I’ve always liked them as a set. I think neither of them on their own are as good as the two of them contrasted against each other.

Your needs are pretty basic? Heh, pretty Visual BASIC!?

VISUAL BASIC FOR APPLICATIONS!?!

No words, it’s the liney version of loss…

Mother fu…

I have friends that daily drive BSD, but I never have. For me it’s because Open Source is already a small field, and Linux solves all the problems I have, while also having the most mind-share, focus, and community. I want it to be FOSS for ethics, which Linux is, but otherwise don’t need anything that BSD offers, so there’s no reason for me to attempt anything more. If there’s even one compatibility problem, it’d be one too many for no benefit.

That having been said, I do donate money every month to one of them, because I like that they exist. So that’s probably weird…

Yeah, the eye flow is all messed up. The third panel, as it is, convinced my brain to switch to anime order to make sense, and then I read the fourth panel backwards and it made no sense.

I get the problem you had, but maybe the layout of something else could have been fixed? Because as-is I think the third panel sabotaged the whole comic…

I basically agree with you, but I’m also a little pedantic, so I’ll also say that if the standard format isn’t the format MSOffice outputs, then the standard format isn’t the format everyone is using, they’re using a similar but incompatibly different format. And so if there’s an opportunity to pick what the standard must be going forwards, and the actual true OOXML spec has effectively zero users, and what MSOffice outputs isn’t an open standard, then you might as well pick ODF which has more than zero users and is standardized.

But again, this is moot if the thing MSOffice outputs is actually actually OOXML now.

Their point about OOXML has traditionally been that the format that Microsoft Office itself produces has never once matched the standardized standard they ratified. So Microsoft used it to check a box on some requirements sheet and muddy the waters (like this), but anyone actually following the standard would not have achieved actual cross compatibility with the massive gorilla in the space. But because it’s “Microsoft’s format” any issues would have felt like bugs in LibreOffice rather than bugs in Microsoft Office. In contrast the standardized ODF actually matches the ODF you find in practice.

That all having been said, I stopped paying attention to that whole scene a while ago, so I don’t know what the current situation is, or if that still applies. It’s possible later version of MSOffice actually moved to the standard version at some point, or that the standard was updated to match what MSOffice actually reads and writes. Possible, but I just don’t know.

Y’all are killing it! Good work.

Similar to others here, but slightly different: start with what you’re most excited about. There’ll be some shitty parts where you’re confused and frustrated, and if you feel like you’re just doing something you’re “supposed to do”, it can feel like a job for no pay. Pick something you have an inner thrill for, and maybe that fire can carry you through the dark.

The Flying V!

Yes

Melania face, big dick grace, taking your camera home to your place

For sure. Or put a more direct way, someone needs to be making drinks at Starbucks when the rich-enough-to-survive go there, someone needs to be boiling noodles and chopping onions all day for when they want pasta at a restaurant, someone needs to stand in the sun next to hot asphalt and lay it so they can drive over it.

And if it’s not the too-poor-to-live, it’s the next wrung down.

Dogpiled

Yeah, like other people covered, it’s unfortunate but also very important. It’s easy to tie “visible wifi networks” to “surprisingly precise location on globe” in many places, so the permission is named for the worst case scenario. Yes, the app might just be looking for a wifi, but it also could use that same information to locate you, so it’s the location permission. Sensible.

If they wanted to support just this one feature without requiring a location permission, they could maybe have an API that is “are you currently connected to this opaque token” API where the app can ask “am I connected” and is just told “yes” or “no”. That’s probably safe enough. And then I could register the app with my wifi without the app even knowing what my Wifi is, it just gets a unique but random string.

The same is true of bluetooth. If I can list nearby bluetooth, I can see that speaker and this TV and guess location. But there could be an API that hides that, there just isn’t currently

Yeah, I think it’s just the way the blog post was written. When I was reading it I saw the first few paragraphs was basically “here’s how to do Cron with it”, and then everything after that was “here’s a bunch of other features it has that cron doesn’t and how to use those”

I don’t think that’s the wrong way to write this kind of article, but I could see it feeling overwhelming on a skim, because it may feel like you need to read the whole thing in order to get anything working. But actually only the start was necessary, and the rest was tasty feature pitch.

I’ve encountered it very little, but when I encounter it it’s because I try to do something and it doesn’t work. So I check the permissions with ls -l, and it all seems reasonable. Huh, this should work. Try again, nope. Hmm. 20 minutes of trying random variations, strange results. Oh fuck, is this SELinux? Shit. Where do those configs exist again? How do I configure that? Google “SELinux cheat sheet” hmmm, I don’t have enough context to use that, Google “SELinux getting started”. Read tutorial, try to skim just enough to figure out what’s going wrong for me.

So I don’t hate it, I just haven’t ever had a use for it, but it has surprised me in a bad way before and cost me a lot of time and confusion, but I’ve never spent the time getting familiar because I’ve never had a use for it. And it comes up rarely enough I never remember anything about it by the time it bites me. I can’t even recall now what I was trying to do the last time I bumped into it.

For an honest answer, from an Open Source perspective, it’s mostly auth, profiles, and discoverability.

Presuming I have a GitHub account, when I encounter a library or tool or something that’s hosted on GitHub that means I can fork it, make issues, comment on issues, make pull requests from my fork to upstream tied to issues, and generally have seamless interaction with any and all software on GitHub.

Or, if I have my account added to a project, then I can also merge PRs and push to master and be a maintainer of that software without any friction.

When I see that software is hosted on KDE’s thing it’s like “Ugh”. I have to login to that, and create a profile for that, and then figure out how tickets work there, and how do I contribute to that. It’s enough to just not, most of the time. And maybe I do that for kdenlive. Then I have a bug for Gimp. Okay, what the heck do they use? Is that another login? How do I contribute over there? Is registration even open? Okay guix, oh boy a mailing list. Do I want to subscribe to a dev mailing list just to submit a 2 line patch? I think I’ll just not… I’m sure someone else will fix it eventually…

So besides all that, some people like their GitHub profile, and like that people can see all the things they’ve contributed to from one spot. That’s why it’s often linked on resumes, but beyond that there’s also a kind of cultural cachet to having a diverse and positive profile, should someone look. If someone is a maintainer of a repo with a lot of stars, that might tell you they’re “important” even if you don’t know why. Because maybe you’re a JS programmer, but this person seems to be big in the Java community, because they seem to maintain a few high profile java libraries.

And then lastly, it’s sometimes useful as a shortcut in searching. “Source code” is kind of a useless term for searching, so if I search “ruby Ledger file library” I’m more likely to get some docs or a rubygems page, but if I search “ruby Ledger file GitHub” I’m probably going to get what I actually want, which is a readme and a git uri I can clone and play around with. Or a web view of the source I can search through to debug something without cloning. At least assuming that is what I want, it depends on what my goals are, but it’s useful often enough that I do it sometimes as a way of jumping to the source part.

I’m typically anti-centralization, and anti-microsoft, and if we all move away from GitHub I’m sure I’ll live, but this is why I like it despite its problems. And sometimes I want a webview of file contents, with search, without cloning, so sue me 😛

You guys are getting paid?

I don’t know the original author’s opinions on AI, but I think it’s still fair to say that it was clearly Copilot’s goal to steal all the code and be good, and they had all the code, and so ethics aside one would expect them to have succeeded with flying colour at whatever their goals were, even if those were bad goals.

But they failed instead, which is impressive.