zygo_histo_morpheus

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zygo_histo_morpheus ,

If you want to break out of the windows mold, tiling windows managers are where its at. You've already explored that route with i3, and there are other alternatives, but they all have a bit of a learning curve unfortunately. hyprland might be worth a try. I've only dabbled but I did remember it being a bit more beginner friendly than i3. But be prepared to be confused, read a bunch of forum posts and edit config files for a bit.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

For git itself sure, but all the other things that come with a git forge, like issue management, are probably things that you don't want spread out over multiple websites

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Sure, but my point is that you'll end up with one "main" remote where you have all git forge stuff even if you push to multiple remotes. By all means, don't make github the main one!

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Caring about the syntax of a programming language is a sign that you haven't properly engaged with it. While not completely unimportant, what matters at the end of the day is the languages semantics. If you program in rust for more than 'a few hours' you will stop thinking about the syntax directly. Trust me, I do a fair bit of work in the cmake language, you can learn to work with any syntax.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

There's a lot here that I could comment on, but I'm particularly fascinated that you make a big deal about const by default.

First of all, it's not particularly good evidence that rust is functional, you could just as easily have a const-by-default java or c. Rust still has mutable data structures which is decidedly non-functional. I do actually think that rust is more inspired by fp than a lot of other languages so it's not even that you're completely wrong here, it's just an odd example.

Secondly, do you actually think that const variables is a bad default? Personally I find that it makes it code easier to read when the author is explicit that a variable is going to be mutated down the line because it makes the intention clearer. It also makes it easier for the compiler to make certain optimizations which is significant in a low-level language.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Kind of misleading title -- Microsofts CEO is worried that not having enough AI will destroy the company, as they'll be made obsolete by other AI companies.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Is the decompiled code guaranteed to be equivalent to the compiled code? While this might be cool it doesn't seem that useful if you can't reason about the correctness of the output. I skimmed the README and didn't manage to figure it out

Discussion between John Ousterhout and Robert Martin ("Uncle Bob") on "A Philosophy of Software Design" and "Clean Code" ( github.com )

This is a discussion between John Ousterhout and Martin, who advocated in "Clean Code" to omit comments and split code in extremely small functions. Ousterhout takes that to town by asking Martin to explain an algorithm which Martin presented in his book on "Clean Code", and algorithm that generates a list of prime numbers. It ...

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Comments can become outdated, but so can variable and function names. "Self-documenting" code often relies on appropriate naming, yet this is also subject to rot as the code develops.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Actually this is trivial to circumvent if you self-host: you can run your own PDS (personal data storage) and just say that you're over 18

Plex or Jellyfin for my Raspberry Pi?

Hi, all. So I want to set up a media server using my Raspberry Pi. It will be used by me and my partner, who is very much tech illiterate. She knows how to use Plex, but I'm tempted by the open nature of Jellyfin. How steep is the learning curve there? Should I just go with Plex and keep it simple? Or is Jellyfin manageable if I ...

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

While jellyfin itself is very simple, you might run in to problems if you want to use it while not on your home network. For this you're either wanna use a VPN (or tailscale) or use something like nginx to give your server a web address, while you get this for free if you use plex.

Giving yourself a public address might be easier for the person trying to access jellyfin, but it it comes with a bunch of security considerations and you probably (definetly) want to do some research on the inns and outs of that. I would recommend tailscale but either way it's gonna be some extra fiddling, unless you already have something like that set up.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

What makes you say that?

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

You can tailor the rust standard library to be more embedded friendly in several way, like if you don't have dynamic memory allocation or a filesystem, you can get the standard library sans those features.

Rust also gives you a very fine grained level of control of memory, I think equivalent to C (maybe there's some gotcha that I'm not aware of but if not equivalent very close).

It really doesn't sound like you know that much about Rust here and are just making things up, you certainly don't need "gigabytes of storage and memory"

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

I think if you do host your own PDS you can just tell it to say that you are age verified, they can only enforce this on the parts hosted by bluesky

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

Got some total war cravings and bough total Warhammer III on a sale. It has a very strong "just one more turn" factor and it's been eating up a good chunk of my free time the past week, but I've finally got it out of my system. Warhammer II still has the best factions, but the mechanical improvements in particular how allies work are really nice. If you own all three games you can play the "immortal empires" campaign including the whole old Warhammer fantasy world and all races. This is an absolutely massive game world, at the start of the game there are 280 factions, although this count decreases quickly

zygo_histo_morpheus , (edited )

I think that linux has a couple of things that might help it grow outside its traditional niche that it hasn't in the past. Proton has been a major step forward in to the gaming scene. A lot of people are very unhappy about windows 11. The EU in particular is also investing in ways to get out from under American techs thumb due to the geopolitical landscape.

