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If you have a daunting big task, take it and break it down into lots of little tasks. Holy shit! Look at all these tasks you have now! Better take a nap.

@hakona whenever there was something tricky to configure on linux, i wrote a script to do it for me. that way, when i needed to configure it again, i could just re-run the script. you know what happened, obviously. years later, when i ran the script? it didn't work anymore. because they'd changed something

@mark
Adding to the vast software repositories is the vast variety of hardware people try running Linux on. I am sure the set of laptops any Linux distro runs well on keeps changing with "the volunteers who spend thousands of hours to mess with my system for free" (great phrasing by @jk BTW).

Maybe we need a dataset of laptop component combinations, and a link to bug trackers so that bug tickets on laptops show up in searches for laptops with similar components.

@jk Oh, definitely.

Don't run package updates every 2 weeks.

I run package updates when I'm forced to, at gunpoint, by Linus Torvalds personally.

I guess I appreciate that he cares, he had to fly all that way after all.

(Seriously though, the package distribution model is to create a set of interrelated dependencies that are all supposed to work with each other in arbitrary configurations, and I'm fairly certain that's not actually a tractable problem given the sheer scale of the package repositories these days).

@jk One cannot resist but wonder how many of there issue would've been present if Valve had sticked to Debian

on Linux, is there a way to switch off "Tamagotchi Mode"? specifically i mean the thing where you set up linux exactly how you want, and every 2 weeks you run package updates and some obscure part of your system which you didn't even know existed now no longer works the way you set it up, and you have to spend 90 minutes fixing it, and it's always a different thing, and this happens every 2 weeks, forever. how do you switch that off? (ideally in a way where it won't switch back on after 2 weeks)

The conventional wisdom is to go with boring technology, yet everyone is rushing to the shiny new and exciting LLMs. Go figure.

@Natanox @yacc143 @hildeaustlid @thorsheim

Measuring growth is measuring economic consolidation you might as well consider it synonymous with exploitation of one form or another.

when the ad cult shows you ads for tax prep services that are offering discounts for a job the IRS tried to make free but then the IRS was sued so H&R block et all could keep charging people to do taxes

:cirno_doubt: the entire country runs on the assumption you are a fucking idiot and just don't pay attention to the backrooms

@andrewrk It would be tricky to get the legal wording right to ban ALL forms of advertising.

You could ban certain forms of advertising, e.g. São Paulo's "clean city law":

> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as that of outdoor posters.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_L

@andrewrk hard to tell whether that 🌈 🌞 is sarcastic or not. "Any form of paid and/or third-party advertising would become illegal. Full stop." To that, I ask: what's payment?

I'd say the power of online advertising is a symptom of the internet's structural problems: wide, reliable, reach requires monetary investment because of the client-server model.

I reckon a P2P model would go a long way towards defanging adtech.

@carnage4life

#TrumpTariffs #TrumpeanTradeWars

I have been thinking, "... buy on bad news..." The old adage holds still true and might be amended with, "...in particular, if you know when the markets are going to turn around!" It's not that it hasn't happened before, e. g.the 2020 congressional insider trading scandal:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_c

If you control all branches of government, even easier to not get caught.

👉What I mean to ask, is there any way to track big investors' behavior?👈

@tafadzwa all of that simply means it costs more to live in the USA. You can live without apple products, stupidly overpriced coffee and branded clothing, so can we! Most Americans already have too much stuff, the tarrifs will not affect the wealthy and Trump will give tax relief to them anyway. The rest of the world's poor are paying for America's wealthy already.

As it happens, one of the oldest Mastodon instances – octodon dot social – is going to close down very soon.

This is a sad milestone, but it also shows the resilience of the broader network – people migrated, and relations remain.

That tiny volunteer-run instance survived longer than Google+ – a gigantic behemoth of a social network, backed by one of the largest tech companies in the world, and pushed down on everyone and their dog through mandatory integration with YouTube.

2/🧵

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@jawarajabbi from the outside, it looks like:
- he was elected by a large number of voters, wasn't he?
- production there seems to be uncompetitive, to use the liberal word for it (subsidized didn't help, now trying import tariffs)
- he isn't increasing tariffs on products whose production pollutes the environment; that would remain pushed out to non-elite regions

What is the impact on the inside?

@jawarajabbi
Out of curiosity, are your import tariffs over and above subsidies promoting local production? Not getting into "why tariffs" etc.

@david_chisnall Functional requirements are overrated. A useful LLM would know what you want without being told.

The reason I get so annoyed about people pitching LLMs as a way to 'democratise programming' or as end-user programming tools is that they solve the wrong problem.

The hard part of programming is not writing code. It's unambiguously expressing your problem and desired solution. Imagine if LLMs were perfect programmers. All you have to do is write a requirements document and they turn it into a working program. Amazing, right? Well, not if you've ever seen what most people write in a requirements document or seen the output when a team of good programmers works from a requirements document.

The most popular end-user programming language in the world (and, by extension, the most popular programming language), with over a billion users, is the Calc language that is embedded in Excel. It is not popular because it's a good language. Calc is a terrible programming language by pretty much any metric. It's popular because Excel (which is also a terrible spreadsheet, but that's a different rant) is basically a visual debugger and a reactive programming environment. Every temporary value in an Excel program is inspectable and it's trivial to write additional debug expressions that are automatically updated when the values that they're observing change.

Much as I detest it as a spreadsheet, Excel is probably the best debugger that I have ever used, including Lisp and Smalltalk.

The thing that makes end-user programming easy in Excel is not that it's easy to write code, it's that it's easy to see what the code is doing and understand why it's doing the wrong thing. If you replace this with an LLM that generates Python, and the Python program is wrong, how does a normal non-Python-programming human debug it? They try asking the LLM, but it doesn't actually understand the Python so it will often send them down odd rabbit holes. In contrast, every intermediate step in an Excel / Calc program is visible. Every single intermediate value is introspectable. Adding extra sanity checks (such as 'does money leaving the account equal the money paid to suppliers?') is trivial.

If you want to democratise programming, build better debuggers, don't build tools that rapidly generate code that's hard to debug.

Pondering if I dare to put #Fortran into my CV. :blobcatthinking:

I can do some Fortran, partly because it keeps coming up in all sorts of #retrocomputing contexts, but, even with Ratfor enhancements, I don't consider it a well-designed or pleasant language, and I'm not sure I can see myself working at a place that deals in new Fortran code now that nice, human-friendly languages such as NumPy and APL have been invented. Besides, 21st century Fortran is a really weird language that doesn't even know what it wants to be when it grows up.

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