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pixelscript

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pixelscript ,

A Post-It and a pencil, usually.

Not because “app bad” or “return to monke” or anything like that. Mostly because if I stow the note in a dedicated app, that somehow just makes me less inclined to write it down and read it later.

A scrap of papersticking out like a sore thumb on my desk or burning a hole in my pocket? I’m going to be cognizant of that all day long. But an obscure text file chilling in a disused part of my phone, or a txt file lost in the shuffle of random shit on my PC? Outta sight outta mind.

I also find all digital input schemes to be frustratingly less flexible than physical paper. Provided I have a writing utensil on hand that is functional (not always a given, granted) it is trivial to put anything I want on a note. Write anything I want. Draw diagrams. Underline or strike text. Write some things larger or heavier than others. All of these things are possible in note taking apps, but they come with the idiosyncracies of needing to know the selection techniques and menu options to activate them. In this way they’re all death by a thousand tiny annoying cuts for me.

I even had a smart phone with a built-in stylus for a good long while. It definitely extended the things you could do with ease, but it was a far cry from a pencil.

The only thing a note taking app can do in my mind that paper can’t is yell at you with a loud noise at a pre-programmed time. If I need one of those, I just set an alarm in my clock app.

pixelscript ,

I live in the US and I consider it unusual to fly more than once every two years.

pixelscript ,

I always hear this statistic on how proper zipper merging increases traffic flow rate over no strategy at all, and I simply do not understand how it helps.

They keep pointing to how much of the upstream second lane is “wasted”. But like, from a strict perspective of flow rate, is it really?

The bottleneck restricting flow is the reduced speed single lane. Put a vehicle counter on it. Assuming no one wastes time getting through whatever funnel point there is, this flow is consistent. The same number of cars passing at the same speed are getting through regardless of whether the zipper point was a few cars back or ten kilometers back. Unless I can hear an explanation on how zipper merging changes this I remain unconvinced.

Zipper merging still has unquestionable advantages that are obvious to glean, of course.

Putting the merge point as close to the blockage as possible minimizes the time spent in the shared lane. Flow is the same, but the overall time spent in the jam is averaged over all drivers.

That “wasted lane” does not, as far as I can tell, improve flow. But it does improve storage. If cars are piling up at the choke point, utilizing the full extra lane keeps the pilup from backing up as far down the road, reducing potential domino effects through the road system.

Zipper merging is fairer to all vehicles by promoting a FIFO processing order. No one in the closed lane gets screwed, everyone gets through in roughly the order they showed up.

It has lots of advantages, and is clearly the winner, but I fail to see how increased flow is one of them.

Of course, I’m making a lot of assumptions about perfect behavior of drivers, while this statistic is supposedly real-world empirical data. That suggests there are significant inefficiencies in real-world human driving, and that the zipper merge addresses them somehow. But I can’t fathom what those are or why zipper merging is relevant to them.

pixelscript ,

I just got home from a 12 hour day of work. This has been my entire week.

Help.

pixelscript ,

For work, it’s usually IDE on the right (my larger screen) and a live build of the thing I’m working with on the left (a laptop screen). Though it varies a lot throughout the day. Primary screen gets the app that needs most scrutiny, small screen gets auxilliary things like passive communication apps or reference materials.

For home use, where I have two monitors of equal size, it’s usually Discord on one screen and a web browser on the other. Comms on the left and active task on the right.

I don’t see a use case in my workflow for a third screen, especially not one that is a weird size or is in portrait orientation. But if one was simply bestowed upon me, I’m sure I’d find something to do with it sooner or later. There was a time where I though two monitors was overrated, I’m sure I can adapt my opinion again for 3+.

pixelscript ,

As an American who was raised Lutheran, who was taught a bunch of Romance-Euro-centric world history in school, I always considered Roman Catholic to be the “default” flavor of Christianity. Protestantism in all of its forms are hard forks. It’s in the name, even–the Roman Catholic church is what Protestants are “protesting”.

To unironically “-and Zoidberg” Catholicism out of Christianity while leaving Protestant flavors included feels completely backwards. I’ve never heard anyone do it.

