Yeah, not great. You always hope that projects under a larger foundation, like GNOME, have a higher bus factor¹, but unless that foundation has dispensible income to pay someone, you’re ultimately still reliant on volunteers and not many people volunteer for maintenance.

What the foundation can do, though, which is also really important, is to hand over the keys to a new maintainer, should you disappear over night.
Like, yeah, forking is great, but some people will never learn of the fork. It happens about once a year that I find someone online who’s still using OpenOffice and that project has been practically dead since 2011.
So, I do hope we can get more open-source projects under some sort of umbrella. No idea how to actually do that, though. I also have open-source projects where I would not even know where to start to get them under some organization…

I mean, Firefox Reader View is probably the closest you will get…

Yeah, I also use the Lemmy webpage on my phone. In particular, I want to be able to come back to posts later, when more of a discussion has unfolded, which is where browser tabs work really well.

The Rust compiler is more sophisticated than most compilers, so it can be slower at the same kind of tasks. But it also just does a different task here.

One of the tradeoffs in Rust’s design is that libraries get compiled specifically for a concrete application. So, whereas in most programming languages, you just download pre-compiled libraries, in Rust, you actually download their source code and compile all of it on your machine.

This isn’t relevant, if you get a pre-built binary. And it’s not particularly relevant during development either, because you get incremental compilation. But yeah, if someone wants to compile a Rust codebase from scratch, then they have to sit through a long build.

Yeah, the good tooling also means it isn’t even terribly difficult for the dev to provide builds, but it isn’t quite as automated as publishing to crates.io, so many don’t bother with automating or manually uploading…

LibreOffice Draw works decently well for this.

Hmm, well no, but don’t you still risk being banned or at least being hidden away by the Algorithm™, if such scandalous thing as a nipple is to be seen?

I’m not sure now, if she actually said this is why she’s on PeerTube. Could also be that other social media platforms pissed her off and then she found a new home on the fediverse.

…just remembered, she recently posted a video, where she’s unboxing a Mastodon plush and figured, maybe she says something there, and yeah: Apparently, she got banned from Instagram a whole bunch of times, so now she’s self-hosting Masto and then evidentally also PeerTube.

https://peertube.doesstuff.social/w/qskCWUnsmJZLZ9ZP4KCiph

Yeah, Lety does some NSFW-adjacent videos, which YouTube is too stuck up for.

Most of the stuff posted to video.thepolarbear.co.uk is.

The guy who hosts the PeerTube instance, Hamish, is hardline anti-big-tech, I believe. Whereas Chris Were and Drew / uoou are mostly just tired of YouTube commenters. Well, and there’s some other folks, who occasionally post there, where I don’t know, whether they post to YouTube, too.

Oh man, I think it’s been taken offline, but there was a video podcast thingamabob on PeerTube, where two dudes would wax philosophically about politics, which they called “Dagoth Hour”. 🙃

(The main baddy in Morrowind is called “Dagoth Ur” and he likes to wax philosophically.)

Usually, the desktop environment devs come together and standardize on something. But yeah, someone has to drive that effort. Open-source isn’t really something you plan, you just need someone to push for it.

I have a big collection of Creative Commons songs. And I wrote a little web music player to stream from my home-server, which I use for listening when I’m working from home, since I didn’t want to install a music player on my work laptop…

For Germany, there’s also https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/index.html which lists the laws in their current version, similar to dejure, but well, the webpage is actually hosted by our government. It’s as official as you’re gonna get on the internet.

Add computer science and you have a programmer.

I mean, while this definitely does happen in reality, in particular if you count data scientists towards programmers, I feel like I need to point out that neither knowing computer science, nor maths, makes you a good programmer.

In fact, if you tell me someone is a computer science professor, I will assume that they are a bad programmer, because programming takes practice, which is not something they’ll have time for.

Yeah, although it doesn’t mean that, say, the top 10 pop songs aren’t blander today than they were 50 years ago.

I’ve heard it argued that Spotify pushes songs to be blander, for example, because:

• they don’t typically get played back as part of an album anymore, so they’re more samey in that they all have to work as a single,
• you don’t want to be the song that stands out, where the user presses Skip, because Spotify will rank those lower, and
• lots of folks now consume music as background noise, so the intricacies of a guitar solo, which would’ve hit like a truck for active listeners, are often just drowned out by traffic noise or may just be too much to take in while you’re learning for school or whatever.

Having said all that, there is the flipside that the top 10 pop songs are less relevant than ever. You’ve got practically an infinite supply of songs to choose from, so you kind of just have to find the good stuff.
That is work, I admit, so I can understand a certain level of frustration, but yeah, it is also something to be excited about, that there is such a huge selection to choose from.

To give a quick highlight, because this case is often politicized and misrepresented:

The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck (1912–2004), a 79-year-old woman, purchased hot coffee from a McDonald’s restaurant, accidentally spilled it in her lap, and suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment. […]

Liebeck’s attorneys argued that, at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C), McDonald’s coffee was defective, and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other establishment.

So, the lawsuit never demanded McDonald’s to put a warning that you’re not supposed to spill hot coffee on yourself. It argued that it’s an unnecessary safety hazard, because the coffee was served at hazardous temperatures.
No matter how many warnings you put down, it can happen that someone spills coffee on themselves and they shouldn’t need to be hospitalized from that.

Runtimes/“VMs” like the JVM also allow nice things like stack traces. I don’t know about the author but I much prefer looking at a stack trace over “segmentation fault (core dumped)”. Having a runtime opens new possibilities for concurrency and parallelism too.

Rust has stacktraces without needing a runtime. Don’t ask me what exactly is going on behind the scenes, but there is a way to request a stacktrace for a given point in the program. And unless you’re doing embedded stuff, a stacktrace is automatically generated for errors.

And as for concurrency/parallelism, it’s correct what you wrote, but I just wanted to point out that it doesn’t have to be a language runtime. Using Rust as an example again, you typically spawn the Tokio async runtime on program start, if you’re gonna do async/await stuff.

I find it annoying, because the hype means that if you’re not building a solution that involves AI in some way, you practically can’t get funding. Many vital projects are being cancelled due to a lack of funding and tons of bullshit projects get spun up, where they just slap AI onto a problem for which the current generation of AI is entirely ill-suited.

Basically, if you don’t care for building useful stuff, if you’re an opportunistic scammer, then the hype is fucking excellent. If you do care, then prepare for pain.

Yeah, modern computers often feel like a scam. Obviously, some things are faster and obviously, we can calculate more complex problems.
But so often, programs are only optimized until they reach a level of “acceptable” pain. And especially with monopolistic, commercial software that level is close to infinity, because well, it’s acceptable so long as customers don’t switch to competitors.

Either way, the slowness that was acceptable twenty years ago is generally still acceptable today, so you get much of the same slowness despite being on a beefier PC.

Yeah, I figured, once I actually thought about it. 😅