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Cake day: Aug 21, 2023

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I dated a girl named Password for a while. She was a lot older than me, she was born in the year 1234.

Anyway, @op the exact same thing happened to me. I gotta get smarter about opsec.


That’s true, you can’t really miss what’s happening with a dark mode switch – it’s not like it’s a “charge me $50 extra for insurance on my shredded wheat” button.

The theme selector tho – while rare – IDK, that doesn’t have have text – it probably should, for the same if a11y, but you can indicate the theme with an image; the one I made for a project recently uses the image itself on the button.


The case that undermines your point is icon toggles, since they don’t need a label, but a checkbox does. For example, dark mode icon buttons: They usually show sun or moon icons, which hits OP’s point: if your in dark mode, and the button shows a moon, that would make sense – except the button doesn’t put you into dark mode, at that point it puts you into light mode, so, shouldn’t it show the sun?


Disagree. The hostility expresses frustration and indicates recognition of a long term pattern, and emphasizes the gravity of Torvalds’s observation.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-abuse – while the hostility does contribute to the content, that doesn’t mean it will have the desired effect. Some people get a fire lit under them when they experience that kind of feedback; others get defensive or heated or hurt, and those people are NOT motivated effectively – and it can cause lasting harm.

The key of it is: group B will not learn and grow from this approach; they’ll learn and grow from a more cool headed approach. Group A, however, will grow from either approach. Therefore, the cool headed approach is preferable.


I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I don’t think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:

  1. I was just rebutting that person’s claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they don’t; physicality requires resources that “digitality” doesn’t.

  2. I feel like you might’ve agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.


First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & it’s physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.

Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value

Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the album’s reach was extended.

Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just don’t approach their subscription that way - you don’t subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, let’s be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.

As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services can’t correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the “content providers” (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.

This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - they’re having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productions’ profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a film’s profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?

It’s a shitty situation, and I don’t know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isn’t whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, I’m just going to step outside the market for a bit.

I’m not living in some dream world where piracy doesn’t reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , it’s just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their “line not go up” on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.

Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.


It’s got nothing to do with whether it’s physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they haven’t lost anything.



How hard are the puzzles? I’ve been coding for a while but I’m self taught and I have no idea whether I’m any good or not. I’d love to give them a shot but I have no idea whether they’re totally out of reach or doable. What level of developer are they intended for?


That’s Wikipedia’s approach, arguably one of the most successful “open source” projects in history - certainly not without its problems, but overall it’s pretty great


As a librarian irl, if I could make a horribly reductive characterization of the difference:

Librarians’ top priority is providing access Archivists’ top priority is preservation

Do you seed? You’re a librarian Leech and no seed? Archivist

be a librarian, we’re better


Idk if it’s actually open source, but they seem to be going on the open source financial model: make an awesome thing and then survive on the generosity of people with money who appreciate it.


iBroadcast lets you upload your music and listen to it anywhere - phone, browser, or offline access. I have like 42,000 songs and I’ve been using it for years. It’s awesome.

To get the mp3s, I still use the website that’s often referenced in old /mu/ memes/instructions.

I’m pretty sure it hits all your features - I’m not sure about lyrics though.


I’m not sure if this is what that person meant, but, usually it’s on the original development team to handle outreach and building the identity of the software - in Lemmy’s case, they have a bit of a not-great reputation… Even if they had the reach, that reputation hurts.

Having Mozilla - or any top tier foss-friendly company - kinda take the reins a bit would probably be good.


What’s the deal with nixos? I keep seeing people who love it, but from a quick Google I didn’t really get what was so exciting about it.


That’s so weird, I thought everyone had already heard about neovim. Why are people still using vs code?

Now that vim has consumed the corpse of the emacs vs vim debate, it has only grown larger, and more ravenous


I’m not sure what that means. Open source telemetry is still telemetry.


Bill Gates was and still is a shady piece of shit. Microsoft is a lot better without him - but that’s a low bar.

Personally what bothers me is that they’re starting to treat developers as users, the same as they treat Grandpa’s operating system, or Beth in accounting’s office suite: make everything “easy” and “intuitive” and “helpful”. I became a developer because I got tired of my computers getting in my way, so now I make them do what I want. I don’t want or need an intuitive, helpful interface. If you’re going to make a tool for me to use, just make the tool do that thing and that’s it.

I’ve mostly moved on from GitHub, only using it for little pushes because the green dots look good for prospective employers.