But if I did, I could only assume it was due to some No True Scotsman bullshit. “Only we practice the correct way. Everyone else isn’t just interpreting it differently, but interpreting it wrong.” Sounds like an Evangelical line of thought to me.

pixelscript ,

it’d be poor style to put more than one statement on a line

Unlike Python, most languages do not endorse a specific concept of style. You’re free to dabble in all the bad style choices you like, on the off chance that once in a blue moon they prove to be situationally useful.

pixelscript ,
  1. Decide your budget
  2. Go to logicalincrements.com
  3. Find the tier that matches your budget
  4. Buy that
  5. Enjoy your PC

Once you get a feel for building and owning, then you can start making more informed choices about what you really need.

pixelscript ,

As a very strong believer in Danny DeVito’s quote, “When I’m dead, just throw me in the trash!”, if any medical party is even remotely interested in dumpster diving for my parts when I’m done with them, they can have 'em. Better than throwing them in a box and taking up land in a cemetary. The less of my remains uselessly taking up space on this planet after death, the better. If I get my way upon my demise, anything they don’t take is going into the incinerator anyway.

pixelscript ,

City. Around 100k is the comfortable size.

Not like I require the city’s wider array of amenities all that much. I will still be spending 97% of my time at work or at home.

But if I lived in a small town again (born and raised in a town of <8,000), that extra 3% of the time I wanted to go out I’d have to remind myself, “Oh yeah, I live in a dead end town in the middle of nowhere that services none of my personal interests,” and that 3% would rapidly become 0%. I’d live fine with that, but eh. Why take a strict net loss when I can simply not?

The walkabiity and community arguments for small towns are complete non-factors for me, seeing as I go basically nowhere and talk to basically no one. And I’m not persuaded by the cost of living argument for small towns, since lower rent would be almost equally counterbalanced by lower salary opportunities.

pixelscript ,

The exception would be high-paid remote work, I guess. But with the reputation that corpos big enough to field those salaries have been recently building, going mask-off with no warning for no reason and asking employees to start filling desks again, I don’t know if I’d risk it.

pixelscript ,

The only difference between a novice and a professional is that a professional checks what they are copying to understand it first before allowing it into their codebase.

Novices copy code to avoid having to understand it. Professionals copy code to avoid reinventing the wheel.

pixelscript ,

Finally found out why I couldn’t renew my Let’s Encrypt cert.

Did you know fresh installs of Debian Testing come with firewalld installed and enabled to auto-block all incoming connections? Me neither!

pixelscript ,

A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.

The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you’re in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren’t in a kid’s head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent’s. The safety risks are high. Always were, that’s not new. But the legal risks are new.

And yeah, it’s not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn’t happen back in, say, my dad’s childhood. But I’d wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they’re old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren’t.

pixelscript ,

Getting static shocked by the TV screen.

pixelscript ,

What’s a FOSS pword manager

There are probably more that these two out there but the two I know of that fit this bill are Bitwarden and KeePass. The latter comes in two flavors, the original KeePass that kinda looks like shit and tries to stay lean and defer niche features to plugins, and the fork KeePassXC that tries to give it a sleeker UX with more features natively baked-in. I will refer to both simply as “KeePass” for the rest of this comment.

that is easy to use

“Easy to use” is relative. If you’re savvy enough to know what FOSS software even is, to care about using it, and to find your way onto an experimental platform like Lemmy to ask about it, I’d say youre more than capable of handling either of the above choices with ease.

reliable, likely to be around and working in 5 years

I’d wager that on both Bitwarden and KeePass.

and won’t leave me feeling shit up a creek if my phone dies or I’m using a public terminal with software installation restrictions

Bitwarden offers free cloud hosting and a web interface. As long as you have access to a browser and an Internet connection, you have access to your Bitwarden key store.

KeePass is offline-only and requires specialized client software to read its key store file format. Though, since all it is is a file, you can use simple and straightforward methods to make it accessible wherever you need it. Copy it to a flash drive. SCP it between devices. Put it on a cloud service like Dropbox. You have options. It’s just up to you to use them.

Bitwarden also lets you save locally stored files and manage them like KeePass, if you’re into that.

Honestly, since each can be made to more or less behave like the other, which one you pick largely comes down to taste. Bitwarden is more turn-key if you want cloud hosting, KeePass makes you work for it. Bitwarden is a company providing a premium service you can buy, while KeePass is a completely free project funded only by good will donations.

I prefer KeePassXC, personally.

pixelscript ,

It would have been Fucking, Austria. But it finally broke under the pressure and was renamed. I have not dedicated any brain cells to remembering what exactly its new name is, which I guess is the intended effect.

pixelscript ,

I replied to that thread.

OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.

Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.

pixelscript ,

Briefs. Actual support. The singular function underwear has.

Boxers are just commando with extra steps. Utterly pointless.

I consider all enlightened boxer brief centrists to be strictly in the briefs camp as boxer briefs are just briefs with leg extensions.

pixelscript ,

MLMs can be actually viable jobs for a very select few of people. Not entirely unlike how you can theoretically make money at a casino. There need to be winners to the game once in a while, or else no one would play. The game is just rigged wildly out of your favor.

The general structure of an MLM as I understand it is sort of a cross between a wholesale job and playing a mobile gacha game. Unlike a normal business where you purchase stock to match your demand, and only stock items that actually sell, an MLM contractually obligates you to buy a certain volume of stock, and each shipment is essentially a lootbox full of who knows what. It then becomes your responsibility to get rid of the stock any way you possibly can.

When you buy all that stock, you are not buying it from a factory or a warehouse. You are buying it from another person in the same position as you, one layer up. They are also playing the lootbox gacha and trying to get rid of all the crap. Except, hmm, now they have at least one person beneath them who is contractually forced to buy from them, and can’t select which stock they’re buying. Gee, I wonder what you’re gonna be getting…

Whenever you actually do manage to sell something off, a cut of that kicks back to the person who sold you that stock. And a piece of that kickback goes to the person who sold them that stock, and so on, up and up.

The real money in MLMs is having so many people beneath you that the kickbacks start adding up into significant income. This is theoretically achievable. But it requires a very specific kind of personality matrix who is not squeamish about being a little cut-throat to get ahead, and generally requires a significant investment where you are going deep into the red just for the opportunity. And even if you do make it there, you have to accept the knowledge that your profitability can only exist necessarily because of the existence of many people beneath you all spinning those slots and losing the rigged game to the house (who by this point is you).

pixelscript ,

Had a lapse of judgement once and sent one of those 2FA passcodes sent to me via SMS to a shady guy on Craigslist. This was back when 2FA was still in the process of becoming ubiquitous, I do not believe I had seen one before that point.

I believe the only thing it allowed them to do was register a Google Talk number in my account’s name. I immediately dissociated my account from the number after this interaction (strangely, you could not actually cancel the number, only disown it, so I guess the scammer still got what they wanted anyway) and changed my account password for good measure.

I’ve also bought many bootleg collectors items off of Ebay. Though, each time I’ve done so was fully knowing the listings were lying, and still wanting the bootleg garbage anyway.

pixelscript ,

I have a fair amount of crap, but not a lot of it is of much interest to most people.

Unless someone out there wants me to show up with a laundry basket full of Fumos and subject them to an unsolicited three hour lecture on Touhou lore…

pixelscript ,

Collectible marketable plushies of anime girls from a very specific franchise. Have a bit of a meme cult following. Both the franchise itself as a whole and this product line in specific.

Google will show you what they look like, and /r/fumofumo on Reddit has a collection of memes and shitposts to see, but if you don’t get the appeal that wouldn’t be surprising.

pixelscript ,

mean: <2 eyes

median: 2 eyes

mode: 2 eyes

pixelscript ,

They use a fuser unit to cook the toner and bind it to the paper. It’s not exactly burning the paper itself per se, but high heat is definitely involved.

Source: repaired a laser printer with a damaged fuser unit that was actually burning paper.

Longtime Arch user, first time Debian enjoyer

As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for...

pixelscript ,

Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

pixelscript ,

They mutually imply one another.

If something was private, but not secure, well, that implies there are ways to breach the privacy, which isn’t very private at all.

If it’s secure, but not private, that implies it’s readable by someone other than the consenting conversational parties, which makes it insecure.

pixelscript ,

I’ve never seen transfer rates given in MBps in the wild. It’s always Mbps.

Serial network connections give no care to byte alignment, they operate either bit by bit or symbol by symbol (which are rarely byte aligned).

pixelscript ,

I believe I pay USD $70/mo for 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up. American midwest.

Tends to actually measure around 10%-20% higher than advertised. Just ran some speed tests and got 120/40. Not complaining.

