zygo_histo_morpheus

@zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah the way I got out was a bit cryptic, although I think there are multiple ways. I’m shameless enough to use a walkthrough when I’ve been stuck for a while, otherwise I’d be having an even harder time.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Patient gamers, which games have you discovered/played this week?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Planescape: Torment

I haven’t played a lot infinity engine games and I’ve struggled with understanding what the game expects of me in terms of gameplay. Hopefully I’ll internalize that eventually but I’ve been enjoying the writing and vibes so far even if the gameplay feel a bit frustrating and a bit like a chore at the moment.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FOSS Alternative to Chromecast?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Nice, I’ll check it out. I’ve been meaning to customize the desktop a bit more but it works well enough for the moment.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FOSS Alternative to Chromecast?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
There are probably better alternatives, but I have a raspbery pi plugged into my tv and use KDE connect to remote control the mouse and keyboard from my phone
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind is overly Morrowind⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I heart vanilla is a good modlist which has some basic bugfixes and minor but faithful graphical improvements. If you wanna make the game look even better, then Volumetric Clouds, Remiros Groundcover (or some other groundcover mod) and Normal Maps for Everything are some of my top recommendations.

OpenMW (or, alternatively MGE XE if you want to use the original engine for whatever reason) already have some nice graphical improvements baked into them though.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind is overly Morrowind⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think that the driving the empire from Morrowind ever happens in game, but maybe that’s a concequence of the Red Year which in turn is a concequence of the Tribunal losing their power because of the ending of the main quest.

The Tribunal where losing their power anyway, but I suppose that Dagoth Ur could have kept Bar Dau in its place if he’d won, but then everyone would have been transformed into a corpus zombie instead.

The Red Year isn’t part of Morrowind lore, but “what is going to happen with Bar Dau now?” is kind of an open question at the end of the game so it is an event that absolutely builds on things set up in Morrowind
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fallout 4⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
I thought fo4 was underwhelming, but I’m exited to play the fallout 4: london mod which is supposed to drop as soon as possible after the patch, depending on how quickly the script extender gets updated to work with the new version.

It’s set before fallout 1 I think and it won’t have a lot of fallout staples like the pip boy, super mutants or the brotherhood of steel which I think will be a nice change since it feels like Bethesda have overused them a lot. A lot of the promotional material looks fantastic and they seem to have a lot of cool ideas and a professional approach to modding.

The new vegas modding community has kind of a bad track record when it comes to large modding projects but I feel optimistic about folon, but it might be good to temper that optimism with a little bit of caution anyway.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Surely dark UX doesn't work in the long run⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Dark UX is more like features that are intentionally misleading, enchitification is making your product worse in order to be able to make money of it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When "Everything" Becomes Too Much: The npm Package Chaos of 2024 - Socket⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
One problem that’s particular to node is that you can’t unpublish packages if another package depends on them. As it says in the article, that means that no one can unpublish their packages, including the everyone package since someone apparently depends on that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Peak dishwasher is a great concept and I think it highlights something important in the way we think of technology. There’s often this underlying assumption of technological progress, but if we look at a particular area (e.g. dishwashers) we can see that after a burst of initial innovation the progress has basically halted. Many things are like this and I would in fact wager that a large portion of technologies that we use haven’t actually meaningfully developed since the 80s. Computers are obviously a massive exception to this - and there are several more - but I think that we tend to overstate the inevitability of technological progress. One day we might even exhaust the well of smaller and faster computers each year and I wonder how we will continue to view technological progress after that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Using Ocaml to learn FP. What FP concepts should I touch on?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
Algebraic datatypes is a huge part of typed functional programming for me, you should read up on that!
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Git is hard⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I might be suffering from stockholms syndrome here, but my prefered ways of working with git are the cli and the fugitive vim plugin which is a fairly thin wrapper around the cli. It does take a middle ground approach on hiding the magic and forcing you to learn the magic which I suppose can be confusing for begginers when you work collaboratory and something happens that forces you to go beyond pull/add/commit/push
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I think you know what I mean when I contrast Rust with GC’d languages, we can call it opt-in garbage collection if we’re being pedantic.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
If you just Rc everything (which I’d count as “abusing Rc”) Rust is significantly worse than a language with a good GC. The good thing about Rust is that it forces you to aknowledge and consider the lifetimes of objects. By default things are allocated on the stack, but if you make something global or dynamically handled (e.g. through Rc) you have to do so explicitly. In Rust the compiler has greater compile time information about when things can be freed which means that you need less runtime overhead to check things and if you want to minimize the amount of potentially long-lived objects you can more easily see how long objects might live by reading the code as well as get help by the compiler to determine if a lifetime-based refactoring is sound or not.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Haskell. I think that more people being familliar with Haskell concepts would be good for programing culture and it would increase the odds of me being able to write Haskell professionally, which is something I enjoy a lot when writing hobby code at least. Having more access to tooling and a bigger eco system would be nice as well.