Edit: for those if you unfamiliar with how he’s been a piece of shit specifically recently: he is the primary reason why covid vaccines weren’t open-sourced. Poor countries were forced to live or die based on the generosity of wealthy nations (and the infrastructure around that generosity), rather than enabling them to buy it from less expensive sources, or even make it themselves.

Not only is that just shitty on its face, let’s not forget that a pandemic somewhere is a pandemic everywhere; the fact that he prolonged covid in poor countries (resulting in the death of thousands if not hundreds of thousands), he kept it from fading in wealthy countries, too (resulting in the death of thousands if not hundreds of thousands).

Gates’s battle to protect “intellectual property rights” (read: take but don’t give) has been a life-long thing for him, literally since childhood. His viciously selfish tactics have produced great success for him, but it’s a despicable kind of success… And having “retired” and amassed more money than he could possibly spend, you’d think he could just sit back and let the rest of us get on with it, but no - that’s not how his level of selfishness works - it’s insatiable.


You’re right that that’s extremely unambiguous, but I still don’t love the idea that users don’t get to decide what’s in $HOME, like, maybe we could call it “$STORAGE_FOR_RANDOM_BULLSHIT” instead?

If anything in computing conventions implies “user space” it’s a global variable named HOME. And it makes sense that there should be a $STORAGE_FOR_RANDOM_BULLSHIT location too - but maybe not the same place? Then users could symlink the dotfiles they personally find relevant.

I know you’re not Linus, but, I just had to express that.


Will things fail to function if they can’t make their $HOME/.dumbfiles?


Imo “scammer” is the wrong word. “Hustler” is more accurate in my experience.

Under certain circumstances, those iFixit places are exactly what it says on the tin - but if rent’s coming up and they haven’t had many walk ins, you might end up with a new Flux Capacitor in your JavaScript Microlibrary, since the old one looks like it started sending unhandled exceptions to the teraflop reader - but don’t worry, they put in a new 6-charge teraflop reader that should future proof it for years.


Very few of them were even useful for anyone but myself

Most developers learn and grow by doing - which means learning by making mistakes, googling their error messages, and looking at examples of other people doing what they’re trying to do - which is why you should always open source your code unless there’s a specific reason not to. If you’ve ever made something that works, then your cube would be useful.

I’ve never felt dependent on public code repos for my own career before,

I hope you don’t actually believe this. The entire Internet, and computing itself, is built on the foundation of open source. This is like saying “why do I gotta pay taxes” when you and everyone you’ve never met has relied on roads etc. And that’s just the basic example - the real importance of, say, public education, is that, while you personally may not have used it, many many many other people have - and their education has pushed the quality of your collegues higher - which pushes you to be better, either as competition or cooperation. This is the actually accurate meaning of “the rising tide raises all ships.”

Even if you’ve never used Linux, or any open source software at all, the rest of us have, and we’re pushing your job and your career to new heights.


I keep trying to find a way to play with a web dev stack that doesn’t involve JavaScript, but I think that might be a pipe dream…


but for anything beyond a very simple UI, you always end up with something that needs to be called in JS.

Isn’t that why god made HTMX? Jokingly asked, but legitimate question - I don’t know much about WASM’s reach - and I can’t seem to watch that video on the train. Could HTMX (+/- hyperscript) take it from there?


This for sure. At work (fe dev), I need to get things done quickly and reliably, so I use Svelte. At home, I’m just playing around, so I’ll try things that are out of my wheelhouse or strange, eg rn I’m rebuilding the site I always rebuild in Qwik, Go, and Surrealdb - why? Because they seem neat. (Though I might just rm rf that to build something on Bun, because is there anything is can’t do?)



And Rich Harris (Svelte) said, it’s an issue for people in his position, aka, people making tools for developers - he fully expects and respects that the end users (developers using those tools) don’t really experience the downsides.

That said, I feel like we’re seeing a lot of versions of complaints about how big the stacks are getting, how big the foundation is that we “need” just to get started. That desire for minimalism is core to the developer mentality imo, it makes us good at our jobs. I think we’re going to see more paring down and culling in the coming months/years.



Literally Edward Snowden mentioning it is the first time I heard of it, and after that, it was in the news a few times when big leaks happened, and the people who used Proton Mail never seemed to be the ones who got caught. That’s the only I’ve ever heard them being “advertised” - and that’s a pretty fucking good ad campaign: be one that people can rely on when their lives are at stake.