that the simpler design and smaller code base was supposed to make it more secure. Well, security, as it turns out, is pretty damn hard.

ramin_hal9001, 14 days ago

@noc @3goodthings @weirdfolks glory to all things punk. Especially the Fediverse and Linux.

ramin_hal9001, 20 days ago

> "In American mythology, people are rich because of "hard work" yet nobody can explain why those who do all the actual work have no money."

@bhasic @Radical_EgoCom the scripted reply to this is "some people work smarter, not harder." But then you have to ask, is a CEO really 1000 times smarter than one of his employees, or is it just that how "smart" or "intelligent" a person is is defined by the amount of money they have?

ramin_hal9001, 27 days ago

@noondlyt I like the fact that I can learn about transgender issues and use the word "cisgender" without having my post flagged or my account suspended...

unlike at that other site...

ramin_hal9001, 1 month ago

@seachanger but that is just the free market, these don't count as taxes, so its totally OK. (sarcasm)

Seriously, the "small government, less taxes" people are always complaining about the wrong thing.

ramin_hal9001, 2 months ago

> "If I'm understanding links/buttons correctly, it would enable me to create commands from text (and at any point I want to do so)?"

@zyd yes, there are two button markups for calling arbitrary Emacs Lisp commands:

• Curly bracket-delimited key chords will run whatever command is bound to those key chords, for example {C-20 M-g M-g} will call "goto-line" with 20 as an argument. (Make sure the cursor is placed somewhere within the brackets, not on or before the brackets).

• Angle bracket notation executes arbitrary Emacs Lisp code within the brackets. (It is safe because you can see what code will be executed.) For example:

  <mark-whole-buffer>

  <eval (save-excursion (goto-char (point-max)) (insert "Hello, world!n"))>

And of course you can define your own functions and commands with descriptive names:

<my/git-fetch-and-pull-here>

@dekkzz76 @rml

ramin_hal9001, 2 months ago

@dekkzz76 Hyperbole creates a set of rules for identifying links which are only activated when you press the hyperlink activate key chord "M-RET" key. Of course, Emacs can already assign hyperlink properties to arbitrary text, but Hyperbole provides two advantages over an ordinary hyperlink:

1. Since the Hyperlink rules are only applied on the "activate" key chord, you can apply very sophisticated rules to just the text under the cursor without having to parse the whole buffer and assign hyperlink properties to text, which would be very slow. This makes the Hyperbole hyperlinking rules much more versatile.
2. The key chord is enabled as a global minor mode, so the hyperlink rules work in any buffer, regardless of what mode the buffer may be in. It is basically a markdown for links that can be included anywhere. The advantage of markdown is of course that it is human-readable, even if your editor does not recognize it as markdown. So you can include Hyperbole links in the comments of source code, in e-mail messages, or as the output of shell scripts, and the hyperlinks all just work (as long as you are in Emacs).

@rml

ramin_hal9001, 2 months ago

> "Who was your fave character/actor in it?"

@msquebanh

> "i think i could relate to the goth girl (Ally Sheedy), but tbh it's been so long, i would have to see the movie again."

@blogdiva

> "that was who I related to most - I loved Ally Sheedy in that role."

@msquebanh Oh jeez, I still have a crush on Ally Sheedy's character in Breakfast Club, she is so beautiful. I don't know if she was supposed to be goth per say, but they referred to her as "a basket case" in the letter to the principle at the end of the film, so maybe? But yeah, I related mostly to Ally Sheedy's character, and to a lesser degree, the nerdy kid who admitted to suicidal thoughts.

@krusynth

ramin_hal9001, 2 months ago

@msquebanh @krusynth "The Breakfast Clib" movie still feels fairly modern, it is kind of hard for me to beileve that the kids in the film (if they are the same age as their fictional characters) would be 57 or 58 years old now.

ramin_hal9001, 2 months ago

> "2023: Guile #scheme, Guix

> 2024: Stalin scheme, Red Star OS"

@rml ah, the compiler that single-handedly defeated the Nazis during the second world war. I get the sense that we again have a need nowadays for some good Nazi-smashing technology.

I have never tried Stalin, but I think it is R5RS only, and that would make it a bit difficult to run on the majority of my code which is R7RS.

ramin_hal9001, 2 months ago

> "Legend has it that #emacs intermittently flashes the word #COMMUNISM across the screen as a subliminal "fuck you" to the man. I think its working."

@rml "git grep" wont work as-is because it is encoded in the source code with ROT-13, so you would have to grep for the ROT-13 encoded string for "COMMUNISM" in order to find it. They aren't stupid enough to leave a subliminal clue like that as plain text right there in the source code.

LBH UNIR ABGUVAT GB YBFR OHG LBHE PUNVAF

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@daviwil I would avoid Go simply because it is a language "blessed" by Google, which is a company I would never want to depend on for any reason.

