pixelscript @ pixelscript @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

If the current tools work fine, have decades of historic support and battle testing, and the alternatives offer little to no net benefit, uhh, why?

Idk, crusading against common myths is something that's pretty hot these days. Stuff like:

• Christopher Columbus didn't actually discover America, and he was actually kind of an asshat
• Bell didn't invent the telephone, he was simply the first to patent and subsequently litigate
• "Frankenstein" is the name of the scientist, not the monster
• Many modern tropes about Christian Hell stem from a 17th century political satire novel

Crusading for truth in easily verifiable matters feels very on-brand for the kind of people who use Lemmy. In that light, reclaiming a negative term that's only negative because of a false premise to describe ourselves doesn't sound so bad. At worst, we become a little insufferable as we have to introduce the term with a "well, ackshually", which a lot of us would probably do anyway.

I only use Reddit for two things these days. Practicing my technical writing skills by offering answers to ELI5 posts, and silently doomscrolling though US politics.

Both of these are theoretically on Lemmy somewhere, but this place really doesn't move fast enough to be fulfilling.

That said, I only access Reddit on desktop PC in old.reddit mode. The third party appocalypse did not make me leave completely, but it did kill off all of my time using it on mobile, at least. The day they take old.reddit from me and force me to use that miserable card view, though, I'm checking out for good.

When that inevitable day arrives, I will not have FOMO over it. Anything positive I'd hypothetically be missing out on would be canceled out by the abysmal way in which they expect me to consume it. I will miss what it was, though. Lemmy just isn't a substitute for it. The Lemmy experience right now is the Miracle Whip to Reddit's mayo.

I can't fathom how anyone would enjoy being on a Discord server with more than a few dozen active users, and even then, more than a dozen or so active users at any given time. Above a certain threshold it just becomes noise.

Unless 97% of them never speak. Which, in my experience, is totally plausible.

Still. Weird way to do socials with schoolmates, imo. I would have expected students to self-select into smaller friend groups on Discord or TikTok or WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever the hell people use now. Not coalesce into one giant digital town square. Not knockin' it, though. Seems like a neat idea.

I garnered a very low opinion of pretty much all vegetables during childhood that persisted well into adulthood, because I grew up in a household that only ever prepared them one of two ways: raw, or boiled.

Doesn't matter what it was. Carrots, peas, corn, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, green beans... the two exceptions being onions (which may have been fried on occasion) or potatoes (which culinarily aren't in the same category). If it was boiled, there'd be a half-assed attempt to make it taste like something again by melting a knob of butter on it and salting it. That's it.

When that's the extent of your culinary range, cabbage has no reason to enter the house, so for us it never did. We just assumed it would be shit if you prepared it that way. And we were probably right. Boiled cabbage is what the poor Bucket family was said to have eaten every day in Willy Wonka. Doesn't paint a glamorous picture.

I'm only just now coming around to the concept of vegetables tasting good when you, like, y'know, actually cook them well. Haven't given cabbage a fair shake yet, though.

My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.

This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.

The original definition of "magazine" was simply "warehouse". A place where you amassed a bunch of stuff. This usage is still around, but it's rare.

At the time, the military was perhaps the most prominent entity creating these well-stocked warehouses, so the specific linking of "magazine" to "military warehouse" was a natural progression. And as we all are familiar now, it later morphed into a word to describe a chamber of bullets. In a sense, a tiny little military warehouse you attach to your gun.

The definition referring to a paper catalog getting mailed to your house full of random written articles comes from one very specific one, named Gentleman's Magazine. It was named that because it thought itself a magazine (a warehouse) of information.

I assume kbin was thinking of the latter when using the term to describe its communities. Though, considering the right-wing bias of its target audience, I expect the wordplay with the ammunition definition was also intended.

Imagine one of those combined Pizza Hut/KFC stores from the 90's, except it's just one big combined buffet of pizza and fried chicken, and the whole place is cowboy themed.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as the editor alone can handle every step of the process from development to testing to version control to deployment to debugging, it's an IDE.

I don't care if it doesn't natively ship with all these things and you have to append them with plugins. (I thought we championed software that doesn't force bloat features we'll never use down our throats?) The only applicable factors are that it exposes the extensibility to add them, and that someone has added them.

Does that make EMACS and Vim IDEs, too? If you've sufficiently tricked them out with plugins, extensions, and helper scripts to do every part of your pipeline without leaving the editor, then I guess so! It is an Environment that has Integrated everything you need for Development. If it quacks like a duck...

VS Code is an IDE, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

MongoDB does it, too. So it's not exclusively a SQL thing.

Why do you have to "announce" your capabilities to beings you designed? Why do you have to onboard them to your "program" at all? If you truly are omnipotent, simply make beings that already know, and are already with the program. Assuming that is indeed what you want, why would you do anything else?

Are you throwing in extra steps for your own amusement? Just as a prank? Why? You're omniscient. You already know how it ends. What's amusing about it?

You are either toying with beings you created to be non-accepting and deliberately presenting conditions that won't convince them, or you're lacking one or both of omnipotence or omniscience.

An argument straight from the edgy teen atheist textbook, sure, but nonetheless one I have yet to see a compelling rebuttal for.

My university Linux cluster was my first introduction to Linux in general, and they ran MATE of all things.

A few years later, when I decided I was done with Window's bullshit and wanted to jump my daily driver to Linux, I installed Ubuntu MATE so I'd have the best familiarity edge I could to minimize friction.

MATE is alright. Despite being rather barebones and dated (being a life support fork of GNOME 2, I understand that is indeed kind of the point), it served me well for about 5 years.

I got a real urge to switch, though, due to just how little support or documentation there is for anything in MATE. I was also getting fed up with Ubuntu's Snap crap as well. So I decided to dump both for something else.

I wanted to stay on Debian's architecture for now, but no longer had need for Ubuntu's handholding, so raw Debian it was. As for the DE, I personally like the rich, full-fat ones more than the lean ones, and I wanted something modern, popular, and with highly proliferous support resources. That basically meant GNOME 3 or KDE Plasma. And I guess maybe Cinnamon, but I always see it marketed as the "newly ex-Windows user training wheels" DE, and that isn't my need.

GNOME 3 strikes me as the "MacOS" of Linux DEs. It wants to swim against the current to introduce its own paradigm. Everything designed to work in its ecosystem is buttery smooth and sexy, yes, but since it's also a counterparadigm, that tends to relegate you to the pack-in software and a handful of big vendors. Most other software has to rely on clumsy shims to fit in. I'm not about it, tbh. I'm sure it's fine, I just don't think higher highs are worth the lower lows, and I generally wasn't in the mood for a drastic paradigm shift.

So, KDE Plasma for me. It was unfortunate I made the leap just as they decided, "Wayland is stable and supported enough for everyone now!" (it isn't, lol), so it's a bit rockier than I was hoping, but whatever. Stability and support can only improve with time. And I expect faster adoption of Wayland than I do the GNOME 3 paradigm since Wayland is currently the only ship of its kind in the water that isn't sinking.

Aaaaall that said, KDE treats me pretty well, minus the Wayland issues. Upgrading to it from MATE was like trading up from a cheap, dingy hostel to a clean 4-star hotel. Should've leapt years ago.

Bottom should be Composer.

Static analysis won't save you from all of them, but they will definitely save you from the great majority of the ones ProgrammerHumor seems to get worked up about.

I still see people sharing ancient memes about pouring over code for hours looking for mismatched curly braces, missing semicolons, and greek question marks. These and the bulk of minor syntax problems like them should all be complete non-issues with modern tooling.

It's 2023. If you're not using an IDE or a highly extensible text editor with simple static analysis features, I really don't know what to tell you.

I would classify it in the same mental bucket where I put activity and workout monitor apps that track steps or calorie goals.

Now, whether it actually produces consistent, net positive health results, I can't say either way.

DreamWeaver.

And thank god for it, too.

I think those of us that treat social media services this way are a minority in the grand picture. If BlueSky continues to be effective, network effect will pull in a steady stream of users, including ones that may have balked before.

It is poising itself to be a 1:1 drop-in replacement for Twitter. Federated services like Mastodon aren't that (and aren't trying to be).

I wholly believe that the majority of Twitter users have no interest in federated platforms as alternatives. By comparison, platforms like Mastodon feel vaguely like Twitter but more fractured and isolated. Everyone was on Twitter. Comparatively no one is on Mastodon. Discovery is awful and micromanaging instances and subscriptions is tedious busywork. "Why can't it just be all in one convenient place, like on Twitter? This is so stupid and complicated," I expect most would complain.

Federated platforms are loved by us because we value the fine control and we like putting in effort to curate our feeds. The complexity is the appeal. But I think it's negative appeal to the type of person who has gotten accustomed to an algorithm doing all of that for them, and I think that's most people. You can use federated platforms out of the box and they'll "just work" without all the tinkering, but it will be very bland and vapid. It only becomes great when you put in work to make it great for yourself.

The thing BlueSky seems to be promising is that big, monolithic platform that Twitter was and most people want. And I think they're the only notable player in that game, so they'll completely corner that market. As long as they don't trip over any footguns (and I don't believe making the beta invite-only is one of them), I believe they're going to succeed greatly.

At this stage that's kind of the point. It's an intentional demand-curbing measure. The number of people trying to switch to BlueSky outstrips hosting infrastructure. They're scaling up slowly and carefully.

I presume once it's out of open beta and they have the infra they need to launch properly, it will stop being invite ony.

Ah yes, Taco Bell programming.