• 1 Post
  • 255 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2024

help-circle

  • Rust is fundamentally more limiting than C, even with unsafe. It is often faster if you write naive code (because the Rust compiler can optimize more aggressively due to those same limitations), but an experienced developer with a lot of time for optimization will probably be able to squeeze more performance out of C than they would out of Rust - as you can see in this example. Rust is still better because those limitations all but guarantee that the resulting code will be safer, and the performance differences would be negligible all things considered.




  • My relationship with antinatalism is very complicated.

    First off, I personally will not be procreating, for multiple reasons.

    Chief among those is the fact that I live in an ever worsening capitalist, patriarchal, xenophobic hellscape; even socialist countries are a long long way away from anything resembling communism, still require a lot of labor from their citizens in exchange for basic necessities (with good reasons), and patriarchy very much persists there. I have hope that we as a species can overcome this eventually, just as we mostly overcame slavery and achieved some semblance of emancipation for many oppressed minorities.

    Another, more permanent reason: despite my relative privileges, my own experience of life has been very mixed, and I perceive there to be more suffering than happiness. Suffering is just a way for our body to push our brain to do something the body needs to survive; human beings have a lot of needs to be met, and as long as there are at least a couple that are not you will suffer (not accounting for things like drugs or other extreme dopamine hits which come with their own set of issues). Another big issue is how our bodies normalize the level of suffering to their environment; this is good because it allows us to get by with very little without going insane, but on the flipside even if you have all the basic needs met, the body is always demanding more via suffering. You can observe this by looking at rich people: even though their needs are met with seeming abundance, they crave to experience more and different pleasures, and suffer in the process of trying to achieve them. While frivolous, I think the suffering they experience is still real and similar to that of our own. I don’t feel any compassion for them (after all, for most of them their wealth was stolen from less fortunate), but it’s a good example.

    As such, I personally don’t want to bring a new being into this world, mostly to suffer their way through life.

    However, I also know for sure that different people experience life differently. I know that people with much worse material conditions than mine perceive themselves (and thus their life) to be overall happy, despite there being plenty of suffering too. I don’t know whether it’s a genetic or learnt trait of their psychology; in any case, I think those people are more likely to produce offspring who experience a happy life, and wish them the best in doing so. My hope is that they bring up their kids in the right way - both so that they are happy, and also able to eventually overcome all the issues in the third paragraph.







  • I don’t know if it’s of any solace, Linux used to be a much more… ahem… “involved” experience a decade or two ago. This was more-or-less the norm:

    xkcd

    I can’t really say what the newcomer experience is nowadays, but I can say for sure that even in the worst-case (as it was in the times when I started using it), after a couple months of furious issue-fixing and trying new things, you will eventually settle on a setup that works for you. Some people actually get addicted to all the problem-solving and start looking for more issues to fix; some start distrohopping to find a “more perfect setup”, getting their fix of issue-fixing in the process. If you’re not one of them, congrats, at that point you can (mostly) just continue using it, until you need to update your hardware, then process may or may not be repeated depending on your luck. If you really hate fixing issues twice, you can look in the direction of declarative distros like NixOS or Guix, but I will warn you that the two-three months of furious hacking is still very much a thing here, but after that you’re set more or less for life.


  • balsoft@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlIntroduction to Nix & NixOS
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    27
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    30 days ago

    NIX IS FOR REPRODUCIBLE BUILDS. That’s fucking it, seriously. It’s literally on their website.

    This post is specifically about NixOS and friends, though.

    IT’S A HORRIFIC EXPERIENCE FOR NEW USERS TRYING TO RUN A DESKTOP. Steer clear.

    There are thousands of users who run NixOS on their desktop, and thousands more users of home-manager (or nix-darwin) on macOS. If you are ready to put in the time and learn how it works, it’s wonderful - your entire distribution, the thing through which you interact with computers, becomes just another project in your ~/projects, rather than something you have to manually configure. You can’t forget “how to configure $X”, because it is all recorded in one place and done automatically when you get a new machine or update or whatever. It’s GNU Stow on steroids, for your entire system.

    There are a lot of downsides for sure as well (mostly the learning curve, and having to fix the buggy bullshit in some software which only runs well in FHS), but if you are a software developer (or adjacent) and like Linux, NixOS is still awesome.


  • For context I’ve been using aerc as my email client for a while now, and was looking for something similar for calendars/tasks myself

    I’ve tried:

    • calcurse: fine but clunky, also a bit difficult to set up. The most mature option and probably the best one available, but I just couldn’t get used to the interface
    • calcure: similarly clunky interface, glitchy/blinking rendering to the point of being headache-inducing, lacking features (couldn’t figure out how to look at all event attributes?)
    • khal: limited in features (compared to calcurse) and slow when there are a lot of events (even when it’s only 2-3 per day), also there are some rendering bugs sometimes. Probably the most intuitive and clean interface of all, and good scripting opportunities.
    • gcalcli: only Google Calendar (I also need support for arbitrary CalDAV), didn’t investigate further
    • plann: no TUI as such, just CLI

    A couple weeks ago I’ve decided to start writing my own. It’s still very much a hacky WIP but I’ll update in this thread if I ever decide to publish it. In the meantime, I hope one of the above works for you!





  • Yes, it’s not linear. The progress of GenAI in the past 2 years is logarithmic at best, if you compare it with the boom that was 2019-2023 (from GPT2 to GPT4 in text, DALL-E 1 to 3 in images). The big companies trained their networks on all of the internet and ran out of training data, if you compare GPT4 to GPT5 it’s pretty obvious. Unless there’s a significant algorithmic breakthrough (which is looking less and less likely), at least text-based AI is not going to have another order-of-magniture improvement for a long time. Sure, it can already replace like 10% of devs who are doing boring JS stuff, but replacing at least half of the dev workforce is a pipe dream of the C-suite for now.