Rust is great for its fantastic type system, and seems to have gained a ton of momentum in the hearts and minds of programmers lately, but the Rust community seems to make no attempt to make Rust binary compatible with other programming languages. The language is too different from C to be able to easily interface other languages (scripting languages) to it without automated foreign function interface generators to generate Rust code to which other external libraries can interface.

Zig is great, but not quite as popular as Rust, and does not have a really nice type system. On the other hand, it does produce very efficient binary code and is fully compatible with C libraries, so you can easily interface languages like Guile or Lua to Zig libraries without having to generate any foreign function interface code on the Zig side. And I am told that it has some pretty nice, modern tooling that helps debugging a lot to make up for the fact that it does not have Rust's type system that can catch such errors before compilation completes. Honestly, Zig just seems to be a much more useful language than Rust. But I would use Zig as a language target for Scheme, sort of like how Gambit or Chicken generates C.

If I were forced to choose between Rust and Zig, I would go with Rust just so that I could get to know its borrow checking type system, but my end game would be try to emulate that borrow checking in a Scheme compiler like PreScheme.

ramin_hal9001, 5 months ago

@pmidden I am not sure what you considere to be "unnecessary dependencies" (I supposed you wouldn't want a web server like Wai), but would log-base get the job done for you?

ramin_hal9001, 5 months ago

> "When we abhor, we become abhorrent."

@LeftistLawyer isn't it OK to abhor fascism, racism, genocide?

ramin_hal9001, 6 months ago

> "One of the reasons I like Python is that it can be used for so many different tasks, and without having to learn a new language.

@steriana @Pitosalas here is the thing though, Python is one of the worst languages for trying to adapt it to many different tasks.

If you want a truly general purpose high-level language that can be adapted to many different tasks, Common Lisp or Scheme is considerably better. The interpreters and compilers for these languages actually provide carefully designed mechanisms, like macro expansion and pattern matching, specifically for adapting the language to different tasks. This is possible because the syntax of the language is so simple and minimal that it is very easy to devise embedded domain specific languages (EDSLs) with very little effort, and without requiring people to expend the effort of learning whole new languages.

Python's syntax is relatively complex compared to Lisp, and its APIs for modifying the compiler and interpreter are not at all well-designed for adapting the language to various tasks compared to those of Common Lisp or Scheme. Creating EDSLs is for Python is not idiomatic coding style and discouraged, but people try to adapt it to every possible task anyways, and it becomes a horrible mess.

So you or anyone else, adressing the software industry as a whole, wanted to learn just one high-level language to solve every problem for you, it ought to have been #Scheme or #CommonLisp. Relatively speaking, #Python is so incredibly limited in what it can do compared to those languages, Python was objectively the wrong choice for this "lets adapt it to all purposes" way of thinking. The software industry is truly in a horrible mess as a result.

By the way, languages like Racket and Gerbil which are both built on top of Scheme are very easy to learn for beginners.

ramin_hal9001, 7 months ago

@spritelyinst @interpeer @pluralistic

> "Talking to folks like @interpeer made me realise that an Internet without DNS is possible. Something that didn't cross my mind."

@RyunoKi thanks for pointing me to @interpeer . I am very interested in all of these up-and-coming technologies.

ramin_hal9001, 8 months ago

@atomicpoet

> "A few days ago, someone asked me in what way console gaming is seen as more regarded than PC gaming—and, in my view, undeservedly so."

> "Here’s an example. Do a search for a book about PC gaming, you won’t find much on Amazon. Sure, you’ll find lots of books on how to build a PC for gaming, but not a whole lot about actual PC gaming. You know, the games made for PC."

My hypothesis: game consoles are locked-down platforms owned by the corporations that also publish games. Because they are locked down, they are easier to control, which makes it easier to exploit their customers. By exploitation, I mean revenue generating tactics such as profiling end users for ad sales, selling games as a service, forbidding the transfer of games they purchased to other people, etc. Therefore consoles are probably considerably more profitable for the game publishers than PCs which are not as strictly locked-down, (or not at all locked down, such as on Linux PCs).

So the profit motive is to emphasize console gaming over PC gaming, to get more people interested in buying locked-down games and making themselves more easily exploited by the game publishing corporations. And the gaming press is heavily dependent on ad revenue from these game publishing companies as well, which makes them functionally little different from corporate propaganda, as they will only publish articles that their advertisers want people to see. So the press are also incentivized to only publish articles about console gaming and to downplay PC gaming.

ramin_hal9001, 8 months ago

@rml Guile and Chez are both fantastic at binding to C code, but C++ always gets tricky due to name mangling, which is a result of constraints with the ELF file format not being able to encode types and overloaded functions.

I have yet to try ECL for anything more than simple experiments, but I think the fact that ECL binds to C++ at the source code level, and at the linker level, that makes it much easier to interoperate with C++ code.

ramin_hal9001, 9 months ago

@rikviergever

> "what are the key differences between freebsd and linux?"

