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3 yr. ago

  • Would you say Go is popular enough to be called mainstream?

  • Zig is what I thought Rust would be like when I first heard of Rust. I'd love to try Zig for some hobby things but can't get it running on OpenBSD (yet!).

  • I am consistently surprised by what companies are willing to pay to not worry about capacity. Incredible DataDog bills, for example, because they didn’t want to think about how many application metrics to store; “just keep it all!”. And boy do they happily pay for it!

  • Ok I’m starting to understand where you’re coming from now! It sounds like the leaders are happy for humans to do the work of increasing capacity on-demand rather than tackle the engineering challenges in handling workload spikes. The priority is to appease customers who are from well-known, “impressive”, well-paying (maybe not?) companies. Does that sound sorta right?

  • Inform and throttle. Think about how your own computer works. If storage reaches its max capacity, you get a signal back saying “filesystem full” (or whatever), not “internal storage error”. If the CPU gets busy, it doesn’t crash; things start slowing down, queued up, prioritised (and many other complicated mechanisms I’m not across!).

    You could borrow those ideas, come up with a way to implement the behaviour in your systems, then present them to whoever could allocate the time & money.

    Another approach is try to get a small, resource-constrained version of the system running and hammer it by loading heaps of data like those customers do. How does it behave? What are the fatal errors and what can we deal with later?

  • Agreed. I didn't know about these features - I've never written any Perl before - and I do find them kinda interesting and cool. But not really surprising.

    A less clickbaity title might be "Exploring Raku's built-in shortcuts for CLIs" or something. Still 6 words. And I still would have clicked and enjoyed the article! Really appreciated its positive tone and clear examples!

  • Sorry my comment was really snarky - I apologise. Long day! I'll do better in the future :)

    There has been criticism of this listicle format. Critics claim they are clickbait and machinated recycling of information/ideas. Listicles seem to exist to just get more ad impressions over entertaining and informing the reader.

    The original article on the original site feels a bit like that. Loads of ads, with just one link to the actual nixos website, mid-sentence, towards the bottom of the article (where the majority of readers never get to).

  • I think I'm missing something. Don't the police or whoever check the license number, name etc. against a central record? Is this just about the convenience of not carrying around a plastic card? I feel like there's more to it but I don't know what.

  • Of all the articles to copy and paste without attribution, you chose this one...?

  • Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

    But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I've written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

    More ideas if you're interested at https://upspin.io

  • They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

    This touches on something that I've been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

    There's also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual "thing". I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

    Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

  • Thanks for sharing.

  • This sounds similar in spirit to me, but I did make a career out of it. If you don't mind me asking, what is your career? You can also email me; see "Contact" at http://www.olowe.co

  • Getting old, "broken" computers running Linux was the first thing when I was about 11 or 12 years old. Then:

    1. needing a way to keep them running
    2. wanting ways to make running them easier
    3. wanting those ways to be easier/simpler

    Often this involved programming. Eventually I found out that companies pay money for this kind of thing.

    But now I'm finding it difficult to find work which aligns with those original values. Getting paid means delivering what people will pay for, not necessarily solving problems. What got me into programming is probably what will get me out of it (profesionally, anyway).

  • Now I do convoluted shit by hand and not knowing I'm gonna fuck it up ;)

  • I won't speak for the OP, but yes it is a fair question about the automatic red-flag. There are characteristics of software described as cloud-native that are considered undesirable by some.

    These could range from things as high level as an objection to how projects are funded, down to things like distaste for code complexity required to support opaque HTTP APIs over standardised protocols.

  • Ah yes good point. Fingers crossed.

  • Maybe there's some IP address ranges to try block?

    It's difficult because, for example, blocking the addresses OpenAI's crawlers use may inadvertently block addresses from Azure used by Bing or whatever.

  • Looks like that will happen later. From Mozilla's original article:

    Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox.