bugsmith

bugsmith , 17 days ago

You know, I wish I could enjoy IRC - or chatrooms in general. But I just struggle with them. Forums and their ilk, I get. I check in on them and see what’s been posted since I last visited, and reply to anything that motivates me to do so. Perhaps I’ll even throw a post up myself once in a while.

But with IRC, Matrix, Discord, etc, I just feel like I only ever enter in the middle of an existing conversation. It’s fine on very small rooms where it’s almost analagous to a forum because there’s little enough conversation going on that it remains mostly asynchronous. But larger chatrooms are just a wall of flowing conversation that I struggle to keep up with, or find an entry point.

Anyway - to answer the actual question, I use something called “The Lounge” which I host on my VPS. I like it because it remains online even when I am not, so I can atleast view some of the history of any conversation I do stumble across when I go on IRC. I typically just use the web client that comes with it.

bugsmith , 2 months ago

I don’t code in C++ (although I’m somewhat familiar with the syntax). My understanding is the header files should only contain prototypes / signatures, not actual implementations. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Have I misunderstood, or is that part of the joke?

bugsmith , 2 months ago

Thanks. I didn’t know about these advanced libraries, and had not heard of C++ modules either. Appreciate the explanation.

bugsmith , 3 months ago

I like Konsole.

It comes with KDE, supports tabs, themes, and loads very fast.

I don’t really need more from a terminal than that. When I, rarely, need more advanced features like window splitting and session management I also use Zellij (previously I used tmux).

bugsmith , 3 months ago

Mistral-large is probably the best large model for practical purposes at this point.

What makes you say that? I have not performed my own comparison, but everything I have seen and read suggests that GPT4 is king, currently.

bugsmith , 3 months ago

Interesting. That’s not something I’ve heard about until now, but something I’ll surely look into.

bugsmith , 3 months ago

First I’ve heard of “Out of Darkness”. How was it?

bugsmith , 4 months ago

Based on your requirements, I would suggest looking at one of the Firefish / CalcKey forks. They are ideal for single user or small instances and they support s3 compatible object storage out of the box.

I would recommend looking at Sharkey or Iceshrimp. Both are under very active development and have very responsive developers if you need support.

If you would like to check out an example, Ruud (of mastodon.world and lemmy.world) set up an instance of Sharkey at (you guessed it) sharkey.world.

bugsmith , 4 months ago

Yes, I don’t know how I forgot to mention that Iceshrimp and Sharkey both have Mastodon compatible APIs - so all the same apps work (mostly).

bugsmith , 4 months ago

A seemingly unpopular opinion, but Christian Bale’s Batman is my favourite live action version of the character.

bugsmith , 4 months ago

When corporations inevitably arrive to the platform, we can use it to shame them into offering a decent service after they ignore our calls and emails.

bugsmith , 4 months ago

Celebrities, politicians and businesses will be more likely to show up on the platform, if that’s your jam.

bugsmith , 4 months ago

I am very excited for this. One part of my childhood that I’ve never been able to let go of is my total fanboy-ism of Shadow.

bugsmith , 4 months ago

I’d honestly be happier with no guns. Not sure if that was their greatest move, in their effort to make him ‘edgier’. He was perfect in SA2 and Sonic Heroes.

bugsmith , 4 months ago

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I enjoyed Heroes for what it was.

I agree that Sonic Battle was one of, if not the best entries for character building. And SB is, in fact, my all-time favourite Sonic game. Breaks me that I may never see a sequel / reboot, and get to relive Emerl’s story.

bugsmith , 5 months ago

The same reason a lot of companies support a community edition. It means that people can use, learn and become experienced with the product without forking over a tonne of money.

This results in a larger number of developers, add-ons and community surrounding the product.

This makes it a more appealing product for companies looking to build a business using it.

It’s the same reason you can use AWS for free, get some JetBrains products for free and often find community editions for similar products to Magento.

bugsmith , 5 months ago

Yes I’ve not managed to solve this yet. For me, it’s hosting AIO behind my existing Nginx.

bugsmith , 5 months ago

As in, I have Nginx running on my server and use it as a reverse proxy to access a variety of apps and services. But can’t get it playing nicely with AIO Nextcloud.

bugsmith , 5 months ago

Care to give a summary on why you think they should be blocked ahead of any bad acting? Yes, there is some concern about Meta attempting EEE, but ultimately they’re a large platform that can bring a lot of users and attention to the Fediverse. There’s nothing preventing large instances from blocking them down the line, and with user level instance blocking coming in 0.19 to Lemmy (not sure if Mastodon et al have something similar), you can block them personally yourself if you wish, rather than having that thrust upon you by your instance admins.

