I’m currently prototyping a macro to help reduce boilerplate, as part of a more general library. And I’m doing some wild shit, like defining the fields of a data type from the parameter list of a function.

But then, yeah, what I’m now stuck on is that my generated code references a data type under one name, but it’s actually got a different name in the public API. All the wild shit was smooth sailing, but a technicality now fucks me over. 🫠

I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.

But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.

So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.

Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.

In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.

Sure, but as it happens with multiplayer games, you typically have a friend group that plays a certain game. Getting all of them to switch to another game can definitely be a problem.

Eh, it’s gonna depend on your taste in games. If competitive multiplayer games are your thing, then it is a problem. But sure, there’s lots of people who have zero interest in competitive multiplayer.

Or a bus seat…

recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.

Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.

This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.

I believe, it mainly has to do with dark-theme screens quickly becoming illegible when there’s outside light sources. It just isn’t bright enough to overpower the glare from the sun and such.

That is genuinely one of the reasons why I use light theme. Like, have you see how bright the fucking sun is? My light-themed screen is still a joke compared to looking outside the window. So, I’m trying to help along my circadian rhythm by at least somewhat simulating the sun on my screen.

Oh man, a few years ago, we had a military dude as conductor in our wind band. And I was always one of his favorites, I’m guessing because I have broad shoulders and a deep voice – prime military recruit material.

…except that I’m vegan. So, one day he sits next to me during lunch and asks me why I’m vegan. I do the usual dance of avoiding the topic, but he does not want to let it go. So, I tell him that I think killing animals is wrong. He walked out of that conversation like a hurt gazelle.

Like, fuck me, dude, if you’re gonna do the whole military tough guy spiel, but cannot take a kid disagreeing with you, then maybe you’re not as tough after all.

That argument annoys me so much. Each vegetable does cover all amino acids, they just don’t have them in the exact relations that our body needs. But if a vegetable has only 50% of one amino acid compared to the distribution that our body needs, then you can abso-fucking-lutely just eat double of that vegetable. Or as you say mix-and-match.

A typical Western diet includes far more protein than the body needs for maintaining itself either way.

Ah yeah, there’s various technologies that I don’t mention too loudly. For example, all things considered, I’m probably an above-average Python dev, but I never enjoyed writing it, so when I get asked about it, I always answer that I’m not too confident with it.

Which, in my defense, isn’t even really a lie. My specialty is large-scale projects, which is something where Python with its loose typing just does not give you confidence…

Hmm, I don’t add extra water when I cook spinach. I just wash it, fill up my pot with it, throw in salt and a splash of oil, then the kid on top.

After a few minutes, I’ve got a couple spoonfuls of tasty goodness.

…I did just notice the typo, but I also threw myself away laughing, so I’m keeping it.

My answer is also every industry. It’s like asking what industry could benefit from collaboration.

Today, I was on a networking event for an industry that is currently heavily looking to adopt open-source collaboration, due to cost pressure. And it was such a surreal experience.

You had dozens of human beings in this room, who all understood that collaboration is good. Who understood that the shared goal of surviving as an industry requires collaboration. Who understood each other as human beings.

But because they collect their paychecks from different companies, you had these stupid infights of “our product is better”, as well as monetization always being prioritized higher than collaboration success.
It did not feel like we were working on a shared goal, and rather like each company was just trying to sell their product. Rather than one solution, there were as many solutions as there were companies, each one pitching their solution as the one solution everyone else should agree on.

Yeah, I don’t know what the moral of the story is. It just felt so incredibly stupid.

I do not believe there to be a higher meaning. Nor for that fact to have particular meaning. As such, I also do not assign particular meaning to suffering. But others don’t seem to enjoy it much, so I throw myself with full force against it, because why not?

Copy Link to Highlight is my favorite addition.

Yeah, that is also my primary motivation, to not need to interact with hairdressers. 😅

I do also like it a lot, though, that I can just cut it every 2-3 weeks. My hair is a lot easier to take care of when it’s short, and I look sharper, so I can just keep it short all the time.