Ever on the hunt for knowledge and always willing to share my catch.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 6th, 2021

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  • Azure@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy is IRC still used?
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    3 years ago

    Signal became a nonstarter for me when it turned out the person running the project is actively hostile to third party clients and bullied one out of existence.

    That and, at least historically, it was pretty heavily wedded to mobile phones in a way that disqualifies it for anything I want to have long conversations with.


  • Because there are a multitude of clients that work with it. it’s open. It’s not a walled garden. You aren’t stuck in yet another horrid browser app.

    Also for some purposes the lack of history can be an advantage. For a channel that’s real-time social interaction, people coming and going and only having access to the things that happened when they were there can be a positive.


  • Azure@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlIs populism an ideology?
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    3 years ago

    It’s more a rhetorical device.

    It invokes a Manichean world of the Good People vs. the Eeeeeeeeeeeevil Elites.

    But it’s effectively content-free. The People and The Elites are just convenient containers for the speaker to pour the things they support and oppose into, and who gets to be ‘the people’ depends on who they’re trying to attract.









  • The language I use most is C++, since it’s what I use in my day job.

    It’s okay. I write very functional C++ and serve as one of the local language lawyers.

    In my private life I write mostly Rust and Haskell.

    Being so intimately familiar with C++ did a lot to help me understand why Rust is the way it is. (The failures of the standard Regex library, and why C++ is so slow to include networking, for example, make me understand why Rust keeps such a minimal library and relies on the Cargo ecosystem for what might otherwise be considered essential functionality.)


  • Debian! Stable on the server (usually)

    Sid on the personal machines.

    I was running Arch for a while, but I got put off by three things bout it:

    1. It’s just not put together as well. Even under Sid I was way less likely to have a package up and break because it depended on the wrong version of something. Usually when it happened under Arch it was only AUR stuff, but not always.

    2. I really despise the way Arch rips the documentation out of packages. Debian gives me the best of both worlds, I can install -doc packages if I want them and not if I don’t.

    3. Arch’s approach to Haskell is /infamously bad/ if you’re actually interested in doing any kind of Haskell development, to the point where they recommend you just not install it and use ghcup.






  • Have you thought of a Magna-Doodle?

    • They’re easy to erase (just pull the lever)
    • About page size (which is good if you want something you can lug around or work with on a desk, but not if you want more than one page of space)
    • They last pretty much forever if you don’t bang them around, and even if you bang them around they still do pretty well.

    Downsides:

    • Low resolution
    • Erasing one spot is not well supported


  • From The DWM page

    Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though.

    I don’t care for this. Configuration through editing the source code is an engineering decision. I think it’s a bit silly, but reasonable people can disagree.

    I’m very much of the opinion that when you stop newbing, you start dying, though, so the air of contempt for newbies really turns me off. There also seems to be a ‘simplicity scold’ tendency where any program that does something they personally don’t find useful is bloated, even if there are lots of use cases where it makes perfect sense. (And in talking to some suckless fans ‘bloat’ seems to include things like localization, which also rubs me the wrong way.)

    Some of their stuff is okay as software.