I don't have too high expectations personally but who knows.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

I think the case is more that OpenAI made certain design choices not with the goal of it driving people to suicide, but with suicide as a possible and in their eyes acceptable cost?

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    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I do use a media server but I could probably get away with just syncthing to sync my computer and phone, it would probably be easier even. Of course, if you have more than 2tband you want it all at your fingertips then a media server is probably the right call.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Another option if you don't have a family is to use DLNA for streaming to the TV, most TV's have native support for that and you can just set up your computer to work as a DLNA server.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Did not know about bear, that's very cool

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    One thought I've had about AI and programing is that you'll run in to a similar problem. Code is a bit special because it's a language that's understandable by both humans and computers, and when you're programing you're essentially writing for both audiences at once.

    Voice is maybe not as important when writing code (although you still want to keep the coding style consistent) but even so I think that writing code by hand has the advantage of you being able to express your thoughts in a more coherent way than the output of a handful prompts will. The problem isn't just with however powerful the AI model is, but that prompting is a kind of vague and indirect way of interacting with the system and it necessarily introduces another layer between the author and whoever ends up reading it.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I think that AI is the most useful when you're doing something that you're bad at so that makes perfect sense. The drawback is that you probably won't improve as much at writing as if you where struggling with it by hand. Maybe you're fine with that though, it's hard to dedicate the time to get good at everything.

    zygo_histo_morpheus , (edited )

    https://tangled.sh/ is looking like an interesting alternative imo.

    It uses ATProto (the bluesky protocol) and allows you to self host the git part and/or your personal data (e.g. comments that you leave on other repos). It's still very much in development as is the ATProto itself, so it doesn't seem mature enough for serious use yet. ATProto does for example not handle private accounts/posts yet which means that all your tangled repos have to be public.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Ok I understand that you don't like bluesky for whatever reason, but could you actually formulate why so that it's possible to have a discussion instead?

    zygo_histo_morpheus , (edited )

    Making a u32 pointer from two u16's isn't a generic operation because it has to make assumptions about how the pointers work endianess

    Edit: Actually, I'm wrong, didn't think this through properly. See the replies

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Oh my bad I don't know where I got that from lol

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    If you find yourself writing regexes often enough that speeding up that process would increase your productivity by "a lot", then you should get good at writing them yourself which means practicing without an LLM. If its something that you don't do often enough to warrant getting good at then the productivity increase is negligible.

    I think the main benefit here isn't really productivity but developer comfort by saving them from having to step out of their comfort zone.

    This Overly Long Variable Name Could Have Been a Comment | Jonathan's Blog ( jonathan-frere.com )

    Thoughts? It does feel like there's a lot of things you can do in comments that would be impossible or impractical to do in names alone, even outside of using comments as documentation. There's certainly much more information that you can comfortably fit into a comment compared to a name. ...

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I try to write comments whenever what the code isn't obvious on its own. A "never write comments" proponent might argue that you should never write code that isn't obvious on its own, but that doesn't always work in practice

    • Sometimes you have to write cryptic code for performance reasons
    • Sometimes you have to deal with unintuitive edge cases
    • Sometimes you have to work around bugs in 3rd party code
    • Sometimes you are dealing with a problem that is inherently complex or unintuitive, no matter how you put it in to code
    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    One of Zed's focuses is AI integration. Other than that, I suppose if you prefer having a dedicated application with its own UI instead of a terminal based ones.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    One of my most controversial gaming takes is that I like the first witcher game the most of the trilogy. There is a lot of jank and some cringeworthy parts but overall it feels like a much tighter experience than the later games, notwithstanding some clearly undercooked parts. It takes a lot more cues from older rpgs in how it's structured and I suppose I might just have a weak spot for that.

    To be fair, I've never gotten that far in the third witcher so maybe I'd like more it if I played it enough to properly get in to it. I just got kinda bored after a dozen or so hours which is not a problem I had with the first witcher.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    you can just do :r path/to/file directly

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I think that it's fair to want the interviewer to ask more critical questions and in general be more precise with their phrasing but

    repeat that PR talking point

    is a very cynical and uncharitable take on bluesky and decentralization. Cynical takes aren't necessarily wrong but they're not necessarily correct either.

    The AT protocol is by its own account an ongoing project with problems that still need be solved before it is able to provide a social network with all the properties that they're interested in.

    I don't think that it's accurate to say that bluesky is "completely" centralized (it is less centralized than most social media) as much as it's de-facto centralized. One reason for this is that it's prohibitively expensive to self-host relays. This is something that the AT protocol devs have plans for addressing, so it's possible that this de-facto centralization is a temporary stage in the evolution of bluesky and AT proto.

    It is of course possible that they are lying or that they will be unsuccessful despite best intentions but taking for granted that it's just a "PR talking point" is, once again, very cynical in a way that I don't think is completely motivated.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    So first of, the part of my comment that you quoted doesn't make sense because what I'm saying is that bluesky theoretically allows for decentralized relays but it's impractical in practice. Your analogy doesn't really apply to that.

