How is that the case? I’ve got pretty much zero experience with decompiling software, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anyone who does say that before. I genuinely can’t imagine that it’s easier to work with say, decompiling a game to make changes to it rather than just having the source available for it.

I suppose unless the context is just regarding running software then of course it’s easier to just run a binary that’s already a binary - but then I’m not sure I see where decompiling comes into relevance.

I don’t see how that’s going to work out well. That’s asking to end up with a mess that you’re just going to have to rewrite anyways.

I do not even have a complete hatred for AI like a lot of folks do, but I don’t trust it that much (nor should anyone).

You’d be better off with an actual deterministic transpiler for that (think TypeScript -> JS but the other way around I suppose), not something with a ton of random variables like an AI.

This can sometimes come at the cost of intuitiveness however. As an example that just happened to me the other day, I was using Pinta which uses libadwaita and had opened an image to make some modifications to it.

All was going well until I wanted to save a new copy of it (and not override the original). The toolbar has all of these functions on it, open, save, undo/redo, etc… but not Save As.

Apparently there’s a tiny little overflow button on the far right side, click it and you get a whole bunch of functions - one of them being the holy “Save As” option I was looking for. I almost went down the route of making a copy of the image outside Pinta and then just overwriting the original.

Apparently the idea of making a copy of an image is blasphemy. Even Microsoft Word when they had first moved to the Ribbon UI made the save button have a little dropdown right under the save option to reveal Save As.

Don’t get me wrong, I love how some libadwaita apps look. Mission Center for example? Chef’s Kiss - but it’s a very simple application that all I need to do is open it to have a quick look at the very pretty looking graphs. Although the latest update seems to have gotten rid of being able to have the sidebar open persistently (now taking an extra click to change between performance graphs)… But I still need to double check to see if that’s intended vs being a bug before I judge that too harshly.

Patching Comic Code? It was quite a while ago unfortunately, so I don’t have the exact commands available, but I used their Font Patcher tool in order to do so.

From what I recall, the tricky thing was actually getting the dependencies it required to be installed properly, Font Forge would be up and running but then the script’s errors indicated that it couldn’t resolve all of the necessary dependencies. Not sure what OS you’re on so your mileage may vary - but for Linux they now have an AppImage that looks to contain everything it needs, and for macOS/Windows if you have Docker available there also appears to be a pre-built container for it. There’s also quite a few examples that I don’t think were there when I used it, since I also recall not being 100% sure of what flags were needed to run it

I pretty much agree, personally I rarely ever downvote a comment/post - to the point where I cannot even recall when my last downvote was, unless I accidentally have done so via a mobile gesture (I try to be cautious about this). If I were at my PC, I’d check my instance’s database, but alas.

[The rest here on is more of a “6 o’clock in the morning stream of thoughts from my perspective” thing. My friends know me as being very verbose - last paragraph is where I try to steer back on track]

If I do upvote something, generally it’ll be something that I feel is driving forward a discussion in good faith (even if I don’t necessarily agree with the content itself) and is respectful of all parties involved.

Though a lack of an upvote from me doesn’t indicate disagreement either.

An actual flat-out disagreement from me tends to be more on the rare side of things. Because so many comments are an opinion / viewpoint rather than solid fact. It’s one thing to say “No, 2+2 does not equal 5” since that is rooted in fact.

Whereas I have to feel pretty strongly about something to directly challenge an opinion, especially since it super easy to misjudge tone on the Internet/across text and I’m not here to unintentionally start a war over something that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer (within reason - but even that itself is something that isn’t binary). I try to be cautious about asserting something is wrong unless I’m very sure of it (even if I do often fail at that, given the previous issue of tone being hard to judge across text), and of course in most cases you can’t really say another person’s opinion is unequivocally wrong.

I don’t mind giving a different viewpoint, but again I try to be cautious about it because I don’t want to come across as “My viewpoint is ultimately right and yours is wrong” and that is unfortunately how a lot of discussions end up being seen (or I just simply make the human error of just having a far too strong opinion of my own).

I do my best to keep my tone as neutral as I can, though as they say “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” My original comment is a good example of this, because I do agree that downvotes are far too often used in the manner that you stated. I also agree that they’re typically a poor way of criticizing someone if they don’t include a corresponding reply (if I say something that is factually wrong - or even just poor taste, I usually want to know about it so I don’t keep doing so!), my only divergence from the matter was that they are a criticism - just a really bad way of doing so.

I am surprised that its actually still a product they sell and seemingly update. Looking on their product page, wow it has git support - it can be yours for $22.99/month too!

(That will also require you to give your soul to them too, via a contract signed in blood)

Oh, so that’s what those Python notebooks are that I’ve heard people talk about!

Oh hey, someone else who uses Comic Code - greetings!

I remember when I first saw it, I laughed - and then it grew on me. Then it turned into “I can’t believe I am buying a derivation of comic sans” but it is actually a really nice monospaced font.

Only thing I didn’t like was having to figure out how to use Font Patcher to make a copy of it that supports nerd fonts, but it was a one and done process.

(I also don’t really like how it looks in my IDE the few times I find myself on Windows, but I don’t really blame the font for that one - looks perfect in the same IDE on Linux…)

No human would be stupid enough to change something’s name for zero reason.