• Linux evolved from Minix, FreeBSD evolved from BSD Unix
• Linux does not provide jails, Linux uses a different filesystem format (EXT4, XFS, Btrfs) as opposed to UFS or ZFS on the BSDs.
• Most Linux distros are not source distributions (Gentoo being one notable exception), whereas the BSDs are source distributions (you get all the source for the OS and build it on your own hardware).
  Their process and threading models are different - their signal handling API is different
• their driver models are different
• their driver APIs are different
• Linux uses GCC or Musl, BSDs use Clang to build.

Linux and BSD Unix are different in every way, except they are both POSIX compliant and are programmed in the C programing language, and most tools programmed in C that can compile on BSD can also compile on Linux and vice-versa because it is relatively simple to port code from one OS to the other, and so Linux and the BSDs have similar app ecosystems.

ramin_hal9001, 11 months ago

Why #FediPact is important (2/3)

The real threat Facebook poses to the #fediverse

The #Meta corporation has a specific goal. They see the #fediverseas a competitor to their business. Their goal in federating is to eliminate this competitor. They are using is the "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish" (EEE) strategy. It works like this:

All of the posts and other content created (for free) by users of #Mastodon (and other #ActivityPub #fediverse services) will become visible on the #Facebook platform. Facebook will benefit from this content without having paid for it. Also remember, Running a Mastodon instance is expensive and time consuming, especially for smaller instances run by one or a few individuals. Facebook will be taking content from their servers for free and using it to improve the quality of Facebook. Further, this increased burden on Mastodon server admins will put pressure on them to shut down.

Also, over time people using Mastodon, the majority of whom are not interested in who provides their social networking services, will see Facebook, with all the content from Mastodon, as "the same as Mastodon but better." This will encourage migration away from Mastodon and toward Facebook. Further encouraging Mastodon instances to shut down.

Over time, the communities that have grown naturally here on the fediverse will be shut down due to the cost of maintaining an instance, or will shut down due to lack of interest, or both. Then, #Meta will have won, they will have slowly but surely achieved their goal of shutting down their competitor. Once these organic communities that we have built together are gone, they are almost certainly gone forever.

(2/3 continued)

#Mastodon #Kbin #Lemmy #Pixelfed #PeerTube #Fediverse #Facebook #Meta #FediPact

ramin_hal9001, 1 year ago

@kravietz @Adorable_Sergal @liztai

Why do I even argue about it? Because if people fixate on the name-calling, they usually lose focus on the methods applied by fascist states. But it’s the methods, not the names, that we should be really watching for.

OK, so we agree it is not merely name calling if the methods applied the state are fascist by some consistent definition (e.g. the Umberto Eco definition).I brought up Ron DeSantis as a specific example, and I think he fits the definition well. Much of the rest of Republican party does to an ever-increasing degree. We could argue about that more, but I do not think this is the appropriate forum for it.

My whole point is, I don't go around complaining about people "throwing around the term," because I am convinced that at this point in history "fascism" is an accurate label for what we are seeing in Florida and elsewhere. It is not merely that I dislike them that I apply the label.

ramin_hal9001, 1 year ago

@kravietz @Adorable_Sergal @liztai

I think rather than wondering “how close to Nazi Germany” it’s much safer to ask “how far behind the rule of the law and Constitution”, and “militarized police” sounds just about there.

OK, well I agree with that.> Making the Nazi Germany a reference point is dangerous as one can always argue “we’re still not there yet”

Well, I have not been arguing that "we are not there yet." I am just saying, I am generally in agreement with anyone who wants to draw comparisons to DeSantis and Nazi Germany, or who wants to apply the label "fascist" to his actions. It is perfectly reasonable to do so given the present circumstances.

ramin_hal9001, 1 year ago

@KFuentesGeorge @marleybits39 @jimdoppke
> "What I am against is just giving free houses to anyone who is homeless. I can be homeless tomorrow and quit paying property taxes, utilities and groceries and let you pay for them....just give me my free house and stuff."

Yeah, I have to say, I really cannot see a single logical reason for any of this, not one little bit. You are talking as if "the economy" is just some bank account that working people somehow fill up with taxes, and it can run out of money and then... something bad happens. Don't tell me you actually believe this? This is really NOT how the economy works, like this is so far detached from reality that I don't think I can even begin to explain how wrong this is.

Let me just say this: if you have watched the news for any amount of time in the past 20 years, you will know that congress can cut taxes while simultaneously approve massive spending bills on the military, or conjure up money out of thin air to bail-out banks or massive too-big-to-fail corporations, all on deficit spending, while the federal reserve can just create money out of thin air (or remove it from circulation) and adjust interest rates to ensure the economy keeps moving.

So why in the holy FUCK can we not just conjure up money out of thin air to house the homeless? It really has to be out of pure malice that anyone wouldn't want to do that.