$5/mo or $10/mo of that I think is for renting the modem which I stupidly have not bought yet.

pixelscript ,

we are throwing accuracy out the window by using milli anyway so who the hell cares

It’s a factor of 8 we’re talking about. That’s not far off from a factor of 10. If a factor of 10 difference is important enough to get its own prefix in SI, I think a factor of 8 difference is plenty enough to care about having clarified notation. This isn’t like the mega/mebi thing where the drift is only on the order of 3%.

pixelscript ,

That sounds like it’d be fantastic for reading but, depending on how it’s implemented, hell for posting.

Lemmy already aggregates posts from communities you follow into one feed. If it allowed the creation of an arbitrary number of sub-feeds configurable by the user, that would be incredible. But every user would have to build these on their own from scratch. Great for user choice, but no communities will come bundled by default, so small communities won’t get a discovery boost.

If instead there was some kind of first-class notion of a “supercommunity” offered on the server side, where it acted as a transparent view of other communities, that’d be a great visibility boost for small communities. But if you tried to post to it, which underlying community would it post to? You’d have to either designate a default community to receive posts (which would be unfair to every other community there), randomize where it goes to (which would be a quagmire, what if your post is allowed in half of the communities present but rule-breaking in the others?), burden the user with choosing (which would be hell if there are a lot), or simply make it read-only. I don’t really like any of these. It also raises hairy questions about who will control which communities are and are not part of the group, how the groupings react to defeds, etc.

pixelscript ,

I am going to continue to tell people “just get an AMD card”, but only if they have indicated to me that they are shopping for new parts and haven’t committed to any yet.

Giving that advice to someone who already has an Nvidia card is just as useless as those StackOverflow answers that suggest you dump your whole project architecture and stuff some big dumb library into your build to solve a simple problem.

pixelscript ,

Nvidia and AMD broadly cover the same use cases. Nvidia cards are not intrinsically better to my knowledge, Nvidia simply offers ultra high-performance cards that AMD doesn’t.

If you just need nonspecific games to run decently, a card from either brand will do it. If you need to run the most intensive games there are on unbelievable settings, that’s when Nvidia should be edging out.

ML dabbling may complicate things. Many (most?) tools are written for CUDA, which is a proprietary Nvidia technology. I think AMD offers a counterpart but I do not have details. You will need to do more research on this.

pixelscript ,

Generally my policy is that if it’s news I need to hear, it will find its way to me one way or another. I need not go seeking it out. I will look up something I’ve heard if I want more info, but I don’t read news for its own sake.

The great bulk of news that reaches me being second, third, fourth-hand and beyond means I’m not well-informed about anything. But at least I’m not wasting brain cells on whatever dumb shit <celebrity> did, or what shit <politician> said, or what breakthrough <scientist> made that does not remotely lead to the conclusion the article implies, or some journalist’s speculative opinion piece masquerading as news.

If I could just get a dry listing of everything that happened the previous day, only including events of actual consequence like “law passed” or “person died” or “business discontinues product/service”, and leaving behind any event that can be effectively retold as “<person> scrawled message on public toilet stall” (like many celebrity and political articles) or anticipation pieces that try to predict future events, I’d be satisfied.

pixelscript ,

Doing alright, I think.

Had a good weekend. Went to a rodeo and played a lot of Factorio SE.

Discovered yesterday that my clothes dryer vent is plugged. Probably has been for some time, maybe years? Put in a maintenance request to have it fixed. Hopefully in the next couple days I’ll finally be able to dry clothes in a single cycle instead of two. Pretty stoked about that.

Work is a tad stressful. Boss kinda shot from the hip with a new overhaul of our logistical processes and suddenly needs our in-house software restructured with a plethora of new features it was never designed to handle. I fear I won’t meet any of the deadlines at the pace I’m going. Boss seems to understand this at least and isn’t the type to hold me over hellfire about it.

Looking forward to next weekend. Going to an annual Paddy’s Day pub crawl and visiting my parents.

The truth about linux having 15% market share in India.

I am from india. These numbers are inflated due to our population and government and health sector office pc using linux (ubuntu). These office pcs just require a chrome browser and all the work is done on the browser Nobody here cares what os they use in their office pc. I don’t see anyone here switching to linux on their...

pixelscript ,

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

pixelscript ,

No one said it was shameful?

When you're writing a song, how do you know it isn't just a song you've heard before but don't recognise?