bugsmith , 5 months ago

Yes. I get the idea, because federating with them is the “negative” option, but honestly it’s just confusing and overly opinionated for an infographic.

bugsmith , 6 months ago

They’re not really blaming capitalism for anything though? They’re just explaining how it works, and they’re right. In a market driven economy, you are paid for having a skill or some knowledge based on the demand of that skill or knowledge and nothing else. In the same way as the quality of your house has little bearing on it’s value when compared to it’s location. Not a criticism of capitalism.

bugsmith , 6 months ago

xkcd.com/1053/

bugsmith , 8 months ago

You could implement ‘drive sync’ giving options of NextCloud, GDrive, Dropbox, etc

bugsmith , 8 months ago

It doesn’t really matter, but worth knowing, only a small amount of your national insurance goes toward NHS costs. The NHS is primarily funded by general taxation. Your National Insurance contributions largely go to paying for state pensions.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

Well, the reality is, search costs money. Quite a lot of money it seems.

So that is either paid for by you, or by someone else. Nobody is going to run search as a charity. So it’s going to be paid for by parties interested in paying for your attention.

Even if you run ad blockers or use meta search engines like searx, you are going to be finding results by companies that have paid to be there.

I am a heavy search user. My search quantity is reasonably large just from personal use (I’m a curious dude, what can I say?) but my professional use of search as a software developer is staggering some days. My anecdotal experience is that that Google search has been declining in quality for years, and especially over the last two or three. DuckDuckGo is a nice alternative for privacy (potentially), but I while I find myself feeling less in a walled garden with them, I don’t actually find their results to be any better than Google’s.

I have tried Kagi recently. So far, I really like it. I genuinely feel like I get good results (read: find something quickly that is relevant to what I searched). I love their lensed searches that let you search the indie-web, and I love that they let you add weightings to websites that you trust.

It is expensive, no doubt. But for a certain audience that relies on quality web search, prefers to not be walled in by paying search engine optimizers and values paying for a product rather than opting to be the product, Kagi offers a solution.

Having said that, I would love to see the cost come down and make it more accessible to the many and I appreciate that for most people, the “free” search engines are good enough.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

It is fantastic. The most polished and stylish monster tamer I’ve played to date. I strongly recommend it to any fan of the genre.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

Absolutely loved this. Never heard of the artist before this (though clearly she is very popular!). She seemed to have a lot of fun making the video.

The only thing that disappointed me was learning that a bunch of people had to volunteer their time to make this. Surely this made lot of money for the artist and video producers, could it really be that the margins were too thin to compensate all the people working on this?

bugsmith , 8 months ago

Fair enough. And I’m sure the people who volunteered were probably thrilled to be involved with the project, it really is a brilliant piece of work.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

Let’s number the dudes in your image form left to right: 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Dudes 3 and 4 have no useful information. They stay silent.

Dude 1 can see one of each hat colour on the dudes in front, but cannot determine their own colour without knowing the hat colour of dude 4. They stay silent.

Dude 2 can see the hat colour of dude 3. They can determine that either they themself or the dude behind must have a different hat colour. The dude behind - dude 1 - can see both of the hat colours in front, but stays silent. This lets dude 2 know that they and dude 3 must be different colours (otherwise dude 1 would have known their own hat colour).

Therefore, dude 2 knows their own hat colour must be different to the dude in front and announces the colour of their own hat.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

That will deduce the liar and truth-teller, but won’t give you any information about which door leads where.

bugsmith , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I default to DuckDuckGo as well. I don’t really like it, and I certainly don’t trust it any more than I do any other for-profit organization. I just wanted something that isn’t Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

It’s really quite fruitless though. Maybe 80% of my searches end up having a !s or !g (really just for variety…) thrown in, as Google’s results are just better.

DDG image search spits out porn as often as it does something relevant. I can change content moderation options if I want to reduce it, but I don’t have to do that with Google.

