Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)N

namingthingsiseasy

@ namingthingsiseasy @programming.dev

Posts
6
Comments
146
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store

    Jump

  • That's fair, but to me, the cost of a new device isn't how much I pay for it - it's the time I invest in using it and maintaining it, as well as how much I rely on it. The biggest reason that I think open hardware and software is important is not just the cost, but the reliability - the fact that it will still be working tomorrow. That is worth a lot more than money to me!

  • Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store

    Jump

  • The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.

    You're probably right in a legal sense, but I think that's a bit stupid. It's very difficult to draw a line that delineates between when a company has the ability to exclude competitors or not. It requires a lot of costly legal battles and a length appeal process to prove, and nobody will create that court case without significant financial means to be able to prove all of it. And if the court rules against you, all of that time, money and effort achieved nothing and just leaves you with a heavily damaged reputation.

    From a practical perspective, it sounds like a very weak legal framework.

  • Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store

    Jump

  • Exactly. All these devices can just be bricked the moment some corporation decides they're not worth supporting anymore. Never buy a device that is so heavily dependent on running on another company's services.

  • Deleted

    'It's obvious that users are frustrated': consumer rights group accuses Microsoft of not providing a 'viable solution' for Windows 10 users who can't upgrade to Windows 11

    Jump

  • Yeah! At this point, Windows is even worse than Minix!

  • Microsoft pushes staff to use internal AI tools more, and may consider this in reviews. 'Using AI is no longer optional.'

    Jump

  • Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I'm practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.

  • Using Signal groups for activism

    Jump

  • Really? That's interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn't know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?

    And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?

  • Using Signal groups for activism

    Jump

  • But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.

  • Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok

    Jump

  • Wikipedia is quite resilient - you can even put it on a USB drive. As long as you have a free operating system, there will always be ways to access it.

  • Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

    Jump

  • Agreed. People just think the first tool that they learned is the easiest to use. I've been a longtime Gimp user and find it pretty easy to do what I want.* The few times someone asked me to do something in Photoshop, I was pretty helpless. Of course, I'm a pretty basic user - I wouldn't dispute that Photoshop is more powerful, but which one is easier to use is very subjective and the vast majority of the time, it just boils down to which one you use more often.

    I've seen the same with people who grew up on Libreoffice and then started smashing their computer when they were asked to use MSOffice.

  • Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

    Jump

  • To add to subignition's point, there is a value in learning useful software. More complicated software means that there is a learning curve - so while you are less productive while learning how to use it, once you gain more experience, you ultimately become more productive. On the other hand, if you want the software to be useful to everyone regardless of his level of experience, you ultimately have to eliminate more complex functionality that makes the software more useful.

    Software is increasingly being distilled down to more and more basic elements, and ultimately, I think that means that people are able to get less done with them these days. This is just my opinion, but in general I have seen computer literacy dropping and people's productivity likewise decreasing, at least from what I've observed from the 1990s up until today. Especially at work, the Linux users that I see are much more knowledgeable and productive than Apple users.

  • Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates Meet for the First Time Ever

    Jump

  • But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

    Debatable, in my opinion. There were lots of other companies trying to build personal computers back in those times (IBM being the most prominent). If Microsoft had never existed (or gone about things in a different way), things would have been different, no doubt, but they would still be very important and popular devices. The business-use aspect alone had a great draw and from there, I suspect that adoption at homes, schools, etc. would still follow in a very strong way.

  • Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok

    Jump

  • Whatever. The next generation will have to learn to trust whether the material is true or not by using sources like Wikipedia or books by well-regarded authors.

    The other thing that he doesn't understand (and most "AI" advocates don't either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They're just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context. Anyone trying to address the facts and information produced by these models is completely missing the point.

  • [ On | No ] syntactic support for error handling

    Jump

  • The lesson learned (in my opinion) is that if you're going to design a language where errors need to be handled explicitly, you need to design the language from the ground up to support monadic error handling syntax. At this point, it seems too late to add it to Golang. What a shame - it could have been so much better of a language without this flaw.

  • What are the modern design trends you hate most?

    Jump

  • I've seen even worse! Sticky headers with sticky sidebars on both sides. Only about 10-15% of the viewport was left for content. And this is for documentation, so you can only read about 100-200 words at once.

    Why even bother having a webpage at that point. Just make the whole thing a non-interactive .png file.

  • What are the modern design trends you hate most?

    Jump

  • Sticky headers. Unbearably distracting.

    Also, wasted space and a lack of information density.

  • Modern C++ — RAII

    Jump

  • 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.

  • What's your favorite IDE right now?

    Jump

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

  • Python needs an actual default function

    Jump

  • 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().

  • Python needs an actual default function

    Jump

  • 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.