I’m currently in the process of writing a song. I’ve got a tune and I’m putting the lyrics together but I’m always concerned that any tune I think of might just be another song I’ve heard somewhere randomly that I don’t remember hearing....

pixelscript ,

The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.

You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.

HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.

The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.

pixelscript ,

Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.

pixelscript ,

Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don’t hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn’t do anything.

In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you’ve declared. You don’t query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.

HTML ““has state””, as in it has a DOM, but it doesn’t do anything with it. You don’t mutate the DOM after it’s built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren’t trivially evident from the state you declared.

You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.

pixelscript ,

Maybe you do know, but in case you don’t, the “convenience fee” is (usually) just the price the vendor has to pay to process a credit card transaction. Because in order to accept credit cards as payment in the first place, they have to pay the credit card network for the privilege.

Providing the exact same service to you is more expensive for them based entirely on the method you use to pay. You bet they’re going to pass that extra expense onto you. The alternative is raising their service charge to eat the cost and screwing over people who pay with check or cash. Which is what most retail stores tend to do.

Though, I agree, I’d rather they just do the fucking math and charge a rate that covers their operating expenses. It’s shouldn’t be my problem to pay their itemized expenses. Just know that if they did so, we’ll be charged the same total either way.

It’s a similar argument with tipping culture. “Oh, you have to tip, employees rely on it to make ends meet!” Sure, but why is that my problem? If the business can’t create a business model that properly pays for the expenses it needs to function, they should go out of business. Raise prices. I’ll pay the same as the tip, fine, just stop playing these frivilous smoke and mirror games with my bill.

pixelscript ,

oh cool. now I can block every trash news article that includes phrases like “blasts”, “slams”, “says”, “should”, “could”, “might”, and “need to”.

pixelscript ,

Particularly in politics and news communities, it indicates a “here is what <vaguely credible source we asked> predicts will happen” article. They’re not all shit by default, but I’m generally not interested in speculation pieces. I only want to know what actions concretely happened, not what some guy anticipates may happen.

pixelscript ,

This is a tremendous amount of cope. Implying there are Lemmy users just lining up to contribute PRs if only it wasn’t written in Rust. Give me a break!

If someone was competent enough to author code that’s fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they’re more than capable of translating those skills to Rust. No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn’t make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax. Maybe a day, even, if the language you are trying to learn is highly similar to one you already know.

pixelscript ,

People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.

People also tend to pick up new skills when they have a driving incentive to do so, like supporting a project they have a vested interest in seeing improved.

You need to learn the language’s structures

Most of the bread and butter ones have analogues in other languages you should readily understand. More language-unique structures are rare; the more niche they are, the lower the odds your ability to contribute in a meaningful way hinges on your understanding of them.

you need to learn how the compiler works

You really don’t, though? Modern compilers, particularly the Rust compiler, are designed to abstract away as much of the details of compilation as possible. If the project really does need to tickle the compiler a certain way to get it to build, it will almost certainly have a buildscript and/or a readme.

you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using

This is true regardless of the language in use. I’m not sure why you brought it up.

you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language

I would imagine most of these language-specific security footguns are either A) so specific that you will never hit the conditions where they apply, B) are so blazingly obvious that code review will illuminate what you did wrong and you can learn how to fix it, or C) so obscure that even the project owner doesn’t understand them, so you’d be at minimum matching the rest of the codebase quality.

Mind, I am not insinuating that one can simply bang out a whole new submodule of a project in an unfamiliar language with minimal learning time. Large contributions to large projects can be hard to make even when you’re a veteran of the language in use, as the complexity of the project in and of itself can be its own massive barrier. But not every contribution needs to be big. And for most contributions, I don’t believe the language is the most significant barrier to entry. It’s a barrier, sure. But not the biggest one.

I’d wager it’s not having a significant impact on the volume of contributions to Lemmy in particular.

pixelscript ,

I got one as a hand-me-down from my father’s office when they replaced all their chairs. It’s pretty well worn and the upholstery is rather frumpy these days, but the bones of the thing are still good.

I remember talking about desk chairs with a friend group and on a lark I thought I’d read off the model on it to demonstrate how unassuming this no-name chair I thought I had was. So I actually said something akin to, “Yeah, it’s just some chair from some company called Herman Miller, whoever that is,” and everyone was aghast. They had to explain to me what Herman Miller actually is, and I was very embarrassed for having accidentally humble bragged about it.

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