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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • An important point to add for someone who hasn’t heard of reproducible builds before: The key difference to a normal build process is that it is 100% deterministic i.e. it produces exactly the same output every time.

    You might think that most built processes would be like this by default, however this is not the case. Compilers and linkers usually have some non-deterministic values that they put in the final binary such as timestamps. For a build to be deterministic these sources of variation must be disabled or mocked to be a repeatable value (i.e. not based on the actual compile time).



  • Would a game that is essentially a micro Linux distro count? I feel that should be pretty doable as a bootable USB stick or CD.

    If you did it that way you’d have to bundle the Linux kernel plus graphics drivers at a minimum. But I wonder how much of the OS you could avoid having. Certainly you wouldn’t need a Desktop Environment. I wonder if you would need something like X or Wayland or if you could get away without that (to run games built in a normal-ish userspace way). I guess finding the minimal environment for SDL would be a good starting point. That sounds like an interesting exercise for sure.

    Although something like that probably isn’t as pure as you’re looking for, it would be pretty cool to do anyway. Maybe we should start a club.









  • In the hamburger menu on the left you should find an “Add account” button. IIRC it says the word “Anonymous” and you have to tap it to show the add account button.

    Some things in Jerboa are a bit confusing for now. Once you get to know where things are it’s pretty good though.



  • The issue I see a lot in the JS ecosystem is laying out documentation like a reference guide, but then not including all parameters or functions. These types of documentation are very helpful if what you need to know is included, because they have nice friendly explanations and examples. But eventually you will run into a parameter that is mentioned on Stack Overflow, or is in a code snippet in the documentation, but then has no further explanation in the documentation, as if it doesn’t exist.

    Projects where the README is the only documentation seem to suffer from this problem the most. They give examples of the most common parameters and functions, and then that’s it.

    In JS this is a big issue because there may be no way to know a parameter even exists, or what values it accepts, unless it is documented.

    A lot of documentation in the Java ecosystem has huge auto-generated monstrosities with absolutely no explanations. In Java this is usually not useful because that information can be found in the types. But in JS it would be incredibly useful. Unfortunately it isn’t as easy to automatically generate that type of documentation for JS.

    Python in my experience has the best of both worlds. It has the friendly explanations and examples. But also has all of the parameters, even if explanations for some are a bit less detailed. And all of that is combined into a single place.





  • For a Reddit/Lemmy app though I would still prefer images to load in the app itself, because it’s more seamless. For now Jerboa handles images and GIFV just like any other link.

    RIF let’s you configure this, which is nice. For Jerboa I think the default should eventually be to load them in the app itself (RIF calls this “Native”).

    Edit: Jerboa does already load the OP image in-app when you open the comments. I think that behavior shouldn’t change. It’s just when you open the image from the news feed that it opens it like a link currently.


  • When you open a link from Jerboa it should open a mini in-app version of your main browser. If your default browser app is set to Firefox it will say “Powered by Firefox” and if it is Chrome it will say “Running in Chrome”. UX wise it is very similar to having a bundled in-app browser. But the rendering is handled by your main browser.

    I’m not up-to date with the story behind this, but my understanding is that new apps that want in-app browers should be implemented in this way. This seems to be the modern way of doing it. The reason for it I believe is mostly security. Your main browser app should be up-to-date on security patches and features, and if apps can just piggie back off that then they don’t need to worry about shipping and patching their own in-app copy of the browser. Also it respects the user’s choice of default browser. So if your default browser is Chrome it will use that for the in-app browser for all apps that work this way (which is quickly becoming most apps).

    Another advantage of doing it this way is that when you use the “Open in Firefox” button it seems to just move the tab from one app to the other rather than reloading it, so it happens almost instantly.