Recent submissions

Comment · 6 months ago
Don't take it personally OP, but taskbar-as-a-service is objectively one of the funniest things I have ever seen posted on this site.
Comment · 6 months ago
The major data centers being built for AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing, and they're being built at a pace that the US energy grid simply cannot accommodate in the short term... or quite possibly even the long term, considering the US's extreme aversion to expanding nuclear power.

Also, you can call it Luddism if you want, but a car factory is going to bring a lot more net benefit to the average person than an AI data center. Motorized transportation is essential to modern civilization, fancy chat-bots are not.

Comment · 1 year ago
No, we have convenient online services in spite of the endless security theater that permeates consumer tech. All it's done is gradually increase maintenance burden and technical complexity until useful features are slowly stripped out to create a more "streamlined" experience. The mobile app for my credit union has become so shitty that I'm not even sure if losing access to it is a deal-breaker for rooting my phone - I already prefer to do my online banking and shopping on my laptop.

There is no "just works" technical solution for a problem caused mainly by naivete and gullibility. Governments and the private sector know this, of course; as others have said, the real purpose is to control users, not to protect them.

Comment · 1 year ago
Very nice site, but it seems to expect you to be following along with some other resource. The exercises each have links under the details tab, but the links are broken, and I cannot find the web pages they are supposed to be linking to.
Comment · 1 year ago
I elaborated a bit when I edited my post, but to be more specific, I think LSP is a protocol that fails at its stated goals. Every server is buggy as hell and has its own quirks and behaviors, so editors that implement LSP have to add workarounds for every server, which renders the point of LSP moot. It's the worst of both worlds: editors are still duplicating effort, but with fewer, if any of the benefits of tools tailor-made for a specific editor-language combination. And that's not even touching on the protocol's severe performance issues.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of servers work much better with VSCode than other editors. Whether this was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to EEE their own product, or simply a convenient result of their own incompetence, is ambiguous.

Comment · 1 year ago
The OP defeats his own argument. LSP was a collaborative effort that benefited from a degree of coordination that only hierarchical organizations can provide, yet it still sucks ass.

OP blames FOSS for not providing an IDE protocol a decade earlier, but doesn't ask the rather obvious question of why language-specific tooling is not only still around, but as market-viable as ever. I'd argue it's because what LSP tries to do is just stupid to begin with, or at least exceptionally hard to get right. All of the best language tooling I've used is ad-hoc and tailored to the specific strengths of a single language. LSP makes the same mistake Microsoft made with UWP: trying to cram the same peg into every hole.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still develops their proprietary Intellisense stuff because it actually works. They competed with themselves and won.

(Minor edit: I forgot that MS alone didn't standardize LSP.)

Comment · 1 year ago
I understand the analogy, it's just ridiculous. You are conflating entirely unrelated things based on your personal feelings about them with no regard to historical or technical context.

Hardware support issues are certainly understandable, but blaming "opinionated nerds" for them is asinine. It cannot be understated how difficult it is to deal with certain OEMs.

Comment · 1 year ago
...what does Emacs have to do with any of this? And how does running Linux in a Hyper-V virtual machine magically make it better?
Comment · 1 year ago
Google likely just doesn't care. They know most people won't bother using privacy-oriented services out of inconvenience or apathy.
Comment · 1 year ago
My point about VSC is that brands itself as "open source" when Microsoft clearly intends for it to have a proprietary, tightly controlled ecosystem. It's not just RMS-unapproved, it's practically a lie. You can use it as a FOSS editor, but only if you are willing to accept a vastly subpar experience. Oh, and they've started cracking down on people using their proprietary VSC plugins in derived editors, too.

I expected it to be a little less convenient to leave Microsoft's beaten path. I did not expect it to be a massive waste of time. This is what I meant by futile. Not only is it apparently very brittle, it's missing large swaths of VSC's ecosystem. Hell, I don't even know if the extension I wanted is available on OpenVSX because it's still down!

If Microsoft hadn't openwashed their product, I wouldn't care nearly as much.

Besides, Emacs still provides a streamlined system for managing packages on top of being hackable. It even makes installing and upgrading packages straight from a Git repo easy. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too.

Comment · 1 year ago
I noticed this the other day when I installed VSCodium on my new Windows box. I had a functional setup for one day, then the next day I couldn't install a language extension I direly needed.

It's left a very sour taste in my mouth. I've used Emacs for ages and despite being a much more niche editor, it's never been so hard-dependent on centralized repositories, and the centralized repositories it does have (ELPA/MELPA) are apparently a lot more reliable than OpenVSX. Installing Emacs packages manually from source is a breeze, doing so with VSC is masochistic.

VSC is not really "open source" in any meaningful sense. It is just plainly unusable if you don't do things the way Microsoft wants you to. I do respect the VSCodium devs for trying to make VSC more properly open, but it does feel like a futile effort.

Comment · 1 year ago
Hurd isn't exactly a useful project, but using Doom as the benchmark for the capability of an OS is a bit ridiculous.
Comment · 2 years ago
> While there are technical differences between Snap and Flatpak, the gist is the same. Offer a sandboxed, isolated, and universal package format for Linux. Universal package formats are an overall win in my opinion. And make Linux feel a little bit more like one operating system. Still, they are now yet another choice that the developer needs to make when distributing their software on Linux.

Someone has yet to explain to me how the Linux desktop is supposed to just agree on a universal standard for everything without a proprietary ecosystem, at which point it would just be a shittier Windows. And that's not even touching on the fact that alternatives often exist for valid reasons, i.e. Pipewire being obviously better than Pulse, which used to be a de facto standard. Or the fact that some companies like Bitwig have already demonstrated that commercial Linux software via Flatpak is viable - Adobe simply does not care, and they never will.

The irony of Windows users sharing their opinions on the Linux desktop is that they often sound how they picture existing Linux desktop users: people who treat their computers as toys. We're fully aware that using Linux has major caveats.

It's okay to just not like Linux, man. Nobody is forcing you to.

Comment · 2 years ago
Most Ghidra discussion I see online boils down to whining that it's not IDA Pro, so, probably not bad.
Comment · 2 years ago
Seeing Brave New World references every time drugs are mentioned is tiring and pretentious. There is plenty to be said about the virtues of moderation and abstinence, and none of it involves invoking the most over-referenced book in modern history not written by Orwell.

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