CoderKat @ CoderKat @lemm.ee

I write bugs and sometimes features! I'm also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

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2 yr. ago

While there's parts about the GPL that I do like, I think it's a generally bad license. Above all, because it limits even FOSS projects from using your code, because it would basically force them to also use the GPL. A massive amount of FOSS projects are not GPL compatible.

I think it generally often just discourages the usage of your code. You have to be something utterly outstanding for most companies to consider even touching GPL code. At least with a more permissive license, some corporations will use your code and even if they don't all contribute, some will. e.g., my company uses a ton of FOSS code. We can only import code with certain licenses, obviously not GPL code. Me and my coworkers have personally made upstream contributions to improve these projects when we discover bugs or limitations. We do certainly also have some projects where we make internal only modifications, but most of those are changes that don't make sense to commit to the upstream (like adding compatibility with internal systems or adapting to our build system). Point being that the projects with permissive licenses will at least get some commercial contributions whereas most GPL software simply won't get anything (the likes of Linux is a rare case -- most GPL projects aren't worth it for companies).

As an aside, have you seen the LGPL? Depending on what you're developing, it can sometimes make more sense. Its use case is for libraries. It basically makes it so that if you change the library, you must open source the changes (like the GPL), but if you merely link the library, you don't need to do so. That can make it a bit more compatible with other people's projects while still having GPL-like tendencies.

Other FOSS projects can't use it, either. The only other "normal people" would be, like, tiny private projects and bad actors. Maybe clueless students, but my university project classes required us to appropriately follow licenses when using other people's code, or we'd get marked down.

The ability for FOSS projects to use your code is the best part about the FOSS movement. They can generally all copy from each other to improve efficiency, especially since many FOSS licenses are compatible with each other.

If you want to stop corporations from using your project, use a license that does that. Most typically, the GPL will do that (while still allowing some FOSS projects to use the code). It doesn't prohibit commercial usage, but for the vast majority of projects, the license is basically a poison pill and thus no closed source project will generally use GPL licensed code. But I personally strongly recommend against the GPL, as it goes too far. Most FOSS projects can't use GPL code themselves. It's a rather extreme license.

If you don't care, just use something like the MIT, Apache, or BSD three clause licenses, which are all super simple licenses that have broad compatibility. Doesn't really matter which you use. I kinda like the BSD three clause because I like the "no using us to promote yourself" clause.

Super closely related is the "god works in mysterious ways" apology often used as the response if you ask what that reason was. It's bizarre that the people saying that quote are so insistent that everything happens for a reason even though they cannot answer what that reason might be (and usually get really uncomfortable if you press for an answer).

One thing I never understood about that nonsense quote is why it would be a bad thing even if it were true. Like, who the heck wants people to be "hard" or have hard times? What's so awful about people having easy times and getting to relax and enjoy life?

It's also usually used by "back in my day" bigots who are usually using it to complain about people they don't like and quite frequently LGBT people, because they think that their generation pushing people into the closet was somehow a good thing (or that it meant LGBT people didn't exist).

I feel like I've never seen or heard of anyone good using that quote. I'm sure it makes some sense if used in genuine good faith. The quote would make sense applied to someone with a disability, for example, by interpreting it more along the lines of having to deal with the person not always being outgoing and maybe even sometimes needing extra help.

But no, I've only ever seen shitty (or at least allegedly shitty) people use that quote, to justify their shittiness. The "worst" they refer to is usually bouts of anger or abuse.

It's weird that it's still used unironically today (and in fact feels like it's made a relatively recent revival). Like, you'd think they'd at least switch to a phrase that makes sense.

I don't think that's the original quote, but rather came later to try and improve the clearly flawed quote. Searching, I found https://grammarist.com/phrase/the-customer-is-always-right/, which says the original quote is the rather uninspiring "Rule number one: the customer is always right. Rule number two: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule number one".

That said, I do agree with you completely. I think the quote is just so obviously flawed, as customers abuse the heck out of it. Treating it as applying to aggregates makes way more sense. e.g., if customers want a pink doodad and you only sell doodads in black... well, then you're wrong and should start selling them in pink.

As a corollary, I also like the quote that has been often attributed to Ford (but checking, it seems unproven if he actually said it), "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." I like that quote because customers often frankly don't actually know what they want. I've had countless times myself where I didn't know I wanted a product until after I learned about it. And myself, I'm a software dev. This quote constantly applies to my field. The idea of users not knowing what they want is an extremely popular meme in the field (example). Users often need expert guidance to identify what they actually want and what a practical solution might look like.

This is as hilarious as people who say the same thing about Rage Against The Machine.

IMO the pedestrian infrastructure and presence of things to walk to matters far more. There's a 4 lane road in my city that goes by the university area and it's fine because that area was designed with walking in mind. The area is full of high rise apartments, countless restaurants, a world class university, a massive park, and has a nearby LRT. There's even a pedestrian overpass.

