• 8 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.


  • Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

    Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

    Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

    Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

    Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack


  • Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

    Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)


  • Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

    But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?

    …In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely


  • umbraroze@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devLanguages
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, I was about to say.

    Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

    PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

    Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.


  • Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

    Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.

    So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

    Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

    Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.

    Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.


  • Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?

    I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.

    Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn’t like got buried really fast.

    Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn’t care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.

    Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I’ll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)

    So that’s what killed Digg. …that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (…insert comparison to modern Reddit here)



  • umbraroze@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldLinux rule
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    2 months ago

    Free Software is Leftism because it has got us great software and maybe the only bad thing I can say is that release schedules aren’t a thing

    Open Source is Capitalist Friendly because, ummmmm, extremely shitty Community Editions and putting everything cool in proprietary side, uhhhhh, random license changes to shit that isn’t actually OSD compliant, unghhhhhh, need of constant vigilance against license violations.

    Like I am happy cheap hardware vendors have adopted OSS components but why are they frequently so shitty about everything








  • Have any regular users actually looked at the prices of the “AI services” and what they actually cost?

    I’m a writer. I’ve looked at a few of the AI services aimed at writers. These companies literally think they can get away with “Just Another Streaming Service” pricing, in an era where people are getting really really sceptical about subscribing to yet another streaming service and cancelling the ones they don’t care about that much. As a broke ass writer, I was glad that, with NaNoWriMo discount, I could buy Scrivener for €20 instead of regular price of €40. [note: regular price of Scrivener is apparently €70 now, and this is pretty aggravating.] So why are NaNoWriMo pushing ProWritingAid, a service that runs €10-€12 per month? This is definitely out of the reach of broke ass writers.

    Someone should tell the AI companies that regular people don’t want to subscribe to random subscription services any more.



  • /mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

    /media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

    And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.



  • Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

    This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.