We're still in a place where when computers try to be "helpful" (using #AI, predictive #algorithms, recommendation algorithms etc.) are too close to #Clippy territory instead of being genuinely helpful.
So I'd rather have them not try to do that. I know what I'm doing and would prefer to not having to constantly undo the "help".
I want to love Forth and Lisp and Perl and Go and I sort of want to know Rust and Haskell and OCaml and Elixir, but really, the most important electronic computing platform for the largest number people is … spreadsheets.
Formulas and graphs turn these into the multifunctional tool that spread from accounting specialists to financial reporting to project managers planning to household budgets to birthday and wedding guest lists.
If you think about it, spreadsheets for the masses succeeded where Emacs failed. Spreadsheets allow you to build the tools you need. And sure, as a programming professional I have heard my share of horror stories: salary distributions and bonus programs, airport light systems, and many other things that should have used relational databases and REST services and whatever. But people know spreadsheets and use them to solve their problems.
Spreadsheets are underappreciated. Certainly they are underappreciated by programmers, I think.
Considering a giant leap in webhost.
I'm 😬
Fed up with my shared web host.
How about a dedicated Debian-based server that I'll manage completely myself.
The difference in price vs. resources is 🤯
I just can't justify giving more money to my shoddy web host (whc.ca) for a little bit more gruel (RAM/Storage) and the same frustrating support, when I could pay the same premium, take it all on, and have a beast of a server. Also a potential new home for my #selfhosted#Mastodon instance!
In my firm, I decide whether or not we use your kit. And sure, right now, we're an #STM32 shop, but we're not married to that family. (We're not even married to the #ARM architecture family!)
This last week I've been evaluating a #CortexM0+ chip. It's not going well. I'm sure the chip is just fine ... but I can't tell. In the end we're probably not going to go with it, even though it's cheaper than its alternatives.
@qqmrichter big list! How are datasheets these days BTW? I only dabbled in embedded long back, and a Realtek datasheet was plain wrong in many places ... got by reading some BSD driver's source code!
Is there a #FOSS#selfhosted alternative to anny.co or Microsoft Bookings? We need a simple booking interface for the local non-profit recording studio in the youth club.
Every time I upgrade my system I look at the list of packages and wonder whether I could uninstall some of them. I look at their description and try to uninstall them. That lists all the things that will get uninstalled alongside it and so the process repeats, lots of exploring of packages, and then, eventually, they're gone.
And when I reboot, it's my time to cry, maybe… at least that's what I fear. Going to reboot right now to get past that feeling of dread.
Hacked some initial #Erlang mode for the #Lem editor yesterday evening.
I have an Erlang shell but did not manage to connect to LSP/ELP, it hangs while initializing. Language server support is also still somewhat minimal in Lem.
@frescosecco tangential, but wasn't there a project long ago to make an Emacs clone in Erlang? SWI-Prolog has a barebones Emacs clone! An Erlang Emacs makes a lot of sense when considering that Emacs became more usable after it got async support. If parantheses matter, there are multiple Lisps on the BEAM.
@ocdtrekkie Is the cult of brands so entrenched that due process isn't a consideration? The thing I notice in witch hunts is, they declare that due process would fail rather than take the trouble needed to apply it and demonstrate the failure. What is it they say about every problem: there is always a simple solution that is wrong.
The feeling when you look at your windows and their title bars are so full of stuff you can't move the window without activating any of the gazillion widgets. A bit like trying to find a spot of whitespace on a status on fedi that you'd like to expand but there are so few words and so many links and buttons and the phone is small and your fingers are large and life is short and then you die.
Tempted to tag this hashtag user experience. Of life, I guess.
I think I want to livestream a bunch of work on/with Stitchcraft (my OCaml cross-stitch software thing) on Thursday. It will likely be a mix of using the software to make cross-stitch designs, fixing the bugs I discover, and maybe adding missing features.
There is an #OCaml#peerTube instance that I might be able to get an account on, but I’m not sure whether that content is too unfocused for it? If you have a feel for what the instance is looking for, I’d love your opinion on that.
@mathiasx C is a 100-year language. Even a small worthy improvement like Plan9's C dialect didn't catch on, so I guess first-to-market and compiler adoption renders any other language moot (as much as I would like to like Ada, and like Zig and Forth).
Higher-level languages is where there has been wiggle-room around Python and PHP.
PKM/note-taking is still huge over on YouTube, and there’s lots of methods like PARA, Cornell system, etc — my system is simply capture notes in text (org mode in my case) and use ripgrep to find things later. No refile, no review.
This is kind of #shitposting , but I imagine some people get overwhelmed seeing all this content and never actually start — here’s permission to just start taking notes without a system.
@mathiasx "without a system" is ... a stretch for me, org-mode (and Tiddlywiki on WebDAV elsewhere) made note-taking frequent enough for notes to be of use.
We updated a certificate for an internal tool. It's a web app, deployed as a #Docker#container. To update the certificate we have to rebuild the container from scratch.
We also have a nice internal tool for changing user settings such as cluster access rights. It runs fine. But it's an #Ansible playbook run through a CI/CD pipeline that builds, runs, then destroys two containers for every user change.
"This container could have been a shell script" feels more true every day.
@mathiasx
Great question. Has to be asked of every web app, actually. @frigginglorious
> Cap'n Proto
first thing that comes to mind, right? :100a: The Erlang term encoding (BERT) sounds great too. Granddaddy ASN.1 too is around?
How is it after so many years #Linux still manages to totally fuck up the most basic and common use of #Bluetooth (audio)?
Every Bluetooth device I own connects to my Android phone without a hiccup. Every Bluetooth device I've tried (a subset of the first group) works without a hitch on the Windows machine at work.
But my main Linux box at home? About half of them don't work.
It should be a fucking embarrassment, but it seems the F/OSS crowd doesn't "grok" shame.
@stuartl@qqmrichter the current experience is just the price paid by dev mindshare going to development of a server platform - I wonder who benefited from that :-(
Devs focusing on a desktop OS of similar vintage (Haiku OS ?) ought to have helped. The Linux desktop experience suggests it isn't too late to pivot ;-)
There are so many user-oriented software artifacts insufficiently explored. Plan 9 home network? Smalltalk desktop (Squeak adopted by app devs)?
@qqmrichter
> the UX in the Linux world is terrible
No disagreement there, not even with fanboys overselling. Just saying, maybe devs aren't the fanboys, and the issue is systemic.
@stuartl
> we are trying to help here
Thanks, but I didn't help with the BT experience at all :-) just got involved in the parallel UX topic.
> Valve ... Linux ... Steamdeck
Very tempting if you don't want a display. Known hardware config, Linux known to work on it.
> typing this post on a Starbook VI
How are Starlabs as a company? They recently became available in my region, but I am balking at paying a regionally-unknown entity upfront.
The biggest problem of #selfhosted services and #homelab is a bus factor. What if my existence will be interrupted unexpectedly? When my #Nextcloud will crash someday after that, my family will not be able to get their files and photos anymore...
I'm thinking about an external drive with all Nextcloud data periodically copied there. To be able to disconnect it by hand from the dead server and connect to any PC. But which file system should it have? FAT32 can be read on any system but has a single file size limit. NTFS is not supported on Macs, EXT4 is not supported on both, Macs and Windows... I mean, not supported out of the box...
