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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Wait until you learn about debhelper.

    If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about “bloat” or “KISS”.

    DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I’ve had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.

    But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.



  • The competitive scene happened. Can’t have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don’t just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say “I’m GE and you’re Gold, therefore I know for a fact I’m better than you”.

    This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is “what’s your chess.com ELO”.

    I’m not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it’s not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn’t have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.




  • Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

    Tracking consent prompt with only an "Accept all" button

    Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

    For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

    Tracking consent prompt with a "Reject all" button next to "Accept all"

    First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).

    I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:

    HTML source showing no reject all button

    For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

    Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.



  • It’s so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?

    Only the Bri’ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.

    (I don’t actually care, it’s just very interesting how even such an innocent map actually shows a strong political/cultural bias)



  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoLinux@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Without good and realistic answers to how the long-term maintenance of such changes would be managed, it is myopically unrealistic to propose those changes

    Lina is talking about a minor change though. It challenges the dominant paradigm but her opinion seems to be that it doesn’t have negative impact on the overall maintainability. To shift the discussion to maintainability is whataboutism; if these kernels maintainers can’t accept patches that do not have a negative impact on maintainability or directly involve Rust in any way because they are related to Rust in general, that’s disappointing tribalism regardless of your opinions on Rust or Rust developers.

    I might be missing some context here as I’m only going off what Lina has said, but if half of it is true then we need to shift attitudes before talking about how to integrate Rust in the kernel ecosystem. It certainly feels very disingenuous and retrograde to present Rust as some kind of existential threat rather than a novelty or opportunity, as if no combination of processes and tools could ever possibly overcome the stated maintainability challenges.


  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.workstoLinux@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    The vibes I got in the other thread about Wedson’s announcement is that the concerns may be valid but there are indeed a handful of contributors who are aggressively shouting down Rust contributor’s efforts to set up the processes you outlined based on hard prejudice. The video Wedson posted was hard to watch. From the outside looking in it looks to be way more about ego than any particular technical roadblock.

    Furthermore Lina’s concerns here are only broader what you are saying:

    When I wrote the DRM scheduler abstractions, I ran into many memory safety issues caused by bad design of the underlying C code. The lifetime requirements were undocumented and boiled down to “design your driver like amdgpu to make it work, or else”.

    My driver is not like amdgpu, it fundamentally can’t work the same way. When I tried to upstream minor fixes to the C code to make the behavior more robust and the lifetime requirements sensible, the maintainer blocked it and said I should just do “what other drivers do”.

    Mainlining memory safety improvements, in C, for C code should be welcomed and it is very concerning if she indeed got shunned because the end goal was to offer lifetime guarantees (which to my admittedly non-expert eye sounds like it would be a good thing for memory safety in general).


    The concern from those contributors (and we might soon see the same in QEMU) is that these bindings are essentially a weaponization which forces the great majority of contributors to learn Rust or drop out. Essentially a hostile takeover.

    Seems like a moral panic over absolutely nothing (where are the Rust developers allegedly forcing people to learn Rust? all I’ve seen in these threads today is Rust developers asking for an open mind and a willingness to collaborate), and that the response to this “concern” is to block any and all changes that might benefit Rust adoption is really concerning (but unfortunately not unsurprising) behavior.


  • We need an app that keeps the gender ratios even.

    Isn’t that what Tinder is indirectly trying to achieve with its “Get Super Gold+++ insta premium” business model? To get a somewhat even gender ratio you need to get a bunch of men to drop out, and asking for absurd amounts of money is certainly one way to go about it. Though I hear even premium tinder users vastly outnumber the women.

    A raffle could work in theory, but upwards of 80 % of men will have to be thrown out and as a woman I wouldn’t see why I would settle for that instead of an app where attractive men will be falling over themselves to talk to me.

    AFAIK the only proven methods for not-super-attractive men to get matches is to either go offline, or be bi/gay. Do with that advice what you will.


  • Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.

    It’s really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.



  • They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

    And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

    The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.


  • It’s the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid “win” when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?

    There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.

    I don’t play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you’ll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn’t feel like improvement.

    Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.



  • There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

    Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

    Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.