The dominoes are falling. Windows is nothing but a legacy burden at this point. Soon we will be rid of this worthless operating system.

Ubuntu is doing stupid things with packages, replacing them with their proprietary packaging system (called Snap). It has been controversial, the way that they are pushing it, especially since the Snap server is proprietary and non-open source.

A lot of people won’t consider using Ubuntu at all for this reason alone, and it makes sense - when you consider that there are so many other distros to choose from these days, Ubuntu just doesn’t really provide a whole lot of added value anymore.

100% agree. But I like posting articles like these because it brings me back to how I learned programming, and Linux specifically - namely by reading a bunch of articles from similar link aggregators and sharing sites.

My hope is that sharing articles like these is a form of planting the seeds for another cycle for people to learn the way that I did.

I just disabled this today and life is so much better. Thanks! Everything works so much better now.

There are a lot of other helpful replies in this thread, so I won’t add much, but I did find this reference, which you could read if you have a lot of free time. But I particularly liked reading this summary:

• _start calls the libc __libc_start_main;
• __libc_start_main calls the executable __libc_csu_init (statically-linked part of the libc);
• __libc_csu_init calls the executable constructors (and other initialisatios);
• __libc_start_main calls the executable main();
• __libc_start_main calls the executable exit().

Reserving main is definitely more hacky. Try compiling multiple objects with main defined into a single binary - it won’t go well. This can make a lot of testing libraries rather convoluted, since some want to write their own main while others want you to write it because require all kinds of macros or whatever.

On the other hand, if __name__ == "__main__" very gracefully supports having multiple entrypoints in a single module as well as derivative libraries.

Is it? I really don’t think so. What can you propose that’s better? I think if __name__ == __main__ works perfectly fine and can’t really think of anything that would be better.

And you don’t have to use it either if you don’t want to anyway, so no, I don’t think it’s that much of a hack. Especially when the comic compares C as an example, which makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Can you put some milk on the algorithm please?

You’re right, but I think the main reason companies like it is because it’s easier to get rid of contractors than full-time employees.

Vim when I can, and when I can’t, Neovim with plugins (LazyVim). Both are fast. I have had troubles with Neovim and configuration, and it does some things that really annoy me (like autoclosing parentheses - it just messes up everything). Honestly, the only feature that I really need is Go To Definition.

But vim - I absolutely love it. I started using it nearly 20 years ago and it still does everything one could want if you’re willing to learn the keymaps and commands. Macros, ci), block indentation and so on. It’s even great for editing XML. If the codebases I’m working on these days weren’t so large and complicated, I would still be using it with very little configuration in my .vimrc.

Of course you can. Instead of committing the code to a repository, you just take screenshots of the everything and commit that instead.

Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds

Pretty sure he’s older than that. And calling people names isn’t nice!

But was this a reversion of the previous commit…?

I’ve never had the chance to use a functional language in my work, but I have tried to use principles like these.

Once I had a particularly badly written Python codebase. It had all kinds of duplicated logic and data all over the place. I was asked to add an algorithm to it. So I just found the point where my algorithm had to go, figured out what input data I needed and what output data I had to return, and then wrote all the algorithm’s logic in one clean, side effect-free module. All the complicated processing and logic was performed internally without side effects, and it did not have to interact at all with the larger codebase as a whole. It made understanding what I had to do much easier and relieved the burden of having to know what was going on outside.

These are the things functional languages teach you to do: to define boundaries, and do sane things inside those boundaries. Everything else that’s going on outside is someone else’s problem.

I’m not saying that functional programming is the only way you can learn something like this, but what made it click for me is understanding how Haskell provides the IO monad, but recommends that you keep that functionality at as high of a level as possible while keeping the lower level internals pure and functional.

Sad to see that Ecosia and Qwant don’t seem to work without Javascript. I’ll stick with DDG, and may consider using Mojeek more in the future. The fact that DDG doesn’t have its own index does bother me a bit.

Sounds like a great deal… TORILLE!!!

Agreed, but on the other hand, maybe this could push them to be better involved in the collective defense of Europe, not just for new arms but older ones as well. The more countries that contribute to Europe’s collective defense, the better.

Right, but I don’t think it’s explicitly clear - today, the US is dominant in movies for example. Supporting alternative industries could start to chip away at that dominance, and if a day comes when nobody outside the USA cares about their movies anymore because they have their own industries, that would do a lot more damage.

I think we’re in agreement, but I just want to point it out in case anyone missed that point. By promoting alternatives, getting to the point where nobody cares about US media anymore is really the ultimate goal if you’re trying to do maximum damage.

(And to be honest, American movies are really not that good. They’re very formulaic and predictable. That’s why I wouldn’t bother watching them, even if I wanted to download them for free.)

Don’t forget that the EU Commission funded a report to document the impact of file sharing and then buried it when they found out that it was actually beneficial to the creators. So if you want to engage in file sharing, you’re actually helping them.

Do what you will with that information. If you really want to boycott, then boycott the content altogether. If you can’t hold back, then download them, but you’re helping them out anyway by doing that.

The best thing you can do is support your local art scene and find better alternatives.

I’m not sure I agree with that. Before suggesting someone wield that kind of power, consider how you’d feel about it if the opposition parties did that too.

At this point, I think the USA is better off just reforming its constitution. And possibly splitting the union into 5-10 separate smaller countries. The country is clearly not an effective union anymore, and to be honest, hasn’t been for a very long time. This isn’t the first time there’s been a north-south divide and it certainly won’t be the last, so why prolong the suffering? Just break it up and be done with it. Everyone will probably be much happier that way.