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samc

@ samc @feddit.uk

Posts
1
Comments
70
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Vomit-inducing article about Jeff Bezos’s obscene wealth

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  • The Koru is a 416-foot masterpiece with three towering masts, each standing 230 feet tall, that harness kinetic energy to propel the vessel. The yacht is so massive that, for it to leave the shipyard after completion, a historic bridge in Rotterdam had to be dismantled. Bezos even offered to fund the dismantling and reconstruction of the 95-year-old De Hef bridge but later abandoned the plan amid public outcry. Eventually, Koru was towed away without her masts, which were later assembled.

    The tone of this article is astonishing. "He even offered to pay to vandalise a historic building", how selfless..

  • Emacs Arbitrary Code Execution and How to Avoid It

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  • Plus we could also get rid of the hacky risky vs safe dir-locals system that fills up custom.el with clutter

  • What if...

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  • Green is my pepper... If you know what I mean... 😏

  • On "Safe" C++ • Izzy Muerte

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  • Reading time 105 minutes...

    And worth every second!

    I decided to have another go at learning C++ given all the recent work that I had heard about regarding memory safety and support for functional programming. This gives me a lot less confidence that my efforts will be worth it in the long run.

    Time to check out rust I guess 🤷.

  • Mason Alternative for Emacs?

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  • To add some more context:

    Eglot is part of Emacs now, so it comes preinstalled. It's good at finding lsp servers, but won't help you to install them. Definitely the option if you want to keep things simple and can live with the need to manually install servers. (Also a quick note, the hook you should use to auto activate eglot is eglot-ensure, rather than just eglot.

  • Bitwarden Desktop version 2024.10.0 is no longer free software

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  • I can't imagine that's any more free than bitwarden?

  • Steam Survey for September 2024 - Linux 1.87%

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  • Obviously there's a lot of caveats about how representative this survey (or any other survey) is of the broader population, but I think this is a good reminder of how weird we all are. Nobody on here claims to use Ubuntu or Manjaro, yet they are more popular than Fedora (and potentially even arch, when steam decks are discounted).

    There's nothing wrong with that, I love the weirdness of the Lemmy Linux community! I just always think it's good to appreciate when opinions (like my love of ublue) aren't as popular as you think they are.

  • Ambulances called to Amazon’s UK warehouses 1,400 times in five years

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  • Thanks, for computing some useful statistics! As much as I believe the implied hypothesis that working at Amazon is bad for one's health, I think the guardian intentionally tried to present the largest number possible with no context.

    Frankly, "Amazon warehouse employees 10x more likely to need an ambulance" is a more impactful headline anyway.

  • How is RISC-V better than arm for Linux?

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  • Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I really don't find the "chip makers don't have to pay licence fees" a compelling argument that RISC-V is good for the consumer. Theres only a few foundries capable of making CPUs, and the desktop market seems incredibly hard to break into.

    I imagine it's likely that the cost of ISA licencing isn't what's holding back competition in the CPU space, but rather its a good old fashioned duopoly combined with a generally high cost of entry.

    Of course, more options is better IMO, and the Linux community's focus on FOSS should make hopping architectures much easier than on Windows or MacOS. But I'd be surprised if we see a laptop/desktop CPU based on RISC-V competing with current options anytime soon.

  • Amazon workers narrowly reject union in historic vote

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  • We have bad/corrupt governments sometimes, that doesn't mean we should get rid of governments. (Though maybe the libertarian Fraser institute might disagree with me there.)

  • Emacs Face Line Spacing / Margin / Height

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  • I feel this. I remember spending ages trying to figure out how to remove the bar in doom modeline (yes eventually I realised I could just make it the same colour as the background...), only to discover that it was necessary to control the size of the modeline.

    I imagine this stuff is really deep in the internals of Emacs, which is why people are less keen to touch it. But if we were in the mood to do that, I would like even more CSS-like features, such as the ability to configure each side of a box property independently

  • Developing GUI app on Immutable Distros

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  • In my experience it Just Works ™️. I spin up a distro/toolbox, compile some software (e.g. Emacs) then run the executable inside the container, and up pops the GUI window.

    If you use distrobox, you can even distrobox-export desktop files, at which point a containerised gui application is practically indistinguishable from one installed on the host system

  • What is your favourite game with native Linux port?

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  • Its all about how an application goes from "I would like to display X on a screen" to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It's then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There's a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that's the general idea.

    Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to "look at" what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn't focussed).

    Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we're at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there's still odd bits of software that either haven't been ported, or that still rely on some features that don't exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.

  • Carnival of Self-Harm

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  • I suppose a complete history of Tory government was out of scope for what's already a dissertation-length essay.

    Actually, at the end the author begins to slightly contradict himself by arguing that (neo-)Thatcherism is the long-term objective of the conservatives. I suppose the consistent narrative is that the Tories have a long-term commitment to policies that can only ever yield short-term gains.

    This does lead to the rather dire conclusion that British politics is stuck in a cycle where Labour slowly rebuilds the British state, only for the Tories to sack it the instant our fickle support for progressive government waivers.

  • Carnival of Self-Harm

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  • Not that I saw. A nag screen maybe, but it was dismissible

  • Jolla's Sailfish OS is moving to a subscription model, new phone (and a privacy-focused AI device) coming soon - Liliputing

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  • Kotlin targets the JVM right? I think you'd need either a port of the runtime (dalvik?) Or an api translation later a la WINE.

    But I don't actually know anything, so don't listen to me. Having a fully Foss phone with support for the android app ecosystem would be wonderful though

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    Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has

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  • I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole...

  • Algorithms are like small AIs

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  • Machine learning is just gradient descent through a subset of algorithm-space

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    Humane on copium

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  • There's a former apple designer on the team I think, which they've been leaning into hard to get the hype train rolling.

  • I don't enjoy it when people compliment me. Why could it be?

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  • How bloody dare you!