Speaking of overpasses, I noticed really great underpasses when I visited Warsaw. They had some really large streets, but they weren't an issue cause you could just go under the street (and that was also filled with shops). I found Warsaw to be a very walkable city and it was largely because of stuff like underpasses and simply things of interest being close by.

I had a similar experience visiting London but because of the Tube. London's public transit is literally the best I've personally used. Despite being a foreigner, I was able to get to literally everywhere I wanted to go with ease. I only wish Canadian cities would emulate that instead of the States as they tend to do.

K8s is amazing for big, complicated services. For small things, it quite honestly can be overcomplicated. If you're running something massive, like, say, Spotify, then k8s will make things simpler (because the alternative for running such a massive and complicated service is... gross lol). That's not to say that k8s can't be used for something like Lemmy, just that it might not be worth the complexity.

For the fediverse, I think a lot of the development is written for small, mostly monolithic single servers. K8s is meant for when you have an entire cluster running some service. You wouldn't typically run a single server with k8s, but rather you'd have many "nodes" and you'd run many instances of your binary ("pods") across those nodes for the redundancy.

I'm not very familiar with the backends of fediverse servers nor Docker Compose, but I'm under the impression that's for single servers and I've seen many Lemmy instances talk about their hosting as if they only have one physical server. That's probably fine for a FOSS social media site that is run by hobbyists, but major commercial software would never want to have a single server. Heck, they wouldn't even want to run just servers in one location. The big cloud providers all offer ways to run k8s clusters that use nodes spread across multiple data centers, usually ones with isolated failure zones, all to maximize uptime. But that's also expensive. For a big business, downtime means millions of dollars lost, so it's a no brainer. For Lemmy? As annoying as downtime is, users will live.

I totally agree that most servers work best as monoliths. Though at the same time, every now and then there's a case that really needed a microservice and you'll regret not having started that way, cause migrating a monolith that was never designed to be anything but a monolith can be really hard.

I have one of those. A server that is so large, complicated, and contributed to by so many different teams that it takes a lot of extra work to safely release and debug issues. Honestly, the monolithic structure does still make it easier to understand as a whole. It's not like splitting the server up would make understanding the end-to-end experience any easier (it would definitely become more complicated). But releasing such big servers with so many changes is harder, especially since users don't care about your architecture. They want it to work and they want 100% uptime. A bigger server means more to verify correctness before you can release it and when something is incorrect, you might be blocked on some other team fixing it.

Replace the Lemmy logo with the Twitter logo (they're not using it anymore).

Yeah, that's an interesting thing with Apple's delay in fully switching to USB C. Now they have to and it's gonna hurt their recent (and today) customers. They should have switched ages ago. The writing was on the wall for a few years at least.

It was especially weird cause they even did use USB C for some things. I have a MacBook for work and it uses USB C. Why the heck didn't they use it for everything??

Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don't know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?

There's no need to answer these questions. I'm not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.

(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the "all" feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)

I don't understand the appeal of no downvotes. Do you really think it's a good thing that trolls, bigots, dangerously wrong answers, general assholes, spam, etc can't be downvoted? I won't pretend downvotes aren't misused sometimes, but their existence is critical for quality control.

Edit: wait, I just saw you post in another thread as an "enlightened centrist", so I guess that explains it.

Even if she didn't have a pass or was the person who didn't pay last time (the driver was mistaken), they never should have closed the door while a person was in them.

Even if the door had managed to detect she was still in the way, the door closing on her could have injured her. And there's surely always something that could get stuck in the door without the sensor detecting it. If not a walking stick like this case, then a thin piece of clothing.

That's the part that horrified me the most. An hour?! That's an eternity. And somehow nobody noticed her despite the bus being in service? I kinda hope she was at least noticed quickly and the delay was something like first responders not being sure how best to remove her, because the alternative of being active dragged for that long with nobody noticing is even worse (as if it wasn't bad enough).

While criminal investigation does take time, yes, that doesn't stop them from arresting people ahead of time if there's even a moderate amount of evidence. I mean, that's never stopped police from arresting "suspicious" black people (eg, someone who simply happened to be black in an area where a crime was allegedly committed by another black person; even if they look nothing alike). Police consistently treat themselves with kid gloves while treating people of colour as hyper dangerous and must be immediately arrested (or shot).

In particular, women are more likely to be viewed as "bitchy", "bossy", etc for doing the exact same thing that a man could do without being considered as such.

So it's not just women speaking up, but also that there's a gender imbalance in how that speaking up can be viewed.

It's bizarre to me how many people assume that disabilities must be visible. And not just visible, but that it has to be glaringly visible.

You'd think that it'd be well known that visibilities might not be obvious, but nope.