Pinned post
Pinned post

Erlang achieves Dan Ingalls' Smalltalk goals 

Choice in software systems design seems hampered by the scaffolding needed to use shared memory and message passing between threads and processes. Dan Ingalls: "An OS has the things not there in the language. There shouldn't be one.". It was about but the VM seems to solve that, with shared binaries between processes and transparent message-passing across nodes. Maybe your language and database should run on the ?

Pinned post

Greetings, people! I am a software developer. Outside of work, I use free/libre software almost exclusively. I am pained that we continue to allow nature and community to get degraded by crony individualism. We can do much better, e.g. the voluntary refugee concept.

I have been chuffed with the almost all of the time I have been on it. There is plenty of food for thought in many a toot out there. I am having to move off @wyatwerp now, and really happy to find a Fediverse instance that ... uh ... federates.

I cannot overstate how much I hate the short character limits on most instances here. It does not make people post short, concise messages (as if brevity is even a thing I’d want to optimise for) it makes people post essays as sequences of 47 toots. Which then all appear in my timeline. In reverse order.

The feeling when you succeed in clicking on the window border when looking to resize it ... 🙌

it's highly ironic that the "AI" evangelists constantly repeat that people who hate it are out of touch. they're implying that people don't like it because they don't understand it, when my experience has been people who hate "AI" seem to have a far firmer grasp on how it actually works than the evangelists

edit: reclaiming my notifications by muting this ✌

I don't use LLMs because I actually like programming. And the way some AI proponents describe programming, you'd think they hate it and want to do as little of it as they possibly can.

@not2b @siracusa I wrote Perl for 13 years. I learned discipline. If you treated your code as more than a disposable one-off, you made it readable, converted the punctuation salad into verbose equivalents. By the time I stopped using Perl, I had a toolchain and project initiation process that was easy to set up and made testing and packaging effortless.

Trying to do the same in Python has basically been a nightmare. Just a swirling vortex of endless infrastructure, churn for the sake of churn.

@acb @siracusa There was a time when I really enjoyed all the language trickery in Perl, I used to read the State of the Onion, etc. Then I found myself in a position where I had to do boring stuff like “maintain code” and “work with others” and its charm kind of wore off. :)

@mxk @Mutesplash @siracusa it turned out compatibility with older code was one of perl's things by that time. They've still managed to add several features to reach 5.42 or 7 or whatever 2026 edition, version numbers being what they are, while still staying largely compatible with CPAN's well-tested libraries and lots of other code from +20yrs ago.

@Mutesplash @siracusa perl 5.8 to 5.10 was a bigger step than Python 3 and perl has never broken compatibility with nearly as much. Modern Perl (the book) is only about 10yrs old.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_5_v

@jon_newby i've been online continuously since 1994. I can absolutely assure you that in all real world practice, the concept of a "filter bubble" was invented by the annoying dickheads to try to get you not to block them.

@vga256 To be fair, that was a pretty contrived example - We could have created a new class inheriting from string and added our method. It was mostly demonstrating the use of the browser.

Something else wild - you can search for methods by providing the receiver of a message, and what the answer to that message should be - it will find a selector (a message, or method if you will) that returns what you are looking for. It's so...different

@scott that's awesome. liking it already.

i don't think people realize just how much ptsd there is to recover from after decades of c/c++. i'm still trying to forget the word class and trying to understand things in terms of prototypes and clones

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.
-David Graeber
#anarchy #anarchism #anarchist #communist #communism #socialist #socialism #socialecology #solarpunk #SolarPunkSunday #DavidGraeber

I literally live more like a "solarpunk" than any of these people and will never call myself one. Turns out DIY just became a commodity for techies and hobbie crafters that want to feel cool. Most of these people are just stoked to become a small power plant for the grid rather than down gear to their needs whatsoever. DIY used to be about a rejection of consumerism and comodification just to become a consumable commodity. Solarpunk is a product based on anti-production principles, and you fucking bought it. DIY was about buying less and doing more, now its about buying more and doing less with the aesthetics of anti-consumerism, and you fucking bought it.
#solarpunk #solarpunksunday

that report is a collection of twisted projections by a well-known addict to erotic drawings of teens and children

you shouldn't give credence to everything you read on the internet

especially to attacks on people who stand against powerful economic interests

CC: @dash_jackson@lemmy.ca
@marte @dash_jackson

"Let me prove that this guy is a pedophile by linking to an obsessive hate site put up by a guy who was quickly discovered to be a fan of virtual child pornography."

The author of the "Stallman Report", Drew DeVault, was still actively using his danbooru account just months before he put up that "report."

Just a few years ago, he used that account to add the tag "happy sex" to a drawing of a canonically 14 year old female character getting penetrated.

He's been contributing to the tagging of a public archive of sexualised drawings of children for years, with the above being the most extreme example that was discovered.

About 10 years ago, when he was about 20 years old, he posted on Reddit that he thinks teenage girls should all be forced to get an IUD.

Around that time, he also posted that it was an "asshole move" to publicly point out that a person has expressed desire to abuse children. (A redditor openly admitted that he would do it if he could get away with it. In another thread, someone called him out for it. DeVault opined that this was rude.)

He's probably projecting his own issues on to Stallman. Maybe he thinks he's a "good pedophile" who must hunt down "bad pedophiles" or something, but who really knows. We can't know whether DeVault is a pedophile himself, but there are definitely very strong indicators of it.

In contrast, Stallman's statements on the matter were based on typical sex liberal argumentation that have been fashionable in certain liberal spheres for a long time, and seen as the "intellectual" position to hold. There's no reason to believe that Stallman made the statements he made out of some kind of personal issue that he was trying to justify.

All the other "evidence" against Stallman seems to be based either on quirky jokes, or difficulties with romance that he had in relation to adult women, which are unfairly used to paint him as a "creep" which is a typical insult for awkward nerdy guys. (Sometimes, it can be deserved; in Stallman's case, it certainly isn't.)

https://sizeof.cat/project/the-devault-report/

My understanding is that the courts forcing Google to split Chrome for the rest and thus making the money for Firefox unavailable might mean that development will stop for both of them – and since Microsoft and Apple don’t really seem to be innovators in browser tech my guess is that development will stop for all major browsers. Smaller browsers can catch up. Websites can catch up. HTML5 can calm down. Perhaps there is some silver lining to all of this. Because: “keep the big bad boss alive for he pays our bills” is not a great idea.

@peter LLM? I thought you were describing the contribution of the average business consultancy.

@torproject I'll add that some people on the Internet seem to not understand that privacy is not binary. You don't have either zero privacy or full privacy. Privacy is a spectrum, you can have more or less of it.

Show older
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.