Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
> Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.

We should call it what it really is: oligapolization of intellectual work. The capital barrier to enter this market is too high and there can be no credible open source option to prevent a handful of companies from controlling a monster share of intellectual work in the short and medium term. Yet our profession just keeps rushing head first into this one-way door.

Comment · 2 years ago
> Just look at the code. How could it be simpler?

Cannot tell if this is a joke.

Comment · 2 years ago
I like the more robotic "Objects: 1" or "Objects: 2", since it avoids the pluralization problems entirely (e.g., in French 0 is singular, but in English it's plural; some words have special when pluralized, such as child -> children or attorney general -> attorneys general). And related to this article, it's more greppable/awkable, e.g. `awk /^Objects:/ && $2 > 10`.
Comment · 2 years ago
I went to Blackbox because its UI elements were smaller (title bars are more narrow, no 64x64 dock icons) which gave me more real estate on my 1024x768 monitor. I then migrated to Openbox because that had more active development at the time.

This year, I've switched to herbstluftwm, a tiling window manager that's really nice and works in a way that agrees with me.

Comment · 2 years ago
Back in 1998-1999, I was interested in installing and using Linux in large part because I thought that the screenshots of Window Maker that I saw online were so damn pretty. When I finally got to use it, I liked how "solid" it felt; the menus were big and large, they stuck to the screen even if you moved your mouse off of them, etc. I don't use Window Maker anymore, but it'll forever hold a special place in my heart.
Comment · 2 years ago
I get a progress bar when I run `cargo clean` because it's so large.
Comment · 2 years ago
I need to find a pithy way to express "we use a garbage collector to avoid doing manual memory management because that'd require too much effort; but since the GC causes performance problems in production, we have spent more effort and energy working around those issues and creating bespoke tooling to mitigate them than the manual memory management we were trying to avoid in the first place would've required."
Comment · 2 years ago
Is there a reason to prefer `while read; ...;done` over find's -exec or piping into xargs?
Comment · 2 years ago
Probably because some terminals interpret Ctrl+S as a "pause the terminal" command and if you don't know about it, it looks like your editor has frozen.
Comment · 2 years ago
I absolutely loved AntennaPod back when I had an Android phone -- I actually never really "attended" to it though: I installed it, it worked, never gave me any issue. Now that I own an iPhone, I really miss having a quality app like AntennaPod.
Comment · 2 years ago
> I'm mostly not following what is under a DDoS attack. Is it their web page mostly consisting of marketing material with static pages?

Yes.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Isn't that our entire industry though?
Comment · 2 years ago
- I use Emacs every day as my primary (and only) programming text editor.

- Having nearly 20 years of experience using Emacs, it's just a totally natural fit for me.

- I program primarily in Rust. I use the built-in LSP client, eglot, to communicate with rust-analyzer and have IDE features such as jump-to-def, find-refs, find-impls, auto-import, auto-format, semantic rename, etc. It works just as well as VSCode/Codium (which I tried for about a week to make sure I wasn't missing out; I wasn't.) I also do the odd shell script, Python script, YAML config, Dockerfile, etc. for which Emacs is also well-suited.

- As far as I know, I'm the only person in the company using Emacs. There's a few vim/neovim users, but the vast majority of people are using VSCode. Having paired with many, I don't think that I'm slower for using Emacs; in fact, I think that I am in many cases faster because I am so familiar with the text operations that I don't even think about them, I just do them.

- Overall, I don't see any reason for me to switch away from Emacs at the moment, especially since LSP really blurred the distinction between "text editor" and "IDE".

- I typically don't recommend that programmers try Emacs if they're not already familiar with it. Partly because I don't want them to ask me questions, but mostly because their natural tendency is to try and reproduce their VSCode/JetBrains/Visual Studio workflow. This usually causes frustration, because the way to use Emacs effectively is different from the way to use a product like VSCode that aims to have a good out-of-the-box experience.

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