And this is why platforms that only grow for the sake of growing is a bad thing. In order to grow unbounded, you have to cater for the kinds of users that you described - no self-respect and no awareness of the platform that they’re using. The kinds of people that will happily let themselves be abused by technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg or whatever Reddit’s CEO is.

Is that the kind of average user that we want on Lemmy? Hell no! If that means that we can never have more than 1 million monthly users, then so be it. Quality over quantity. Reddit has plenty of quantity, but garbage-tier quality.

B-b-b-but my convenience!!!

Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/

I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.

The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.

On the other hand, there are lots of bots scraping Wikipedia even though it’s easy to download the entire website as a single archive.

So they’re not really that smart…

I wasn’t aware of that, but it’s crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn’t make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that’s a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.

Also, I’m not going to argue that things aren’t better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.

Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn’t have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the “conspiracy” you’re talking about - but it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.

But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.

And the ones that stay behind will be the kinds of teammates nobody wants to work with.

Google is already falling behind in pretty much every area where they have competition and getting sued in all the areas where they have driven the competition out. It will really be great to see their business shrink given what they have become in the 2010s.

On the other hand, it’s also really sad to see what they’ve become too. They used to be a really admirable company around the early 2000s. So many people were cheering for them as a company run by engineers, doing things differently and running all over the incumbent assholes everybody hated like Microsoft. There was a time when it felt like Google was a company for real people fighting back against the machine. But then they became the machine themselves.

The good Google is dead. I’d love to see them get completely buried.

This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.

Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we’ll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.

Good. Operating systems should be neutral. The people who make them should not be allowed to dictate the terms that others use to interact with their platforms.

Of course you can. Instead of committing the code to a repository, you just take screenshots of the everything and commit that instead.

I didn’t read the article, but I presume this is under the DMA which has provisions for increasing fines for repeat offenses - something like 10% of global revenue or something like that. I’m also a bit discouraged by how small the number is, but there is still some hope that it will either increase or get them to change their practices. But it is quite frustrating how slowly it’s going.

In fact, chances are that Apple is going breaking the law until the last minute so they can squeeze every penny they can out of this scheme until they can’t do it any longer.

Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds

Pretty sure he’s older than that. And calling people names isn’t nice!

But was this a reversion of the previous commit…?

There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.

I’ve never had the chance to use a functional language in my work, but I have tried to use principles like these.

Once I had a particularly badly written Python codebase. It had all kinds of duplicated logic and data all over the place. I was asked to add an algorithm to it. So I just found the point where my algorithm had to go, figured out what input data I needed and what output data I had to return, and then wrote all the algorithm’s logic in one clean, side effect-free module. All the complicated processing and logic was performed internally without side effects, and it did not have to interact at all with the larger codebase as a whole. It made understanding what I had to do much easier and relieved the burden of having to know what was going on outside.

These are the things functional languages teach you to do: to define boundaries, and do sane things inside those boundaries. Everything else that’s going on outside is someone else’s problem.

I’m not saying that functional programming is the only way you can learn something like this, but what made it click for me is understanding how Haskell provides the IO monad, but recommends that you keep that functionality at as high of a level as possible while keeping the lower level internals pure and functional.

What kind of programming work are you doing?

I’ve thought about situations like yours and what I would do if I were in that situation someday. For me, the plan is to try doing as much in the console as possible, which means Vim/Neovim for development and Tmux for window management.

If you ever feel useless, don’t forget that both true and false have manpages in Linux.

They even have --help and --version flags in case you need them.

First, we’ll take away the headphone jack.

Then, we’ll remove everything else!

My understanding from what you’re writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That’s all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can’t use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal - just exchange your other “account number” via some other channel.

Besides, don’t think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. “What are you hiding, citizen?” and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The “Give us your phone number or fuck off” sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we’ll do it for them when they’re so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you’re trying to claim you’re more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I’m sure I’m not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.