• 6 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • The problem is that Nazis love to appeal to some hypothetical right to freedom of speech, because they want to shift the Overton window. That is why people are being particular with the wording here and why your post is getting downvotes.

    It also makes it hard to answer, because, well, if you are a Nazi, expect to be banned from various communities and instances significantly faster than on Reddit. Supporting the harm of others is not an opinion worth tolerating.

    The moderators on my instance have banned people for repeatedly asking what exactly is allowed to be said, and I’ve come to support that decision, because yeah, Overton window and all that.


  • Good question. My best guess is that the buttons have become less important, because:

    • they try to auto-detect where a signal comes,
    • they have better defaults, so you don’t really need to change settings, and
    • even monitor brightness can partially be controlled by the OS.

    But yeah, I got a new monitor at work, and instead of buttons, it has a joystick on the backside. Now the monitor’s menu pops up every so often, I’m guessing because something shook the joystick just enough to trigger it.
    When I saw that joystick for the first time, I wondered how long it’ll take before it breaks, but it’s broken on day 1, so that’s great. 🫠




  • A few years ago, I set up a home-server with music and some pictures on there, and recently I noticed that my storage disk was getting full. Then I saw that the disk only had 16 GB and wondered, where the hell I got that small of a disk from.

    So, I go to plug in a bigger disk and can’t even find the original disk at first. Turns out my whole storage capacity was one of these bad boys:

    Spoiler

    A tiny USB-A stick, designed for keeping it plugged into a laptop at all times.

    And yeah, I’ve got about 1800 songs, clocking in at 5.8 GB, so even that tiny storage would easily be enough for a much larger collection.
    And I do also have them replicated on my phone, for listening on the go. (Don’t even need an SD card in my case.)




  • I’m weirdly deeply invested, like I’ve got decent headphones, I’ve composed songs before, I’ve played two instruments, and like someone else posted, I’ve also implemented my own music player program.

    But man, I struggle with feeling it as art. I don’t know, if that’s a case of music-maker being snobby about everyone else’s music, while being too critical of their own music. Maybe my expectations are just too high.
    Like, I’m trying to create lyric-less music where I feel a meaning. And at times, I’m amazed that I can evoke the sense of snowfall. But at many other times, it just sounds paperthin to me, and I still haven’t managed to really portray a deeper meaning.

    Maybe I’m just frustrated, because poems come more naturally to me (and yes, I am dense for not adding lyrics to my songs 🫠).




  • Man, at $DAYJOB, if we open-source something, they tell us to check for checked-in passwords and whatnot, and force us to throw away the commit history, which always feels stupid when we’ve known upfront that we’re going to open-source it and so kept things clean from the start.

    But then, yeah, you see a post like that and just think that it really wouldn’t have been too difficult to search for swear words before publishing.
    I mean, I also don’t really care, since it’s code rather than an official communication channel, but I can understand why management might care.


  • I thought about creating something like that and the major problem that I see is that lots of meme templates do have copyright and the font that’s typically used for memes, Impact, isn’t free either. Well, and it isn’t done by merely developing a software and offering it for download. You would need to host the meme templates or some editor webpage, which is a whole 'nother skillset.

    If we say that users bring their own meme template, and it can be a free font that looks similar to Impact, and it’s not to be hosted as a webpage, then it would be quite doable.
    You would “just” need to call the ImageMagick library with the right parameters. Still not trivial, but the path to get there is fairly straightforward. I could imagine that something like that already exists as an open-source project…



  • One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

    Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.
    And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

    In effect, this meant:

    1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
    2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
    3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I’m not giving myself overly broad access. And because it’s an Excel, they can’t really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

    Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything…




  • Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don’t want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.
    It’s just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it’s been a few versions, so maybe they’ve fixed it. It’s always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.


    To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that’s supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.
    The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn’t work.
    The second time, I couldn’t click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.
    And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.

    Instead, I’ve slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it’s definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.


  • I’ve seen it argued that the best way to create lightweight software is to give devs old hardware to develop on.

    Which, yeah, I can see that. The problem is that as a dev, you might have some generic best practices in your head while coding, but beyond that, you don’t really concern yourself with performance until it becomes an issue. And on new hardware, you won’t notice the slowness until it’s already pretty bad for those on older hardware.

    But then, as the others said, there’s little incentive to actually give devs old hardware. In particular, it costs a lot of money to have your devs waiting for compilation on older hardware…