Deebster

Deebster , 14 hours ago (edited 8 hours ago)

For such an influential letter, I don't find his arguement all that compelling. I agree that not using go to will often lead to better structured (and more maintainable) programs, but I don't find his metric of "indexable process progress" to satisfyingly explain why that is.

Perhaps it's because at that time people would be running the programs in their heads before submitting them for processing, so they tended to use more of a computer scientist mindset - whereas now we're more likely to use test cases to convince ourselves that code is correct.

Deebster , 8 hours ago

I wasn't saying that unit tests replaces readability, I was saying that back in the 60s they'd reason and debug using their brains (and maybe pen and paper), with more use of things like formal proofs for correctness. Now that we write more complicated programs in more powerful environments, it's rare to do this (we'd use breakpoints, unit tests, fuzzing, etc).

Deebster , 5 days ago

I used to have some with e-ink displays that showed how full they were, but I always wished I could use them to show a label instead.

Deebster , 20 days ago

function delete-branches() {
  git branch |
    grep --invert-match '\*' |
    cut -c 3- |
    fzf --multi --preview="git log {} --" |
    xargs --no-run-if-empty git branch --delete --force
}

This is really slick.

Deebster , 20 days ago

A great post, interesting and to the point.

Deebster , 21 days ago

Mbin seems like a healthy project, and the only sensible move from kbin.

Deebster , 21 days ago

I think all of the communities would rather have something more than just a bare link. I'm not sure why you're responding with such indignation, to be honest, it was a perfectly reasonable suggestion, politely made.

Deebster , 21 days ago

So you think it's too unreasonable for you to cope with?

Deebster , 19 days ago

I just now noticed it was gone. Did it just vanish one day, or did its users at least have some hint?

edit: looks like it was a surprise: https://lemmyverse.link/mander.xyz/post/12163154

Deebster , 25 days ago

Pretty shitty attempt on Hashicorp's part. Come to think of it, are Hashicorp themselves in the legal clear for grabbing code from an incompatible licence?

Deebster , 25 days ago

I'm not saying OpenTofu is doing any accusing, but I am. I was thinking an original author had the sole right to relicense code but I guess they found some legally plausible way to get it done. I wonder if the author was an OpenTofu employee.

Deebster , 25 days ago

Thanks for the link, I forgot about CLAs. Interesting - this kind of thing seems to be controversial but common.

Deebster , 25 days ago

Distro watch rankings are just which page gets the most hits. Get a bunch of different IPs to load LemmyLinux and it'll be number one (and then actual people will click on it to see what it is and why it's number one).

Deebster , 24 days ago

As far as I know I made it up, but I stand ready to be surprised!

Deebster , 24 days ago

Back in the naughties PCLinuxOS was at #1 and people suspected them of cheating. I'm sure some people do try to game it, but there's plenty of organic and bot traffic to compete with.

Besides, I think the popularity thing's kinda backwards - I'd never visit Ubuntu or Fedora because I know what they are, but I'll be clicking on something novel out of curiosity.

Deebster , 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

I like it too, even though it didn't notify me when the trial was up like it said it would. I was planning on buying the lifetime (or uninstalling) but it autobilled me for a year instead.

Anyway, here's mine:
https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/c870eb0e-c91b-462b-a1b8-0be680516f8d.jpeg

Deebster , 27 days ago

Finally, when you reference a Git hash for posterity, e.g. in another commit message, I’d recommend always using the full value.

Good advice.

Deebster , 1 month ago

This seems like a pretty standard solution for this kind of thing and I don't believe it would have been patentable - there's no breakthroughs here, even for 2007.

Deebster , 1 month ago

I was kinda hoping for another story about some clever compression bomb or similar to slow up the bot - after all, if it's hammering this little site it's surely doing the same to others, even if they haven't noticed yet. After the robots.txt was ignored I was sure, but I guess this mature, restrained response is probably the correct one *discontentedly kicks can down sepia street*

Deebster , 1 month ago

I feel a company that big would write a more competent bot, but I also wouldn't be too astonished.

Deebster , 1 month ago

Thinking there must be another way, I switched to Haproxy.

Hang on, weren't you on Haproxy already? Or do you mean you switched your attention to Haproxy? (If not, what were you in before?)

As others have said, blocking incoming stuff as high up as possible is definitely the right way, and Cloudflare is the right place for you. It's interesting that this bot wasn't caught by Cloudflare, I wonder who runs it.

Deebster , 1 month ago

I went with Fedora on my VPS because I was also planning to use rootless Podman. Quadlets and running everything through systemd with SELinux enabled is working pretty well for me.

Deebster , 1 month ago

I've often thought that something like git's auto-merge would make like much easier when I get asked if I want to keep my config, use upstream or decide per-line. What I should be able to do is have the system pick whichever changed recently, and give me the results to review and/or fix conflicts.

Deebster , 1 month ago

I'd say it's more like it demonstrates how quirky the requirements are that Haskell also failed to get it right. The error and the fix are both in Rust code.

Deebster , 1 month ago

Hmm, not really. It's only because it nerd-sniped someone who was trying to do something completely unrelated that this came to light. If that person has been less dedicated or less skilled we'd still probably be in the dark.

Deebster , 1 month ago

Maybe millions of potential eyes, but all of them are looking at other things! Heartbleed existed for two years before being noticed, and OpenSSL must have enormously more scrutiny than small projects like xz.

I am very pro open source and this investigation would've been virtually impossible on Windows or Mac, but the many-eyes argument always struck me as more theoretical/optimistic than realistic.

Deebster , 1 month ago

And are bugs harder to find than carefully hidden backdoors? No-one noticed the code being added and if it hadn't have had a performance penalty then it probably wouldn't have been discovered for a very long time, if ever.

The flip side to open-source is that bad actors could have reviewed the code, discovered Heartbleed and been quietly exploiting it without anyone knowing. Government agencies and criminal groups are known to horde zero-days.

Deebster , 1 month ago

The author has no idea how to get his audience on-side! He starts with bragging about his 6400% profit margin on domain he resold, in a market where there's no customer value for middlemen.

At least antique dealers will identify pieces as rare, clean/restore them and put them for sale in a more visible place. Whereas domain reselling is about as ethical as ticket touting.

Deebster , 2 months ago

Are you informed about what they're using AI for? One example is in-browser translations, which allows it to work offline and be privacy-respecting (no calls to Google, etc).

Deebster , 2 months ago

Are you saying you've disabled searching from the address bar and instead load up whatever.com and then type your search into there? I don't understand what you think you're gaining by enforcing this extra step.

Deebster , 2 months ago

Why should it be relegated to a plug-in? It is a feature everyone would find useful because no-one speaks every language. Also, since Chrome has this feature, new users would expect to have it work without having to research which plug-in to use.

You might not want to use it, but some people don't use Firefox bookmarks and you don't hear them demanding that bookmarks be moved to a plug-in. It's been a very long time since a browser was solely an HTML renderer, and while people were also against CSS and scripting at first, we've moved on.

"AI" has been used for many things for many years. The fact that the news is full of machine learning and generative AI doesn't mean that it's sensible to condemn anything using it.

Deebster , 2 months ago

You have other options. You can use the separate search box. You can use smart keywords to only trigger searches when you want.

Deebster , 2 months ago

So, they're just going to add a QR code? Of course, you could already do that, but having it built in and be the default process would probably help.

Deebster , 2 months ago

Afraid I don't know, but please post the answer here if you do (particularly if you get the answer from somewhere un-indexable like Matrix).

Deebster , 2 months ago

I assume this latest bump is due to lemmy.world updating and now counting lurkers when assessing active users.

Deebster , 2 months ago

I think of a lurker as someone who doesn't post - I guess your definition is someone who doesn't interact at all (besides making an account and subscribing, I assume). But yes, I mean users who only vote are now counted (it's not using views afaik).

Deebster , 2 months ago

That reminds me of Netflix's Chaos Monkey (basically in office hours this tool will randomly kill stuff).

Deebster , 2 months ago

A general tip on buying UPSes: look for second hand ones - people often don't realise you can just replace the battery in them (or can't be bothered) so you can get fancier/larger ones very cheap.

Deebster , 2 months ago

Longer means you're more likely to be able to ride out a power cut, and gives you more options if you want/need to complete something more involved than saving and shutting down.

Deebster , 2 months ago

Interesting article, thanks, although I don't know what the page is doing to make Firefox offer to kill it. Maybe it's something to do with the 1455 comments.

Deebster , 2 months ago

They might get some more uptake if they had some examples or a more concise explanation than just linking to the RFC (aside from the tutorial in French).

Deebster , 16 days ago

Compare to MessagePack's example from their front page:

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/16329c49-dfe7-4e0d-85a7-cca3c69aae50.png

It answers 90% of my questions in a quick example.

Deebster , 3 months ago

unvaluable

You've edited this post and left this in (or added it!?) so I suppose you mean it!

Deebster , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Sorry, I was just joking; it's clearly a typo and I don't think anyone misunderstood (or maybe even noticed).

Deebster , 3 months ago

"is in good health"? I was looking for autocorrect typos but can't figure out anything likely, unless they're not using querty.

Deebster , 3 months ago

The problem with stats like these are that Firefox users (and the browser's defaults) block a lot of the scripts and images used for tracking.

Cloudflare's stats show higher Firefox usage (4.737% for 2023 Q3), although that's still less than even Edge. My own logs show more still, although my visitors are more technical than usual.

Deebster , 3 months ago

Federation like that sounds perfect, and would definitely help out for the current situation I see where projects are officially on, say, Gitlab but still accept pull requests on GitHub. I'm sure that involves some annoying manual process (although should be less hassle than the code review!)

Deebster , 3 months ago

btw, if you put double spaces at the end of a line, it makes a new line without a new paragraph:

It's not DNS
There's no way it's DNS
It was DNS