• 24 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
    But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

    In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.


  • Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.

    This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.


  • Oh man, a few years ago, we had a military dude as conductor in our wind band. And I was always one of his favorites, I’m guessing because I have broad shoulders and a deep voice – prime military recruit material.

    …except that I’m vegan. So, one day he sits next to me during lunch and asks me why I’m vegan. I do the usual dance of avoiding the topic, but he does not want to let it go. So, I tell him that I think killing animals is wrong. He walked out of that conversation like a hurt gazelle.

    Like, fuck me, dude, if you’re gonna do the whole military tough guy spiel, but cannot take a kid disagreeing with you, then maybe you’re not as tough after all.


  • That argument annoys me so much. Each vegetable does cover all amino acids, they just don’t have them in the exact relations that our body needs. But if a vegetable has only 50% of one amino acid compared to the distribution that our body needs, then you can abso-fucking-lutely just eat double of that vegetable. Or as you say mix-and-match.

    A typical Western diet includes far more protein than the body needs for maintaining itself either way.


  • Ah yeah, there’s various technologies that I don’t mention too loudly. For example, all things considered, I’m probably an above-average Python dev, but I never enjoyed writing it, so when I get asked about it, I always answer that I’m not too confident with it.

    Which, in my defense, isn’t even really a lie. My specialty is large-scale projects, which is something where Python with its loose typing just does not give you confidence…




  • Yeah, I agree that there could probably be a way to “close” Activities, which doesn’t do the session management, so explicitly just throws the windows onto another Activity (or maybe prompts you when there’s still windows on that Activity), without having to outright delete that Activity.

    Deleting an Activity is relatively disruptive, since you may have files linked to it or nicely setup wallpapers and such. And there are a number of places where Activities show up, where it can be annoying to have Activities showing up that you’re not currently using.

    I can imagine them being open to that suggestion, if you articulate it well.
    From what I saw, they did make a lot of changes to remove the start/stop functionality, but most of it was session handling code. So, it might not be too additional much trouble to add a way to close Activities instead.

    As a wise Nate Graham once said: The most reliable way to find out whether people use a feature (and how they use it) is to remove it. The second-most reliable way is to announce its removal.
    Well, you did miss the announcement, so it probably felt a bit rude to you, but yeah, you should still consider this the start of a conversation. They’re not hellbent on removing this feature.



  • The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

    The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

    I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…








  • To me, a big part of it is that I’m tired of commodity art. I don’t care about your pretty pixel soup. I’ve seen other pixel soups before that were similarly pretty.

    And I’ve been tired for many years, long before every middle-manager under the sun could cook up their own pretty pixel soup.
    Back then, it was humans trying to make a living off of their passion and then settling for commodity art to make ends meet. I was cheering them on, because they were passionate humans.

    Now that generative AI has destroyed that branch of humanity, there’s no one to cheer on anymore.
    Even if generative AI never existed in the first place, I’d like to see commodity art being relegated to the sidelines and expressive art coming into the limelight instead.

    Tell me a story with your art. About your struggles or a brainfart you had, or really anything. This comic is great, for example. There’s emotions there and I can see the human through the art. I would’ve chosen a very different illustration for whatever, for example, which tells me a lot about the artist, but also about myself.
    I have never had that kind of introspection with pretty pixel soups.