Followup question.

“As opposed to what?”

If everyone is “insane”, what would a “not insane” person look like if one hypothetically did exist?

All but you?

hack into any mobile phone

(Emphasas mine.)

Seems a bit hyperbolic.

Yeah, I know about the binary repositories. I’m running Gentoo as well (on one box with the intention to expand to other machines), but haven’t had occasion to use the official binary repositories yet.

I imagine I’d probably only ever use them if I wanted to install something temporarily. Install LibreOffice, view a file, uninstall. Just seems weird to have one package compiled with different USE flags than the whole rest of the system.

And, the compiler optimizations definitely aren’t why I use Gentoo. Probably more than anything, I’m sick of SystemD. And Gentoo feels a whole lot more “under my control” than Arch. (Arch is great for the most part, don’t get me wrong. I just like what Gentoo has to offer.)

I’m not RanzigFettreduziert, and I don’t know much about PopOS, but…

• Rolling release is awesome.
• Amazing documentation.
• Helpful user base. (The forums are great.)
• Does pretty much nothing that you don’t specifically tell it to. (Like, very little is installed without your express say-so, for instance.)
• Customizeable as fuck.
• Doesn’t making things harder by trying to hide the “hard parts” from you.
• Doesn’t take days to install Libreoffice like Gentoo.
• AUR is great for software that isn’t available in the official repos. (Always review the pkgbuild, but practically everything is there.)
• Very up-to-date (even cutting-edge) on everything.
• And surprisingly stable given how cutting edge it is. (That said, I’ve never run a keyword-unmasked system.)
• Definitely will teach you a lot.
• Very actively developed.

Downsides:

• Learning curve. (Definitely not as bad as, say, Gentoo, though.)
• You’d definitely have to get really comfortable with the command line. (Arguably as much a good thing as it is a downside.)
• The biggest exception to the “customizeable as fuck” bit is that you’re stuck with SystemD, which is practically a whole OS. (And Artix (Arch but with a choice of init systems) is… kinda janky last I tried it.)
• Support for non-x86 (like ARM, for instance) is abysmal.

It’s kindof the second-most hardcore OS out there after Gentoo. (Nobody actually uses LFS as a daily driver, so I’m not counting that for this.) It’s the sort of OS that will teach you a lot and let you get down in the guts. But also avoids a lot of the downsides of Gentoo by remaining a binary OS.

Yes! This so much.

I am entirely convinced that one of the more underserved niches in software is domain-specific languages for doing traditionally-mousey/clicky/GUI things. I’m so convinced of that that I’ve written just such a DSL and am actively working on a second one.

About the only really good examples of that that I know of are OpenSCAD and Graphviz. (And I guess the one I wrote.) I’ve love to know about more. (And, no, libraries that make GUI-sort-of use cases easier in some general purpose language don’t count. There’s really something about having syntax/builtins/standard library custom made specifically for the use case that I’m quite convinced has major benefits to overall usability.)

About OpenSCAD specifically, I also have some nit-picks about the language. There are cases where I’ve written code in other languages that outputs OpenSCAD code specifically to get around some limitations. (There’s one project I’m working on and haven’t Open Sourced yet that just begs so hard for maps/dicts/string-keyed-composite-types. And the ability to use modules as values. (Like, making it more of a “functional” language… or rather a “moduleal” language.)) But like you, none of that detracts enough to make me not love OpenSCAD.

People are spending all this time trying to get good at prompting and feeling bad because they’re failing.

This whole thing is bullshit.

So if you’re a developer feeling pressured to adopt these tools — by your manager, your peers, or the general industry hysteria — trust your gut. If these tools feel clunky, if they’re slowing you down, if you’re confused how other people can be so productive, you’re not broken. The data backs up what you’re experiencing. You’re not falling behind by sticking with what you know works.

AI is not the first technology to do this to people. I’ve been a software engineer for nearing 20 years now, and I’ve seen this happen with other technologies. People convinced it’s making them super productive, others not getting the same gains and internalizing it, thinking they’re to blame rather than the software. The Java ecosystem has been full of shitty technologies like that for most of the time Java has existed. Spring is probably one of the most harmful examples.

Nikita is the only one in our company that refuses to use any coding model for anything. And he keeps being the most productive person in the company.

Does “coding model” here mean an LLM for writing code? (Like Claude or whatever?)

If so, that makes the above quote really funny. The only person in the company who doesn’t use an LLM is the most productive person in the company? Gee fuckin’ wizz, I wonder why the fuck that would be.

Also, if my coworkers praised my skill in software engineering by comparing me to an LLM, I’d be pissed.

What ever it is you’re smoking, stop smoking it.

Good stuff. If I’m being honest, I’ve kindof felt a bit “out of the loop” on general “news” since quitting Red…acted. I’m glad to see more news here, and Democracy Now! is a fantastic news source.

