rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

Lord Buckethead/Count Binface is the producer behind A Problem Squared podcast — Whhaaaaat‽‽

@freemo I once worked on a project where we reserved the right to break anything that didn’t have a unit test. There were many downsides to this, but the massive plus is that we could easily rewrite stuff on a whim, and boy did we do a lot of that

@freemo Writing code is absolutely all about successive drafts. Even working code is usually not the last draft, I almost always redraft what I’ve done to make it clear to whoever will be reading it what’s going/what the important parts are

Looking to export my reminders using Apple’s JavaScript automation tooling, and they’ve just not bothered to implement the API for getting the URL attached to a reminder. It’s stuff like this that is making my migrate to a plain-text-files only system…

@asterope I thought Apple was trying to sell their devices more as “real computers” recently? Like they have a file browser now. I honestly wouldn’t mind if the built in notes app’s data was accessible on a Mac — I could cron job up something

@bonifartius @amerika No, I totally get where you’re coming from. I too think we have to be careful not to take the tireless effort made by FOSS contributors for granted and should help wherever we can, financially or otherwise. My main issue is with Apple: I spent nearly a grand on this device and it can’t do such basic stuff. I feel like over time computers are becoming devices only capable of white-listed functionality; we’re going back to before WW2… We peaked at UNIX pipes…?

@bonifartius Software is different though — you make the thing once and it benefits infinite people and there are no material costs. Plus, it just feels like the functionality is too fundamental to necessitate paying for. How long before we have to pay to browse files on disk? Or to assemble machine code? Like, I just want to append UTF-8 encoded characters to a block file on disk…

@bonifartius oh absolutely — the fact that you have to pay Apple to even distribute free apps is problematic (the main hurdle to me trying to build my own). I don’t know whether donations often cover that annual cost? But in any case I have nothing against paid apps, just when they try to sell something isn’t new or novel or free apps that block basic functionality. I think the right way is to enhance the experience with paid for

@bonifartius well yeah, I think it’s on the operating system to provide at least a very basic editor, which Apple just doesn’t do. After that there’s room for discussion about whether I need additional functionality that’s worth paying for, and whether there’s space for developers to innovate in new ways, but I don’t think it’s unfair to feel entitled to not need to pay for functionality comparable to Ed

@trinsec That’s really useful, thanks — I’ve tried a lot of them but there’s some there I haven’t. And yeah, I think it’s absurd that an operating system can come without such basic functionality; just bizarre

Just when I’d thought I’d found an app for editing plain text files on iOS they lock me out after opening 5 files. This is unacceptable! I refuse to pay anyone to be able to edit plain text files on my general purpose computer. I will pay for services that innovate, I will not pay for services that provide such fundamental computing capabilities! This is outrageous!

So much discussion here[1] about the right tool for maintaining a collaborative set of notes within a development team, and I just don’t understand what .org files checked into git fails to provide

[1] https://hackerdaily.io/25521487/comments

Spent a chunk of my afternoon drawing on graph paper, pretending that what I was doing was work, on the last working day before Christmas, like was in primary school again

“Google Maps postcode error leads delivery drivers on wild pizza chase” — mapping services should be the business of national governments where citizens have a legal right to recourse when they are discriminated against or wronged by incorrect data. It is a national shame that the Ordinance Survey has faded into obscurity in the 21st century.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/dec/20/google-maps-postcode-error-leads-delivery-drivers-on-wild-pizza-chase

English lockdown tiers summarised:
1. Beer
2. Beer with chips
3. No beer
4. No chips

Source: https://reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/kg8ehx/_/ggdkh32/?context=1

10 men have made more than $400 billion since the pandemic began. Makes me sick. #eattherich

So I have a bunch of numbered comments in a text editor, designed to reply to a select set of numbered points. I copy that text into JIRA, and what does it do?, it coverts it to 1, 2, 3… WHY‽‽ Why would you do that??? Who wants that??

Sometimes I wish we could just use a set of org files checked into a godamn git repo. It’s not hard.