Well, unless you’re a product manager at Google apparently… Though with them you’re lucky if its just a change of name rather than it becoming an entirely “new” thing, or just getting outright axed…

I do wonder why Valve hasn’t enabled it by default. It’s only defaulted on SteamOS and in fact, I believe they removed the option to turn it off on SteamOS recently…

COSMIC is definitely a really neat desktop, and I’m looking forward to the stable release!

I have had the alphas installed and usually give it a go for a day or two each revision. Currently there’s definitely some oddities regarding graphical glitches, such as after suspending the system - but I like where it’s headed.

For me right now the biggest roadblock is the lack of a night light mode (blue light filtering). I’ve gotten so used to relying on it in other desktops.

I do have some crappy $20 blue light filtering glasses, but they’re… Not great or comfortable to wear for any extended amount of time. And my monitors’ built in color shifting mode is also pretty lackluster.

I think downvotes are criticism/judgment - even if it’s more of a silent type (in lieu of actually replying, as you pointed out).

Even from the standpoint of “You should only use downvotes to indicate that a comment/post is off topic for the community” that Reddit originally tried to (naively IMO, you can’t enforce it not being a “I disagree” button, but I digress) have is still what I’d consider to be criticism. Mainly because regardless of the vote being cast as that vs a general “I disagree”, it’s still an indication of disapproval of the commenter.

Criticism of course comes in a lot of forms, and can vary on the “level” of it - I wouldn’t say that downvotes are a high level of criticism, but one nonetheless.

That’s just my view of it, at least, I can’t see how they wouldn’t be a form of criticism - you shouldn’t use them as a “This breaks the rules” indicator because that should be a report instead of a vote IMO, otherwise it’s far less likely to be acted upon/handled.

Ooh! Is that swap implementation the default? I got back into LE for the launch of the newest season, and while I haven’t had any problems on my Ally or Deck yet, I just finished the campaign so I’m barely into endgame - I hear the issues start as you get deeper into monos…

Funnily enough, I use Cachy on my desktop, but I don’t recall seeing anything regarding this, but I’m definitely happy to run it on my Ally too if it helps avoid future potential crashes.

I definitely don’t doubt their utility, despite my facetious comment regarding them - however it’s not likely I’ll ever be able to actually appreciate them (in this lifetime at least) due to my struggles with understanding far “simpler” areas of math haha.

I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

(Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).

For me personally the advantage is that since the editor is opened by your user, it has all of the same config that I’m used to (such as my souped up Neovim config).

Whereas if you sudo nvim /path/to/file then the editor is opened as root and you don’t have the same configuration.

Welcome to Lemmy!

For me the first Linux distribution I used was Ubuntu 8.04 - though I never had installed it on physical hardware, just a VM - VirtualBox IIRC (that didn’t occur till Ubuntu 8.10). I was in my early teenage years and had discovered Linux and found it interesting, I used the WUBI tool to install it through Windows and updated the bootloader to keep Windows as the default (with a one second timeout) since it was the family computer, I think my family would’ve shat their pants if they randomly rebooted the PC and was greeted with Linux heh.

Though a few years later on an old secondary family laptop (it was the “someone else is using the other computer” spare/backup) that was running Vista, it had gotten so buggy and bogged down that I installed Kubuntu for my family and they happily used that until eventually that laptop was retired. It never got them to really look into permanently switching to Linux, but I think that’s more than fine - I’ve never been one to “proselytize” Linux: If it is the right tool for you, fantastic - if not, no hard feelings is how I see it. In the aforementioned case, it was the better tool over the bogged down and buggy Vista.

As for nowadays, its CachyOS on my desktop (I’m not married to it, but its been working alright for me for about a year now), SteamOS on my Deck, Fedora on my secondary laptop (an old intel macbook), and then Bazzite on my ROG Ally. Windows is still installed on a secondary drive on my desktop, but I very rarely have to boot into it.

Ah gotcha, that’s a bit unfortunate - good to know though!

My memory is probably hazy (it’s been a while since I used macOS) or it might’ve been removed but I recall that you were able to hold a key on the keyboard to bypass it as well. You’d have to right click the application, then hold down the key, and while holding it down click “Open”.

Said key I believe was the “option” key

You’d basically have to do the modifications at build-time rather than at runtime, so you’d need to edit the image definition to do so (or effectively, create an “extension” of the image) - at least in the case of UBlue/Fedora Atomic based distributions. Each one has their own system for doing this (VanillaOS for example works similarly, IIRC).

(There is the rpm-ostree layering system, though from what I know the usage of it is discouraged)

This is pretty much why I don’t use atomic/immutable distributions on my main system - they can still be tinkered with, but it ends up requiring a lot of setup in order to do so. The last time I checked, creating custom images based on the UBlue images was quite complex and the documentation left me pretty confused. In theory, I shouldn’t have any issues with it, I work with containers all the time at both work and my own personal projects, but it just didn’t “click” for me at the time.

It’s been a bit though, so I’ll need to revisit it at some point - I just don’t really have the time currently to learn an entire system just to make tweaks to my system. That being said, I’m perfectly happy with Bazzite on my ROG Ally where I don’t need to make any tweaks to the base system (same with my Steam Deck running SteamOS - atomic based distributions are great for these devices/use-cases).

I have also tried out NixOS a few times, but same issue - it requires a lot of time investment to get the hang of the Nix ecosystem. For what its worth, I find the idea of atomic distributions to be intriguing and I see their appeal, but it just isn’t for me at the moment.