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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: March 5th, 2025

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  • That’s a very nuanced analysis. I’ve explained it this way especially to people who describe themselves as “bad at computers”. Hey, give yourself a break, you’ve learned a lot about how to cope with windows. But this investment leads to a conservatism— they dont want to learn coping skills o a new system. The devil you know.

    I’d just add that GUI is more discoverable. When faced with a terminal, what to do? Whereas with a GUI you have a menubar, some icons etc. The GUI gives a lot more hints.

    In the terminal (which I love) it is more powerful once you know how to crack the lid.



  • I am not a big fan pf matrix but I think SchlidiChat was the one I used most successfully on android.

    From what I have seen a main issue with Matrix is that the protocol can be implemented in bits and pieces. Which is perfectly fair but it leads to an inconsistent user experience. The default web clients you first use to try it out will be using strong encryption settings by default but then a lot of the mobile or native desktop clients don’t support encryption. So it’s difficult to get going finding cross platform apps that have all the desired functionality consistently between them.

    In terms of the apps, I don’t think comparing matrix to lemmy is exactly fair for this reason.




  • It’s not really something developers want to think about very much so they often just use the default.

    Do you think it was intentional ideological decision by the Rust developers or some other contributors/interests to make permissive the default? Or a random decision that has ended up being consequential because of the popularity of Rust?

    I have noticed for a long time that github promotes MIT license. It lets you use any, of course, but puts a real positive shine on MIT. My perception is that this is a purposeful intervention by MS into FLOSS to promote MIT.


  • I do not program. So maybe trying to understand all this is over my head. wikipedia describes

    A static library or statically linked library contains functions and data that can be included in a consuming computer program at build-time such that the library does not need to be accessible in a separate file at run-time.

    I thought that was the idea of binaries in general. In the Arch repos there are many packages appended with -bin. (The Arch repos also contain items of various licenses including proprietary.) Lots of FLOSS packages make a binary available by direct download from their website. Without too much detail, is there something special about Rust? Or maybe I misunderstand the concept of a binary release.

    library code licensed under it must be able to be replaced.

    Does this mean you need to be able to make a reproducible build? Or need to be able to swap code for something else? Wouldn’t that inherently break a program?










  • I felt the same way every time I tried to use Twitter as I feel every time I try to use Mastodon. It’s either way too much or way too little. I prefer everything about the reddit/lemmy/threadiverse style.

    How would we even be having this conversation on microblogging? A bunch of reposts, with or without comments, disconnected from each other… So much nicer to have a “subject” line and a page where every relevant comment is presented.



  • I’m really interested in the concept.

    I would like to see community-oriented search engines. But I don’t know if “the community” is viable really. It would better be for communies. I just downloaded the browser extension and it lets you see the pages it is crawling; they are the sorts of things that would be of interest to a lemmy type community— a lot of nerd stuff. Which is of interest to me. That’s why I’m here. :)

    What if I am in an online community interested in a different part of the web— say celebrity gossip and royal watching. A network of forums, comment sections, socials, chats etc with thousands of people who are at least casually interested and some hundred who are very motivated. Like everyone else the web is getting harder for us to navigate. How realistic would it be for us to spin up an instance of this to make our own community search engine? This community does not want to see a bunch of stackoverflow, gihubs, arxiv papers, tech news or the other stuff I am seeing float past me in the crawling extension.

    It seems that the place where this kind of thing is somewhat documented would be https://book.mwmbl.org/ — but it’s pretty vague.



  • This is a case where both tools are invaluable.

    The original find has much more comprehensive options. Of course it is extensively documented and you can find all kinds of information online about how it works and how to combine it with other tools to accomplish all kinds of tasks. And it’s GPL which is always preferable.

    fd has a narrower range of functionality but goddamned it really is faster. fd can run several searches on the whole hard drive’s contents while find is struggling to get through just a single comparable search on the same set of files. For simple tasks, the cli usage for fd is less to remember and less to type.

    If I had to choose, I’d stick with find because it can do everything, even if it’s slower and more cumbersome. But luckily, don’t have to choose, just have both and use them as appropriate.