Kagi has caught my attention lately. I’m going to try it and see if it feels good value for the money. I’m not opposed to paying for search, but this does feel expensive (I say that having no idea of the true cost of running a search company). Obviously, privacy is out the window as it’s paid for and linked to an account. But as I feel I’m not really getting that anywhere else either, I’m more hoping that it will just provide good search results.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

I do, via the !s bang. I was thrown off of using Startpage exclusively after the System1 acquisition. Since then, I’ve also experienced more downtime with Startpage than I find acceptable. It is nice getting the Google results via another interface though.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

Good question. I am now a software developer, but in a previous career I was a logistics manager. In that job I had a lot of repetitive report downloading and creating. It would take hours each day. I used techniques taught in that book to automate downloading reports directly, as well as generating some in SAP by automating mouse and keyboard movements, as well as generating CSVs and Excel spreadsheets. In all cases I either cut the time required or at least the time I had to be physically present. Many jobs could have similar applications of a little Python, I imagine. Certainly not all jobs though, of course.

bugsmith , 8 months ago

Four lions is an absolute classic. Roz Ahmed’s career really took off a few years after the film and it always throws me straight back to it when I see him. It actually broke Venom for me, seeing him as the villain, as for me he is only Omar.

I don’t know about outside the UK, but I think it’s quite a well known and loved movie amongst people in their late twenties onward.

bugsmith , 9 months ago

I am shocked by how well your latter example emphasizes an extremely large quantity of tacos.

I vote for that one.

bugsmith , 9 months ago

Can confirm. Endless rain this summer in the UK. No grass watering required (not that it is ever required…). Didn’t stop my neighbour watering on the few sunny weeks we’ve had…

bugsmith , 9 months ago

I get it with the others, but given what Google is currently trying to do with Chrome and the open web, I think the Firefox evangelism is the least sinful of these by far. Or maybe I just became part of the problem.

bugsmith , 9 months ago

It’s not even that these evangelizers think we should all be using the same browser. It’s that there are currently only two realistic choices: Chrome (and it’s derivatives) and Firefox (and it’s derivatives). There is safari too, of course, but it hardly compares to either in it’s current state.

Given those two choices, only one of them is in support of the open web. The other is literally trying to add DRM to the web.

As to your first point: I agree that here it may be preaching to the choir and that we all get it. But it has such a small marketshare, I’m not sure it is good for those encouraging it to be quitened.

bugsmith , 9 months ago

Who are you with? I get 150 symmetrical for £25 with Swish.

bugsmith , 9 months ago

How often is that bootable Linux drive useful to have on hand though? I can’t imagine it being useful more than once a year or so, but maybe I’m not thinking creatively enough.

bugsmith , 10 months ago

I make this all the time. An absolute staple of our weeknights.

bugsmith , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Sure. But I didn’t say it was either. I only pointed out that it’s silly to say “there’s no comparison”, when most functionality is easily achievable on both. And depending on language, it’s not even difficult.

Edit: In fairness, I did say “it’s effectively an IDE”, but I stand by the point that after a few extensions - what is the difference? If I can debug, refactor, and and get complete intellisense (including finding declarations etc), I’m doing more or less everything I would in a dedicated IDE.

Edit 2: I feel I’ve gone to far the other way. I have used am am aware of some of the capabilities that a fill fledged IDE has over something like VSCode. Especially for languages like those of the C-family. But I do take issue with implying they’re not comparable. For many usecases and languages, they’re totally comparable.

bugsmith , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Yes, I’ve made heavy use of PyCharm, IntelliJ and Datagrip and I’m a huge fan of them all.

bugsmith , 10 months ago

It’s that’s fine that you’ve got some examples of features that are more powerful in JB products. It would be a great shame if such a heavy and reasonably expensive program didn’t.

But I’m not arguing that VS Code is better or worse. I’m arguing that it is comparable (on the sense that it is worth of comparison). Which it is.

I agree that JB’s search is fantastic. Unmatched perhaps. All of that indexing it does when you open a project really pays off.

But you can get a lot of JB’s functionality in VS Code. You can get a very good code inspection in several languages, Python being the premier example. You can also get excellent docker integration, excellent linting, a reasonable search and replace across all files, and a top notch debugging experience for some languages (Python being the premier example again).

Sure JB products do some of that stuff better (at the cost of being heavier programs with significant start up time).

I use both. I like both. I believe VS Code is very formidable and could be the sole editor a developer uses flr many types of projects (Web Development, Python projects, many Go projects too all come to mind).

bugsmith , 10 months ago

The problem with this idea is, what if the state is controlled by unsavoury people? I know that is kind of a hard thing to imagine, but just humour me and assume it’s possible.

It gives far too much power to too few people.

bugsmith , 10 months ago

It doesn’t need to be an authoritarian government or an evil government as such.

It would just need to be a govermt that doesn’t prioritize fairness and egalitarianism above all.

If the people dishing out the housing have biases and they’re not favourable to you, you’re stuck.

At least in the existing system you have the ability to progress and determine your quality of living to some degree.

I don’t think our current system is good by the way. I just don’t think state owned housing is the right medicine. Not unless we can find a way to instate benevolent dictators.