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Cake day: June 10th, 2024

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  • Rust is fundamentally more limiting than C, even with unsafe. It is often faster if you write naive code (because the Rust compiler can optimize more aggressively due to those same limitations), but an experienced developer with a lot of time for optimization will probably be able to squeeze more performance out of C than they would out of Rust - as you can see in this example. Rust is still better because those limitations all but guarantee that the resulting code will be safer, and the performance differences would be negligible all things considered.








  • For off-road and hiking: (properly customized) OsmAnd is the best app in existence, hands down. My setup shows me all the information there is: surface type, road quality, required road clearance for tracks; surface, incline, difficulty, obstacles for trails; surface, vegetation, elevation, steepness for completely off-road/off-path sections; all the amenities that are there (water sources, picnic tables, random gas stations in the middle of nowhere); easily switchable and overlayed layers to look at aerial imagery if something is unclear on the vector map; and there is a 3D map to help visualize the terrain, which works both with vector maps from OSM, aerial imagery, and the combination of both (which has saved my ass on a couple occasions). All of this can be fully offline (including pre-downloading aerial imagery) which is indispensable when you’re in the middle of nowhere.

    I avoid driving in cities at all costs (out of principle, shout out https://lemmy.ml/c/fuck_cars, but also practicality). When I really have to, I use OsmAnd. It’s perhaps not ideal (way too much information density even if you disable most things) but I’m using it when I get there anyway so why switch.

    For walking in cities: OsmAnd is ok. I have a profile which disables most details and makes the map readable.

    For cycling: OsmAnd is ok, but for some reason routing always takes ages, and I’ve never figured out why. If I need to take a longer trip I just use CoMaps - it gives slightly worse directions but finds the way nearly instantly.

    For city transit: I mostly know the routes in my city already, but when I’m in an unfamiliar part of town I use the city’s transit app. It’s OSM-based, doesn’t require google play services or anything like that, provides great routing and instructions and live position updates. Sadly OsmAnd is not a good fit for this purpose: it takes forever to load the routes, and the coverage on OSM is not good enough to be 100% reliable.

    For inter-city transit: sadly it’s not too good here, and it’s very badly mapped; I tend to give up and resort to rome2rio. I can usually find a phone number of the bus driver to call and figure out the current schedule.

    For finding businesses I would not expect much… there seems to be no good answer that isn’t Yelp or Google Maps, and of course that kinda goes by the nature of crowd sourced reviews and information.

    This is where you can actually contribute yourself. Adding businesses to OSM is trivial with something like StreetComplete or EveryDoor. The OSM community is strong where I live so I can find almost any business I would want to visit.


  • My relationship with antinatalism is very complicated.

    First off, I personally will not be procreating, for multiple reasons.

    Chief among those is the fact that I live in an ever worsening capitalist, patriarchal, xenophobic hellscape; even socialist countries are a long long way away from anything resembling communism, still require a lot of labor from their citizens in exchange for basic necessities (with good reasons), and patriarchy very much persists there. I have hope that we as a species can overcome this eventually, just as we mostly overcame slavery and achieved some semblance of emancipation for many oppressed minorities.

    Another, more permanent reason: despite my relative privileges, my own experience of life has been very mixed, and I perceive there to be more suffering than happiness. Suffering is just a way for our body to push our brain to do something the body needs to survive; human beings have a lot of needs to be met, and as long as there are at least a couple that are not you will suffer (not accounting for things like drugs or other extreme dopamine hits which come with their own set of issues). Another big issue is how our bodies normalize the level of suffering to their environment; this is good because it allows us to get by with very little without going insane, but on the flipside even if you have all the basic needs met, the body is always demanding more via suffering. You can observe this by looking at rich people: even though their needs are met with seeming abundance, they crave to experience more and different pleasures, and suffer in the process of trying to achieve them. While frivolous, I think the suffering they experience is still real and similar to that of our own. I don’t feel any compassion for them (after all, for most of them their wealth was stolen from less fortunate), but it’s a good example.

    As such, I personally don’t want to bring a new being into this world, mostly to suffer their way through life.

    However, I also know for sure that different people experience life differently. I know that people with much worse material conditions than mine perceive themselves (and thus their life) to be overall happy, despite there being plenty of suffering too. I don’t know whether it’s a genetic or learnt trait of their psychology; in any case, I think those people are more likely to produce offspring who experience a happy life, and wish them the best in doing so. My hope is that they bring up their kids in the right way - both so that they are happy, and also able to eventually overcome all the issues in the third paragraph.






  • That’s not really related to the idea of superdeterminism. Superdeterminism literally just posits that the choice on which experiments are to be performed is determined by the same universe and its rules as the outcome of those experiments. The universe still has an initial state and a set of laws it obeys, it just does so deterministically.



  • I don’t know if it’s of any solace, Linux used to be a much more… ahem… “involved” experience a decade or two ago. This was more-or-less the norm:

    xkcd

    I can’t really say what the newcomer experience is nowadays, but I can say for sure that even in the worst-case (as it was in the times when I started using it), after a couple months of furious issue-fixing and trying new things, you will eventually settle on a setup that works for you. Some people actually get addicted to all the problem-solving and start looking for more issues to fix; some start distrohopping to find a “more perfect setup”, getting their fix of issue-fixing in the process. If you’re not one of them, congrats, at that point you can (mostly) just continue using it, until you need to update your hardware, then process may or may not be repeated depending on your luck. If you really hate fixing issues twice, you can look in the direction of declarative distros like NixOS or Guix, but I will warn you that the two-three months of furious hacking is still very much a thing here, but after that you’re set more or less for life.


  • balsoft@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlIntroduction to Nix & NixOS
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    29 days ago

    NIX IS FOR REPRODUCIBLE BUILDS. That’s fucking it, seriously. It’s literally on their website.

    This post is specifically about NixOS and friends, though.

    IT’S A HORRIFIC EXPERIENCE FOR NEW USERS TRYING TO RUN A DESKTOP. Steer clear.

    There are thousands of users who run NixOS on their desktop, and thousands more users of home-manager (or nix-darwin) on macOS. If you are ready to put in the time and learn how it works, it’s wonderful - your entire distribution, the thing through which you interact with computers, becomes just another project in your ~/projects, rather than something you have to manually configure. You can’t forget “how to configure $X”, because it is all recorded in one place and done automatically when you get a new machine or update or whatever. It’s GNU Stow on steroids, for your entire system.

    There are a lot of downsides for sure as well (mostly the learning curve, and having to fix the buggy bullshit in some software which only runs well in FHS), but if you are a software developer (or adjacent) and like Linux, NixOS is still awesome.


  • This is clearly not “a russian wondering what’s wrong”, this is “a russian living in russia who doesn’t want to die in prison”. This would be a fair criticism if there wasn’t a law criminalizing pacifism together with many laws making it easy to deanonymize internet users.

    Silence does not fix things.

    Neither does grandstanding on Lemmy. It especially wouldn’t fix anything if a person in Russia trying to build international relations would go to prison for it.


  • This is about as useful as suggesting to an average USian/brit/german that they violently overthrow their oppressive governments and install socialism. The punishment for trying (at least in UK/germany) is about the same as it would be for a russian wearing an anti-war T-shirt, the benefits for the humanity would be greater than they would be for overthrowing Putin’s dictatorship, and yet I don’t see people yapping about it any time someone from those countries posts an open-source project.