    I do think that it's misleading to call bluesky decentralized today (at least without any caveats). The goal of the project however is to eventually create a more meaningfully decentralized social network and they have tangible plans for moving in that direction so I think it's unfair to dismiss this aspect of bluesky completely.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I agree that the interviewer shouldn't have implied that they are decentralized today! I don't know if bluesky even say that they are decentralized themselves, on their website it says that they're "building an open foundation for the social internet" which is more accurate but maybe they mischaracterize themselves somewhere else.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Yeah I in general think that Graber is very good at giving good answers in interviews!

    Honestly even if bluesky does become enshittyfied, which is a very real possibility, the work they've done on AT proto so far will probably be extremely useful for whoever takes a crack at a more decentralized internet next. There are a lot of clearly smart and passionate people who are given space to research and experiment with different ways of doing things and I think that's both very valuable and interesting

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Zuckerberg himself is probably constantly surrounded by yes men so maybe it won't seem like that much of a difference to him

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    What are the odds that you're actually going to get a bounty out of it? Seems unlikely that an AI would hallucinate an actually correct bug.

    Maybe the people doing this are much more optimistic about how useful LLMs are for this than I am but it's possible that there's some more malicious idea behind it.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I use wezterm. It's more configurable than the windows terminal and also works on linux. It has an appropriately linux-y feel imo.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    They are open to drop some features apparently, but maybe not "90%"

    The developers are taking a “less is more” approach. This means that some features of the original sudo may not be reimplemented if they serve only niche, or more recently considered “outdated” practices.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    tldr is great, sometimes you can't remember the exact syntax for a certain command and just need a quick reminder as well.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Well it's not like everyone who uses Chat GPT is going to become delusional but if you start going down the path Chat GPT is going to make it a lot worse

    I have used Windows all my life, and I have some questions.

    Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it's a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that's apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though ...

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

    It depends a lot on the game, but in my experience not always. Running games straight from steam works really well with a small number of exceptions, but a lot of the sometimes weird tools for patching exe:s and so on that some games use can sometimes be a pain to get running. Not necessarily impossible but yeah this is a reason for why I still keep around my windows installation for dual booting.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    It's another c/c++ competitor along with rust and zig. https://odin-lang.org/

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Don't think it has anything to do with electron. VSCode is just the largest editor that people install extensions for, so it's what makes the most sense to write malware for. If vim was more popular, I'm sure there would be more crypto mining extensions for that (I wonder how many there are? Surely more than zero?)

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Fresh memes!

    My theory is that the primary reason why the fediverse isn't more popular with young people is cultural. For instance, I don't think anyone in generation z would use the term "fresh memes" :)

    But yeah I also think that tumblr has a nostalgia advantage. It represents the internet before it "turned bad", while the fediverse represents a possible future for the internet. Both have different appeals, but I think that nostalgia wins out for a lot of people.

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Yeah I agree, I think looking towards the future is a better idea in general. I'm on lemmy but not tumblr myself

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    I don't know that it's the "algorithms": a lot of people just use their following feed on twitter and although it changed a while back that was the default feed on bluesky for a long time. I think that there is a fairly large portion of bluesky users who mostly just look at following and still don't really like mastodon.

    Imo, a big reason why bluesky has been a more successful twitter competitor than mastodon is cultural: mastodon has been around for years before musk bought twitter, and a big selling point was that it wasn't like twitter, for example that its "less toxic". A large part of mastodons userbase never liked pre-musk twitter that much and will tell you of for acting like you would there. Bluesky on the other hand has a large portion of users who liked pre-musk twitter and are happy to follow pretty similar social norms as they did in pre-musk twitter.

    This is to some extent reflected in the functions of the different sites as well, for example you can't quote retweet on mastodon which iirc is deliberate because qrt dunking is "toxic". Bluesky has quote retweets (although they allow you to untag yourself from a qrt).

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    Why do you think it's a bad idea? Both you and OP are in agreement that you should validate early, which seemed to be what your first comment was about. Is it encoding that the data has been validated in the typesystem that you disagree with?

    zygo_histo_morpheus ,

    This article uses the term "parsing" in a non-standard way - it's not just about transforming text into structured data, it's about transforming more general data in to more specific data. For example, you could have a function that "parses" valid dates into valid shipping dates, which returns an error if the input date is in the past for instance and returns a valid_shipping_date type. This type would likely be identical to a normal date, but it would carry extra semantic meaning and would help you to leverage the type checker to make sure that this check actually gets performed.

    Doing this would arguably be a bit overzealous, maybe it makes more sense to just parse strings into valid dates and merely validate that they also make sense as shipping dates. Still, any validation can be transformed into a "parse" by simply adding extra type-level information to the validation.