Not to say I only ever come to Lemmy for news. I do visit news sites sometimes, and Democracy Now! is one of my most preferred sources. Still, though, it’ll be good for DN articles to show up in my Lemmy feed.

Yes, code is debt. This is a good way to think about things.

But… what does AI have to do with anything?

To be honest, when I hear news of a language I’ve never heard of before, my reaction is usually “oh god, another language”. And to be fair, that is still largely how I feel about V. (There’s close to zero chance it’s going to gain widespread adoption, especially with being so similar to Go as it is. And I’m probably not going to start writing “real world” stuff in a language that’s going to die without ever receiving enough usage that libraries and such are going to be widely available for most use cases I can think of.)

Buuuuuuut… also, being honest, I write a fair amount of Go because it like it. V is apparently very similar to Go, but also has some differences that mostly feel… pretty fuckin’ cool, actually. The one that made me salivate most is definitely “no null”.

I will say a few feel gross to me. Specifically string interpolation, primitive types having methods, enums, and maybe centralized package manager. Oh, and I don’t like that there are compiler flags as implied by GC is optional, globals can be enabled for low-level applications like kernels, and development/debugging mode. (Compiler flags are for things like what architecture to cross-compile to and how much optimization to do and such. Not for enabling/disabling specific features in the language or changing behavior. Like, compiler flags shouldn’t change whether a given program compiles or how a program behaves.) And it’d be nice if there was no runtime at all.

But a lot of what is listed there is pretty frickin’ cool too. Sum types, immutability by default, only one declaration style, and of course no null as I mentioned earlier are very good things, IMO. Those definitely make the language more appealing even than Go.

Beyond that, given that the V folks seem very specifically to be trying to appeal to Go fans, I’m thinking there might be benefit if there was some nice way of interoperating with Go. (Or if there is such a way, it’d be nice if it was more prominently featured in the documentation.)

(One final footnote. I said when I hear about a new language, I groan. That doesn’t apply to domain-specific languages for making things other than programs unless they’re in a niche that’s already occupied by something that’s already good and popular. OpenSCAD and Graphviz, for instance, are awesome things and we need more things like that for making stuff. Especially stuff that can’t otherwise reasonably be made without a GUI.)

By George, I think OP’s got it.

“A friend”, huh?

I’ll let you him know when I figure it out.

Fuck those JSTOR assholes.

For even more fuckup, visit this on a Raspberry Pi and get to see it in all its 2fps glory.

Just my guess here, but…

The desktop/laptop sort of form factor is associated in people’s minds with unlocked bootloaders. People expect to be able to install Linux on them if they want to. Tablets, game systems, and other sorts of consumer electronics, not so much. I’m thinking Microsoft will do what it can to push hardware manufacturers and the software industry as a whole more in the direction of the kinds of devices that consumers already expect to be locked down like tablets or game systems that are “streaming” game systems. And that way, the bootloader will prevent folks from switching to Linux.

So… is this a thing you’re thinking shouldn’t be the case?

If we were to agree this was a bad power for admins to have, then how, from a technical point of view, would we prevent admins from doing so? There’s no real way to prevent an instance admin from, for instance, running a fork of Lemmy that has as a feature, for instance, the ability to prevent a local user from posting on remote instances’ communities or a specific remote instance’s community (even if the official upstream Lemmy repo developers/maintainers decided to remove that feature).

Theoretically, given that Lemmy is licensed under the AGPL, one could legally demand the source code of any specific Lemmy instance and from that source code obtain proof that it was a fork and what differences might be on that instance relative to the upstream official Lemmy repo.

I guess if I had to come up with another way to prevent a fork from preventing users from posting on remote instances’ communities, I might suppose maybe one option would be for Lemmy officially to support logging into your instance 1 account from instance 2’s domain. (Might require some OAuth fanciness to allow that without potentially opening up the user to their account being accessed by instance 2 if instance 2 happened to be maliciuos.) And if you did that, you’d be subject to instance 2’s rules for being able or not able to post to a given community on instance 2 or instance 3 or whatever. That would undermine instance 1’s ability to prevent you from posting on instance 2 or instance 3 or whatever.

Or maybe I’m misunderstanding you and you’re not advocating for anything in particular. Just sharing information.

What’s more likely? ChatGPT finally made some breakthrough that makes LLMs actually useful for at least one single solitary use case, or Bubeck is lying?

The second one. Emphatically the second one.

So, the one I used appears to have been removed from Thingiverse in the meantime, but I’m pretty sure it was V1 of this (which has been remixed a couple of times by someone else and is up to V3). It is a very tight fit, though. (Like maybe the original designer left zero tolerance.) If I had it to do again, I’d go for a different one, but I’d guess probably V2 and V3 have resolved the way-too-tight fit issue.

I made a couple of things myself for mounting my Joycon charger on the wall. (Definitely improvements that could be made to the wall mount one. Conical holes for the screw holes for one. But it does the job.)