IAm_A_Complete_Idiot
@IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption 4 months ago:
There’s a transaction fee, the higher you pay the more priority you have (since miners get a cut).
- Comment on Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app 6 months ago:
Not in this one, iirc they actually reverse engineered and were working off of apple libraries, rather than proxies.
- Comment on Apache Allura: an open source implementation of a software forge 7 months ago:
The data model there is fundamentally different. That would break how git would work because operations that worked one way before would now no longer work that way. You’d functionally have rewritten and mapped all the old functionality to new functionality with subtle differences, but at that point is it even git? You have a wrapper with similar but subtly different commands and that’s it. It’s like saying “instead of reinventing functionality by building both ext4 and btrfs, why don’t we just improve ext4”?
The two are practically entirely different.
- Comment on Apache Allura: an open source implementation of a software forge 7 months ago:
It being objectively better then SVN doesn’t mean that it’s the best we can do. Git has all sorts of non-ideal behaviors that other VCS’s don’t. Pijul’s data structure for instance is inherently different from git and it can’t be retrofitted on top. Making tooling only support got effectively kills off any potential competitors that could be superior to git.
One example is pijul specifically let’s you get away from the idea that moving commits between branches changes their identity, because pijul builds a tree of diffs. If two subtrees of diffs are distinct, they can always be applied without changing identity of those diffs. This means “cherry picking” a commit and then merging a commit doesn’t effectively merge that commit twice resulting in a merge conflict.
That’s one example how one VCS can be better.
- Comment on Apache Allura: an open source implementation of a software forge 7 months ago:
Not OP, but personally yes. Every code forge supporting only git just further enforces git’s monopoly on the VCS space. Git isn’t perfect, nor should be treated as perfect.
The above is probably the reason why so many alternative VCS’s have to cludge themselves onto git’s file format despite likely being better served with their own.
Interesting new VCS’s, most supporting their own native format as well for various reasons:
- pijul
- sapling
- jujutsu
Sapling is developed by meta, jujutsu by an engineer at Google. Pijul is completely FOSS and was developed by an academic iirc. If you’re okay with not new:
- mercurial
- fossil
- darcs
VCS’s are still being itterated on and tooling being super git centric hurts that.
- Comment on Mozilla will move Firefox development from Mercurial to Microsoft’s GitHub 7 months ago:
It’s not battle tested on massive projects nor does it have the prior mindshare git has. It doesn’t have a lot of tooling either. (Does any CI/CD system support pijul?) It has nice properties, but ultimately git with all it’s terrible warts is well understood.
- Comment on I've lately been making my git commit messages with AI 7 months ago:
Yeah, good commit messages are about intent and context of a change - not what the change itself is. We can look at the diff for that. Just write a single line or two summarizing what the commit does, and everything else should be adding context on top that doesn’t directly exist in the codebase.
- Comment on I've lately been making my git commit messages with AI 7 months ago:
Not having to swap over to a ticketing system just to see the context of a change is really nice (Or to add context on why changes are done a certain way). One line that says what you changed, then any context such as why it was done that way, and important notes about that change works wonders. It’s pretty much the exact model the Linux kernel uses, and it makes looking at changes great for anyone down the line.
- Comment on A Linear Algebra Trick for Computing Fibonacci Numbers Fast 7 months ago:
According to the benchmark in the article it’s already way faster at n = 1000. I think you’re overestimating the cost of multiplication relative to just cutting down n logarithmically.
log_2(1000) = roughly 10, which is a hundred times less than 1000. 2000 would be 11, and 4000 would be 12. Logs are crazy.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
It looks like on blender’s website there’s 6 entities on there, and one of them does seem to be an individual fwiw. Here’s his website: aras-p.info.
The rest all seem to be corporations though - meta, aws, some game company I’ve never heard of, AMD, and epic.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
I just checked their financial report for 2022 and it looks like 50% came from patron funding (which looks like entirely companies like Google), 5% from epics grant, and then 10% corporate membership. 20% came from individuals, and the rest from random other miscellaneous things like the blender market.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
Wikimedia foundation is, none of the other things I listed are.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
I think the key there is funding from big companies. There’s tons of standards and the like in which big companies take part - both in terms of code and financial support. Big projects like the rust compiler, the Linux kernel, blender, etc. all seem to have a lot of code and money coming in from big companies. Sadly there’s only so much you can get from individuals - pretty much the only success story I know of is the wikimedia foundation.
- Comment on Docker vs Podman, which one to choose for a beginner and why ? 7 months ago:
The point is to minimize privilege to the least possible - not to make it impossible to create higher privileged containers. If a container doesn’t need to get direct raw hardware access, manage low ports on the host network, etc. then why should I give it root and let it be able to do those things? Mapping it to a user, controlling what resources it has access to, and restricting it’s capabilities means that in the event that my container gets compromised, my entire host isn’t necessarily screwed.
- Comment on Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption? 7 months ago:
How would rust fare any better then a tracing GC? Realistically I’d expect them to use more memory, and also have worse determinism in memory management - but I fail to really see a case where rust would prevent it and GC languages wouldn’t.
- Comment on Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption? 7 months ago:
There’s built in functions to leak memory that are perfectly safe. You can also do one really trivially by making a reference count cycle. doc.rust-lang.org/…/ch15-06-reference-cycles.html
Rust only prevents memory unsafety - and memory leaks are perfectly safe. It’s use after frees, double frees, etc. It prevents.
- Comment on Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption? 7 months ago:
Rust doesn’t guarantee the lack of memory leaks anymore then java/C++ does, so sadly not sure if it would help here. :)
- Comment on Let's encrypt? 8 months ago:
Yeah. There’s reasoning for why they do it on their docs, but the reasoning iirc is kanidm is a security critical resource, and it aims to not even allow any kind of insecure configuration. Even on the local network.
- Comment on Let's encrypt? 8 months ago:
Kanidm doesn’t require a CA, it just requires a cert for serving https (and it enforces https - it refuses to even serve over HTTP). I think that was just the OP not quite understanding the conceptual ideas at play.
- Comment on Let's encrypt? 8 months ago:
Kanidm wants to directly have access to the letsencrypt cert. It refuses to even serve over HTTP, or put any traffic over it since that could allow potentially bad configurations. It has a really stringent policy surrounding how opinionated it is about security.
- Comment on Best free (preferably FOSS) Rust IDE for MacOS 8 months ago:
While part of me agrees, I will say most ecosystems have some glaring flaws in them. Python’s lack of lock files in particular is something that annoys me to no end. Having to use poetry, pipenv, or whatever else people are using now to get around it sucks. Python’s lack of being able to use multiple versions of the same library is also a thing… but not something I’ve found issues with personally.
I’m not going to say cargo is some mind blowing system cause I really don’t think it’s innovative, at all - but I do think it’s far better than most ecosystems just due to benefits of hindsight. Having an opinionated, simple build system that does all the right things out of the box is valuable, and I can’t think of any mainstream language that really hits that mark otherwise.
- Comment on Best free (preferably FOSS) Rust IDE for MacOS 8 months ago:
Also, it’s worth noting that cargo is a fairly good package manager all things considered. It has a native lock file format, unlike requirements.txt. Running code that’s built with cargo typically just works with
cargo build. No futzing around with special build commands for your specific build tooling like in js. I can’t speak for maven since I’ve only used it a little bit and never used it enough to be comfortable with it… but cargo just doesn’t really have many major paper cuts.Admittedly, cargo isn’t really special - it’s just a classic package manager that learned from the hindsight of its predecessors. It’s all minor improvements if any. There’s actually innovative build tooling out there: things like buck2, nix, etc. But those are an entirely different ball game.
- Comment on Advice needed, son wants to learn how to program 8 months ago:
See if you can find a book on python, and work through it a bit. Sit down with him once you know some and try making something basic with turtle or the likes. Your goal is to keep his interest up and not make it a “studying” thing. For a kid the most important part is that he needs to be able to see results of what he’s making. Drawing simple shapes, cool patterns, etc. in python is a nice way to start and it can teach all the basic initial things he needs to know.
There’s also simple robot kits for kids that could be fun to play with, which he could eventually move on to basic electronics to after from.
W.r.t. safe browsing, I’d try blocking egregiously bad stuff with some DNS blocker that you either buy or host using something like pihole, and have a conversation with him about it. Use it to block ads and well known “bad” domain names. (I’m not sure how much this helps here considering he’s 8… but better then nothing.)
- Comment on OpenSubtitles Hostility 8 months ago:
The last bit isn’t strictly true - there’s ways to trace such tasks by generating IDs and associating it per task / request / whatever, letting you associate messages together even in a concurrent environment. You can’t just blindly print but there’s libraries and the like to help you do it.
- Comment on Introducing Raspberry Pi 5 8 months ago:
I don’t think the SATA acronym is right…
- Comment on Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds 10 months ago:
Problem is this assumes that everyone has to build their own captcha solver. It’s definitely a bare minimum standard barrier to entry, but it’s really not a sustainable solution to begin with.