sping

joined 2 years ago
[–] sping 7 points 2 days ago

I know about window managers and how using them will reduce the memory usage by system a lot because they are less bloated etc.

Ehhhh... I think it's more "not using a curated general-purpose DE", rather than "using a WM". All graphical systems include a WM, and a DE in some senses is more of a concept or category than a concrete thing. The choice is whether it's one you cobble a DE together yourself, or use a pre-configured, curated one.

Many people use stand-alone WMs and then create their own DE, but quite a few of us put the WM of our choice within existing DE because we want the WM but have no interest in re-inventing all those DE wheels (and/or have >4Gb memory so the "bloat" is not an issue). In my case it's i3 on Gnome via gnome-flashback.

Curated DEs do tend to use more resources - typically mostly memory - partly because they tend to be comprehensive for diverse users. Rolling your own minimal DE for your personal needs can often be lighter weight. If you have a very constrained system then it can be beneficial, though that circumstance is more and more unusual these days when 8Gb of memory is often considered "minimal".

The main reasons for making your own DE is to do things exactly the way you want, at the expense of having to do it. Beware though, there will be various helpful features of DEs you may not realize you appreciate until you have realize you don't have them. E.g. what happens when you plug in a USB drive? Nothing, by default - a DE usually manages that. SSHing into servers a lot - a credentials agent is nice - better add one of those...

A lot of rolling your own DE is months or years of "oh yeah, that is a useful thing to have; I need to find tools and configure them to do that". Conversely, dropping your WM of choice into another DE is often a case of "huh, that happens automagically; nice!".

[–] sping 4 points 5 days ago

Dynamic typing is shit. But type annotation plus CI checkers can give you the same benefits in most cases.

[–] sping 9 points 5 days ago

Once you need performance

If you need more performance. Many things just don't.

[–] sping 2 points 1 week ago

I think that's a slightly different animal. AFAIK it's doesn't switch config depending on the current focused window. E.g. for some programs I don't want remapping.

[–] sping 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I use a key remapper to give me the readline keys everywhere. Though I've used XKeysnail and xremap and they're both a bit flakey, so if anyone has better recommendations that work on X11 and Wayland, I'm all ears.

[–] sping 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I have decades as a SWE, including deep (but now out-of-date) C++ experience, a lot more recently in serious Python systems, and a fair amount of web UI dev on the side.

Now I have 1 year with Go. I came to it with an open mind having heard people sing its praises I thought it would be broadening to spend some time with a language new to me.

My advice now is do anything you can to avoid working in golang. Almost daily, I seriously contemplate whether it'd be worth quitting and being unemployed, even in this economy (US). It is a better C, but that's a low, low bar at least for the project domains I ever work in. Where it's an even plausible answer, Rust is probably a better one (I think? - haven't used Rust for anything real).

[–] sping 3 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

That seems to be the Go way. Why put it in a library when everyone can just re-implement it themselves (and test and document it too, right? Right?).

E.g. There isn't even a standard set object, everyone just implements it as a map pointing to empty structs, and you get familiar with that and just accept it and learn to understand what it means when someone added an empty struct to a map. And then people try to paint this as a virtue of the language.

[–] sping 1 points 3 weeks ago

That's ironic. Few countries have less readable plates.

[–] sping 1 points 3 weeks ago

Excellent description of the zeitgeist.

Your portrait of before generative AI is a bit hard to square with the ad driven internet, but fits ever better the further back you go.

Yeah, we're turning it all to shit in so many ways simultaneously, it's truly something awful to behold. Maybe there is a singularity coming after all, but it's not one like the credulous tech worshippers imagined.

[–] sping 15 points 4 weeks ago

To be fair though only some are ok with Palantir. They made some useful generic developer tools and quite a few refused to use them.

And there is a lot of free software ethos was born out of MIT. Free as in libre, not free as in beer. This may all have been a mistake, but quite a few people in our are ok.

[–] sping 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Also depends on your variant of English, because North American Biscuits are very different from the rest of the anglophone world's biscuits. Many of them are unleavened, just as most gods don't have a strong position on whether you should use leavening at any time of the year, let alone now.

 

Well someone has to post something to this Somerville Community... So it has to be something about the community path obviously...

Google maps is always rubbish for bicycle navigation, but OpenStreetMap offers three different navigation systems for bikes, all of which are better. I'm most impressed with GraphHopper - 3 days into the community path opening will happily route you down the new path. It doesn't seem to know about the High School diversion, but that's realtively minor.

Its route for me to get to the Seaport from near Davis is pretty much what I would choose.

 

This is my rescued Marin Hamilton, that over the years has evolved into a modern take on the old English 3-speed. My former commuter was stolen, and at the same time this appeared, broken, rusty, and abandoned on the same office bike rack (coincidence?). I saved it before the office management sent it to the trash, and got it on the road again.

The wheel bearing races were pitted from rusty neglect and I find SS awkward in the urban stop-start, so after a failed experiment with an SRAM Automatix 2-speed hub I fitted a Sturmey Archer 3 speed. 3rd is a single-speed ratio, 1 & 2 are for hills and setting off. It's a sweet setup for my area and usage, and is almost as robust and low maintenance as SS.

A transportation bike needs fenders (Velo Orange Zeppelins - excellent, effective, silent). The original fork rang like a tuning fork on braking no matter what brakes or pads, so I got a $40 Marin fork off Ebay and converted the front to disk, and put on generator lighting at the same time.

And just now it got some luxury new tires - Schwalbe Marathon Supreme 700x50 on the label, but are actually 43mm, in typical Schwalbe fashion. Great tires though - light and fast and grippy and durable and puncture resistant.

It's a fast and comfortable city bomber. I have a little TSDZ2 motor and battery that I fit each year for commuting the hottest summer months, and then in winter it gets studs to get me through the ice and slush. For fairer weather riding I have a very similar derailleur bike and the pair of them get me around nicely.

 

In Cambridge, MA, USA, and nearby communities, bike advocates have made real progress with lanes and paths and general infrastructure. Also the city requires that new builds have a proper bike room. This building was recently gutted and fitted out and this is the bike room today - overloaded, and the building is barely half full... Looks like they will need to find more efficient bike racks!

Meanwhile in a recent commute I was in a queue of 30 bicycles at a light at which about 6-8 cars get through at a time. 10-15 years ago I was one of the few bikes on the roads at any time.

Hats off to the advocates and representatives of the local cities that have made this happen through continuous pressure and work over decades...

 

The lack of keyboard interface on Lemmy is killing me, but really what I want is a good client in Emacs. However, it's beyond my Elisp to design and start such a project, but I could probably help. Anyone on it?

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