manxu
@manxu@piefed.social
- Comment on Neanderthals Spread Across Asia With Surprising Speed—and Now We Know How 5 days ago:
I'll save you the read: they invented the Segway.
- Comment on Hertz, showing the difference between science and engineering 5 days ago:
I mean, why would a guy that started a car rental company know anything about radio waves?
Gotcha!
- Comment on Facial recognition error sees woman accused of theft 5 days ago:
"No one should find themselves in this situation."
No one would if the corporations making the mistakes actually faced consequences beyond, "Oopsie!"
Fine companies real money if they make an "honest mistake." They will make dramatically fewer of them.
- Comment on Majority of Australians think China will be world’s most powerful country by 2035, poll finds 6 days ago:
I don't think they really cared if China took advantage of it. America's CEOs are only invested in the next few quarters, at best. Something that might take a decade or two is entirely not relevant to their planning and actions.
- Comment on Simple Blog options? 1 week ago:
Did you look at Pelican? I share the frustration with much of Hugo's infrastructure: the template language is buggy and inscrutable, and the plugin architecture wanting.
I ended up with Hugo, but I considered Pelican. It uses standard Jinja templates, which I find much more rational (but it might just be me) and I recall there were plugins for a lot of things, including different source formats. The code is written in Python, so that even if there isn't a plugin for a format you need, there probably is a Python library for it and it should be relatively easy to make it a plugin.
Crap, now I want to switch to Pelican...
- Comment on Simple Blog options? 1 week ago:
Hugo watch mode (both server and build) does not produce accurate sites on change and is really meant for development. I find after a developing for a while, I have to kill the process and restart it and then things are "fresh"
From reading the documentation, I strongly have the impression that hugo focuses on being fast on re-render and that the idea is to build and deploy to public site each time there is a change. The big difference is probably whether to render locally and push the generated content, or to push the source markdown and render remotely (which I chose).
- Comment on Simple Blog options? 1 week ago:
I ended up with Hugo, a git repository, and a cron job for the build. I write an article, check it in, the server picks up the git change and rebuilds the site. What I like about the setup is that the server only has the binaries hugo and git, and a shell script for the rebuild. Also, I write in Markdown, add media to the git repository, and articles are published soon after I check in without any remoting on my part.
I did look at WriteFreely after the setup, though. I find the minimalist design very beautiful. Didn't switch to it, but may look at it again for another project. https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely
- Comment on Italian citizenship referendum polarises country 1 week ago:
Well, yes: your vote is probably not a conservative vote, so absolutely any reason is good enough to deny you a vote!
I think it's very telling that the conservatives went for ignoring the vote in this case, to use the voting threshold to sink the change. They know their usual arguments are self-contradicting here, so that counting on laziness is their only (and probably successful) hope.
- Comment on Google Restricts Android Sideloading—What It Means for User Autonomy and the Future of Mobile Freedom – Purism 2 weeks ago:
I completely agree. Unless Google is forced to install more than one app store by default, or forced to have multiple app stores downloadable on Play Store, three is no realistic way to install a third party app store on a phone. In both cases, Google's cooperation is required.
- Comment on Gemini will now automatically summarize your long emails unless you opt out 3 weeks ago:
It's so weird that we have to go through hoops and loops to get rid of this stuff! I was sick of my Android responding to a long press of the power button, meant to shut it down, with a Gemini prompt. Took me an hour to figure out I can't get rid of the function, but I can switch back (for now) to old style Google Assistant.
If you have to force functionality down your users' throat despite them not wanting it, you already lost. Gemini is Google's Clippy, just less iconic and more also-ran.
- Comment on [Debian Stable] Which Static Blog Generator: blag, Jekyll, Hugo, Lektor, Pelican, staticsite? 4 weeks ago:
There must have been a gallery component, since I only looked at generators that had one available.
Honestly, in hindsight the templates were really not a big deal. Just for fun, I tried converting the Hugo template I used to Pelican, and it was easy for me.
Pelican is solid and mature and I would use it, in hindsight. The only major flaws are that it's much slower (but makes up for it with incremental builds) and that the community is much, much smaller. On the plus side, Jinja2 is much, much, much better than Go templating (Hugo borrows from Go).
- Comment on [Debian Stable] Which Static Blog Generator: blag, Jekyll, Hugo, Lektor, Pelican, staticsite? 4 weeks ago:
I went the same direction, from WordPress to static site generation. I did the same evaluation as you are trying to do and ended up with Hugo, mostly because there is a lot of support available for it. My runner up was Pelican, because I was fluent in Jinja2, but I didn't want to mess around with the templates and Hugo's were prettier. Sue me, I am shallow.
The one regret I have about Hugo is that the templating language is challenging. I am trying to be as neutral as possible, but it seemed like even simple things were complicated to achieve. If someone would come up with a Hugo that speaks Jinja2, I'd be really delighted.
Other than that, conversion from WordPress to Hugo was relatively straightforward, despite needing to find a gallery component and converting menus. Hugo is indeed very fast in processing, which become important when your blog has thousands of articles.
I set up the blog as a private git repository. The server pulls from it, then runs Hugo and a full text search engine, and the content is visible and searchable within five minutes on update.
- Comment on Italy changes law on right to claim citizenship through great-grandparents 4 weeks ago:
Smart move for a country with one of the lowest birth rates in the world! /s
- Comment on An EXTREMELY Simple Guide to Mastodon 4 weeks ago:
I think it's the "basically" part in basically right back where we started that makes the difference. Even if 100% of Fediverse users were on a single instance, once that instance starts pulling Musk moves, the users can move somewhere else.
Only if that instance defederates from everyone else do we get the Twitter situation again. Or, since that's actually what happened, Truth Social, which I think is just a slightly modified Mastodon instance with federation disabled/deactivated.
- Comment on Canada’s conservative leader Pierre Poilievre loses his own seat in election collapse 1 month ago:
Help out this Yank-adjacent thing: Why was JT so incredibly unpopular?
- Comment on The Pentagon is the best shape for a large buildings as long as all surrounding buildings are also Pentagons 1 month ago:
Technically it's only regular pentagons that don't tile the plane.
I know everything about planes because I am shorter than my brothers. When we were young, they called me Tattoo and if I pointed at something with my finger, they screamed in unison, "Da plane! Da plane!"
- Comment on If all the money in the world can only make you look as good as elon musk or jeff bezos there is truly some things money can't buy. 2 months ago:
As someone else pointed out years ago (about Eric Trump, not known for his supermodel looks), there is an amount of wealth and influence where you don't have to look good, because everybody will treat you anyway as if you were the hottest person on the planet. Basically, you want to look ugly because it's a bizarre proof of wealth.
"Look at me, I am so rich, I can have all the supermodels, porn stars, and Hollywood actresses I want, and I don't even have to get plastic surgery or a personal trainer like a poor millionaire (ewww) on a budget."