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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

    Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

    At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it


  • Why do you think C is the one true language? It’s a tool.

    There’s a single very simple answer to “what tool should I use?”. Use the best tool for the job

    The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What’s in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

    For you, the best tool might always be C. I don’t know how you’ve specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there’s just no better option for the jobs you take on

    For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I’ve chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I’m not meticulous, it’s against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don’t need to understand to start doing

    All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won’t be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

    The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can’t afford the cost

    Ultimately, I think you’ve correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn’t the tools, it’s the fact that the cost is someone else’s time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

    A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can’t - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don’t know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don’t know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

    So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don’t want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don’t want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

    That’s the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I’d go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

    Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren’t the problem - the economics are the problem


  • Agreed, but I think it’s more than that

    I don’t think he’s offering them plane tickets. That means they have enough wealth to move there - it would instantly be a shot in the arm for the Russian economy. They’d get a captive market, and he’s not even inviting them to be Russian

    That selector also means they’re more likely to have useful skills, and the messaging is targeting people very susceptible to Russia style propaganda - he could censor their connection to the outside world, and they’d thank him for it

    Also, if NATO arms hit American civilians, that would be a powerful message to reduce international support for Ukraine or NATO.

    They’re too valuable. They’d pay off for him immediately, and long term he’d have an isolated community that is just begging to chug the Kool aid


  • It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron

    We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then

    It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support

    Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently


  • I’m split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm

    On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy’s problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it’s already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it’ll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference

    Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so shrug



  • Just to put this in context:

    There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

    Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

    So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason










  • Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

    The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

    Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

    I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

    I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

    And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet