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.

A Single Extraordinary Gentleman

The Dirty Individual

Scott Pilgrim vs Himself

~(which actually is kinda accurate)~

The Only Element

This isn’t shit, you’re shit!

~Muhfuckin shitpost my ass…~

I know it’s kinda off topic, but what I find even weirder are bands that are “one hit wonders” in one country, but have like 10 hits and a long career in another country.

They’ll have a whole wikipedia article of awards they’ve won you’ve never heard of, and tours they went on, and you’re like “they wrote more than one song!?”

Maybe I’m expecting too much from a shitpost… or maybe it’s an accent thing, but for me “cope-in-hay-again” doesn’t sound a lot like how I say Copenhagen…

It’s nice of this poster to ignore the $181m spent on “other projects” and conclude this is some kind of scam. If we include the Linux Kernel with the other projects part, that’s about 67%, or two thirds, of their expenses are paying for various and assorted open source projects. Among them the kernel. So if you’re a “cash and cash alone” person, then 2/3rds of your money is still going as cash to software projects.

And if we include things like community tooling and project services, which may help a project in ways beyond just cash that becomes about 78% in total, or over three quarters.

That’s pretty good, I think, but to each their own.

Yours is, I think, the only account I check in on by name on this platform. I’ll sometimes be like “what’s that wild girlie cookin’ today”!

So, like, don’t keep posting just for me if it’s not fun anymore, but block the haters and keep cruisin’!

Right, but what I’m saying is that git doesn’t store authorship information or line-by-line history, no matter how it’s done. Figuring out which line came from where is an algorithm the git blame command does every time you request it, and that algorithm can give different results depending on which options you give the blame command. And so what you’ve found here is a collection of commits that produces a situation the default blame algorithm can follow, without any optional flags, which is neat! Maybe not great for git history, but neat!

Interesting. Yeah, sounds like what git blame -C is for, so I’ve never made copies when splitting files, I’ve just moved lines between files naively. But I guess if one’s tools are limited and doesn’t have the ability to -C, then I guess I could respect the hack that is that solution?

I mean, I’m 99% sure git doesn’t store blame or authorship info in the pack files, even as a convenience cache, and just guesses by traversing the patch log with heuristics live when you run blame anyway, so the history mostly doesn’t matter there, but the way you’ve done it does seem to have tricked the heuristics into doing what you want without relying on an option, so that’s neat! It’s an interesting hack, and I like interesting hacks 😛

By the way, if there are down votes, they’re not from me!

I don’t know about this dude, but also not all monks are, like, born into a monetary and raised in it. So probably he played videogames when he was younger, and argued as an adult that they’re not that bad.

Yeah, I’m with you. I mean, git isn’t magic. You “can” squash anything, including a merge commit, by just being at the end result, running git reset <commit you want to be squashed off of> and then running a manual git add and commit there. That’s basically all a squash is.

But what you’ll be left with us a single commit that contains all of the code from the branch you’re squashing and also all the code pulled in from every branch you merged, all written as though it all came from this one commit. And maybe that’s what you want? But it feels like also maybe it’s not?

Right… for sure… but then if you don’t want to squash, then it doesn’t matter you can’t squash a merge commit.