robinsonb5

7 ms·

61.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
OOM killers serve a purpose but - for a desktop OS - they're missing the point. In a sane world the user would decide which application to shut down, not the OS; the user would click the appropriate application's close gadget, and
62.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
Yeah I think SSD / NVME makes all the difference here - I certainly remember XP / Vista / Win 7 boxes that became unusable and more-or-less unrecoverable (just like Linux) once a swap storm starts.
63.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
I still have a dusty old XP box here with PageMaker 7 on it. As long as you don't need transparency effects it's still plenty capable. I used to use it with an Agfa Accuset imagesetter - and in that role it was more capable than I
64.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
More to the point, no documentation on how they work this year.
65.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
> Shouldn't you manage permissions from groups instead of hacking udev? Well my user is a member of plugdev, but by default udev has no clue that it should allow plugdev members to access some obscure third-party FPGA board. Someone
66.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
To quote TFA: "...outputs strictly designed to farm green squares on github, grind out baseless bug bounties, artificially inflate sprint velocity, or maliciously comply with corporate KPI metrics".
67.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
If code becomes essentially free (ignoring for a moment the environmental cost or the long term cost of allowing code generation to be tollboothed by AI megacorps) the value of code must lie in its track record. The 5-day-old code in charde
68.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
I don't have a problem with the concept of udev - I just find the details to be laden with papercuts. Needing different syntax depending on which subsystem is interacting with the device makes no sense from a user perspective. To cove
69.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
I can't help feeling that the old XKCD cartoon [1] about life satisfaction being proportional to the time since last opening xorg.conf could equally apply to udev. For instance, I tinker with FPGA boards, and one board in particular pr
70.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
This indeed the real issue (not the AI angle per se, but the wholesale replacement. The licensing issue is real, but less important IMO). Half a million lines of code have been deleted and replaced over the course of four days, directly t
71.
by robinsonb5 7mo ago
Perhaps - but an argument might still be made that the result is a derivative work of the original, given that it's produced by feeding the original work through automated tooling. But either way, deleting the original version from the
72.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
As someone with only the vaguest ideas of how cryptography works under the hood (and none at all about how elliptic curves might be useful) this turned out to be the primer I didn't know I needed! I found it really accessible and well-
73.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for free.
74.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
To be honest I have similar reservations. The one huge advantage of C is its ubiquity - you can use it on the latest shiny computer / OS / compiler as well as some obscure embedded platform with a compiler that hasn't been up
75.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
The fact that you have to know to use uv rather than any of the other package managers is kind of the point.
76.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
Personally I prefer a keyboard with a gentle curve rather than an actual split - the old Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 was my favourite for many years, but mine have all failed with membrane issues now. I'm probably going to end up buil
77.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments. You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of
78.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
"Equally jarring and out-of-place on all platforms" isn't quite what I asked for, but I guess it's the next best thing! ;)
79.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
Another factor is the lack of a good cross-platform GUI toolkit (by which I mean one that (a) doesn't feel out-of-place and jarring on any platform and (b) doesn't turn a 50K app into a 1GB download.) Between that and the level of
80.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
I would think they're gut core with metal winding around them - much as the bass strings on a classical guitar are nylon with a metal winding. On a modern instrument the core would be metal as well.
81.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
There's certainly something to be said for stable, uncomplicated and minimalist tooling that wont evolve out from under you and leave you with something that won't just-work five years from now. I guess that's why Tcl is so p
82.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
Very impressive - graphically it runs very smoothly on Firefox under Linux - but unfortunately the audio is extremely choppy.
83.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
> Surely you wouldn't expect -1 == 0 to evaluate to true. I wouldn't, no - but that's exactly what's happening in the test case. Likewise, I wouldn't expect -1 == 1 to evaluate to true, but here we are. The stric
84.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
I don't mean interactivity within apps, per se - I mean the desktop and underlying OS, so that if an electron app goes unresponsive and eats all the free RAM the window manager can still kill it. Or you can still open a new terminal w
85.
by robinsonb5 8mo ago
Indeed. I think what's really needed is some way to mark pages as "required for interactivity" so that nothing related to the user interface gets paged out, ever. That, I think, would go at least some way towards restoring t
86.
by robinsonb5 9mo ago
> In my experience error diffusion often gets muddy due to dot gain Absolutely - there's a reason why traditional litho printing uses a clustered dot screen (dots at a constant pitch with varying size). I've spent some time tin
87.
by robinsonb5 9mo ago
> and ignores the window manager decorations. That's because Gtk4 does "client side decoration". That has the advantage (or otherwise, depending on your point of view!) that the application can now place custom widgets in
88.
by robinsonb5 9mo ago
A hugely entertaining blog post, despite subject matter that could easily result in very dry reading.
89.
by robinsonb5 9mo ago
You might an internet search for "Array mbira" entertaining.
90.
by robinsonb5 9mo ago
For me the liberty question you raised there isn't so much about whether the business has become large, as whether it's become "infrastructure". Being denied service by a cake shop may very well be distressing and hurtfu

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