I’m not a 100% sure about my answer though. For one, I might grow to resent Haskell if I had to use it at work, and there’s also a risk that it would be harder to do cool innovative stuff with the language when more big companies depend on it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
You are absolutely correct that rusts safety features don’t extend to memory leaks, but it’s still better than most garbage collected languages unless you abuse Rc or something, and it does give you quite fine-grained controll over lifetimes, copying and allocations on the heap which in practice means that rust is fairly good about memory leakages compared to most languages.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hi, I want to start programming but dunno where to start and which language to learn⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t think boolean logic is a necessary prerequisite for coding, if you don’t know it yet it makes more sense to learn about it when you come across a programing problem where you’ll want to use it imo
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I’m about to throw my entire Pihole out the window⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
It’s not that much of a strain since it only handles DNS traffic.

When you go to e.g. programming.dev, you computer needs to know the actual IP and not just domain name so it asks a DNS server and recieves an answer like 172.67.137.159 for example. The pihole will just route the traffic to a real DNS server if it’s a normal website or give a unkown ip kind of answer if it’s a blacklisted domain. Actually transmitting the website which is the bulk of trafic is handled without the piholes involvement.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which programming language is hard to understand?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I can see how PS might be better for writing actual programs in but the wordiness really gets in the way when youre just trying to write something on the command line so it feels poorly optimized for cli usage. Bash is very poorly optimized for writing programs otoh.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which programming language is hard to understand?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
What’s esoteric about Rusts syntax? I can’t relate at all, but maybe I had just the right background of languages commin into Rust.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linear code is more readable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
One downside with the code on the right is that it’s not obvious where the different functions might be called from. In the example on the left, we know that we’re not, say, adding toppings to a pizza that we haven’t baked. If we notice a bug in the topping adding function on the right, we might get tempted to reason about adding toppings as a general process that needs to handle all kinds of situations when in practice is doesn’t.

When you have single use functions like this it’s good to limit the scope of the function using whatever language features are available so that you can more easily reason about where it’s being called from
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would it take for you to move away from Github?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I’m not in charge of many open source projects but the last one I actually put up on gitlab instead. We use gitlab at internally at work and it’s completely fine. I mostly use my github account to interact with repos that other people host on github.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
I think that there might be a fundamental missunderstanding here: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use tabs to accomodate people with disabilities, I’m saying that better editor features seems like a better “solution” to the problem.

In the abscence of editor improvements I agree that it makes sense to use tabs to accomodate disabilities, I just don’t think that it will catch on that mutch. I don’t think that spaces (imo) being slightly better is a good reason to not accomodate dissabilities by using tabs right now, but I do hope there is a more editor oriented solution some day because I think it would propably be better both for people with visual disabilities and without.

Being in a slightly argumentative mood might have led me down towards validating this false dicotomy between editors and tabs, and I apologize for wasting both our time because of this.

You do have a point that I personally might have more influence over if a given project has spaces or tabs than if better editor features are made, but I think that there can be a point to having the poor support for programming that is apparently offered by screen readers to take some place in the discussion as well since that is a potentially more important piece of the puzzle.

I can’t imagine that there is much of a point to keep replying after this so I think I’ll leave it here.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Thank you for the insight, didn’t expect it to be that dire. Tabs and spaces nonwithstanding, hope that the screen reader/braille display tooling situation improves in the future, sounds like it is sorely needed.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
Do you think it matters if getting a large number of people to switch to tabs is an achievable project at all? Maybe I am a bit cynical but this seems to me like something that is actually very difficult to do.

When faced with a problem like this I think it makes more sense to approach it from a perspective of what would be a practical way to actually address it and refusing to do that does I think in its own way betray a different kind of cynicism.

For the record what I’m saying isn’t that I wouldn’t switch to tabs for the sake of people with various disabilities, I’m saying that spaces are slightly better than tabs so if there is a way to have the cake and eat it to that would be a nice bonus, but that’s honestly besides the point.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

There’s a difference between doing something that’s “easier” and what’s right.

The way I see it, there are two competing strategies for improving the experience for braille screen users: making tabs more widely used and improving braille oriented editors. Without knowing for sure, my guess is that improving editors is a better strategy and this is in part because it is easier.

As a matter of principle it might be “more right” for people without visual disabilities to adjust themselves to people with visual disabilities than vice versa, but I also think that it’s important to care about what is actually likely to improve braille screen users experience and not default to the more principled goal without any consideration for how realistic it is.

(Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors, but since you referred to this as the “easy” solution it doesn’t sound like you’re disputing this specifically.)
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

Arguing that it’s invincible to convince people at large to adopt tabs over spaces with good arguments is a ridiculous statement

I do actually think that it is very hard to convince basically every programmer of something, no matter how good arguments you have.

Also, without knowing much about the issue, it sounds a bit like the tooling for people using braille displays isn’t very good and fixing that is maybe also worth advocating for, perhaps it’s even a strategy for advocacy that is more effective?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
My spontaneous reaction is that making some sort of braille oriented setting for some or hopefully most editors used by people with braille displays (I have no idea if using a “normal” editor even makes sense if you’re using a braille display) is the most pragmatic solution to their screens being taking up by spaces.

First of all, convincing everyone to use tabs is a monumental task. Convincing people with braille displays to use more convenient tools on the other hand seems pretty easy, why wouldn’t you want to use more convenient tools?

Secondly, there is a large amount of code written with spaces today, so even if people switch with tabs in the future you might still want to be able to read legacy code.

Thirdly, I don’t think that the choice of tabs vs. spaces is completely arbitrary because of alignment. Using tabs for indentation and space for alignment leads to a lot more micro management of whitespace compared to just using spaces. I would guess that alignment isn’t very braille friendly anyway, but it does make the code more readable for other people. Having a good braille editor affordance might be closer to letting us have our cake and eat it too.

Of course, I don’t know what this would look like exactly, and maybe there’s some sort of obstacle that I’m overlooking, I do want to be clear that this is just of the top of my head as someone who has never used a braille display.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

Another accessibility reason for tabs: when using a braille display, each space takes up one character cell, so indenting with four spaces eats up four cells. Indenting three times with four spaces each eats up 12 characters already. Tabs only take one character cell each, so three indents = three character cells used.

The fact that there (I assume?) isn’t a braille oriented text editor that can handle space-based indentation in a smarter way is a bit depressing. Maybe the solution should be better tools based around accessibility rather than convincing everyone to switch to tabs, which is a project that will just never succeed.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:
It’s hard to do this consistently (especially in a team) because people might (and statistically in a large enough project, will) use the tab key for alignment since it’s faster than pressing space, or just be confused about what whitespace is tabs and what is space. Just using space everywhere is idiot proof and requires no work to micromanage. The only way to use tabs is to not align at all.