@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, that has nothing to do with fun. đ
I was thinking back to CD players. Switching tracks took a moment, although I donât know anymore how long exactly. IIRC, playing CDs on a computer was a bit slower than in a dedicated player.
Donât worry, switching to the next OGG file on my disk is basically instant. đ
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org But stuff is still âmostly usableâ, isnât it? Itâs not like it became impossible to write a letter because everything has gotten so slow.
Thatâs what I meant by âabsoluteâ performance: A human being tolerates a system boot up time of 0.5-2 minutes, for example, so thereâs an absolute/fixed duration that any task is allowed to take. Boot: 0.5-2 minutes. Opening Word: 1-10 seconds. Saving an image file: 1-10 seconds. Time until the next song starts to play when you click ânext trackâ: 0-5 seconds. Stuff like that. As long as we donât exceed those durations, people will be more or less happy.
Wasted potential? Ab-so-fucken-lutely.
(Maybe Iâm repeating myself. Iâm tired. Sorry. đ )
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uhh, nice. Havenât seen a sunset like that in a while, I think. đ€
What the heck is going on here today, so many messages. đ
@prologic@twtxt.net ⊠what was that again? đ€đ đ€Ș
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess itâs all about âabsoluteâ performance. Everything is just fast enough for you to get stuff done â no matter the underlying machine. LibreOffice today on my modern machine takes the same time to start up as StarOffice (its ancestor) on my retro machine. And working with it feels the same, everything is just as fast (or slow).
Browsing the web today feels similar to 25 years ago. Even all this wobbling that my link above demonstrates already existed back then (in a way), but it was caused by images loading so slowly. Then, for a brief moment, some browser (I donât remember which one) had this brilliant feature of trying to keep the current scrolling position stable while the page was still loading. That was great. đ This feature then got lost again, probably because itâs too hard to do with JavaScript changing the DOM all the time. So now weâre back to the way it was before.
Corporations should give devs the slowest and oldest machines that they have. đ Not only would this be more sustainable, it would also force them to optimize better.
Wayland wants to make every frame perfect. I wish web devs had the same goal. Instead, weâre stuck with this:
https://movq.de/v/112a927861/hiccupfx/
đđ
@prologic@twtxt.net Most of the things that cause my frustration are things that I canât change or even avoid. Thereâs little benefit in complaining about it, I think. đ€
Iâm putting all efforts to switch to Wayland on hold for another 2 years, minimum.
As we all know, writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is next to impossible. Luckily, thereâs the wlroots project which aims to build a base library for this task. Basically every compositor except for GNOME and KDE uses it. (This is good! The less fragmentation, the better.)
wlroots is still very volatile, lots of changes with every release. Downstream users (i.e., the projects that write the actual compositor) have to constantly âchaseâ changes in wlroots. dwl, my favorite compositor at the moment, has recently switched their main
branch to target the wlroots git version instead of the latest release. My understanding is that they have to do this in order to keep up with wlroots (maybe Iâm wrong).
Everything is volatile and a moving target.
Why does any of this matter for me? Because I have to eventually fork dwl or at least keep a patch set, and I donât have the stamina to constantly fiddle with this stuff. Iâm running my own X11 window manager, itâs highly specialized, and using just âsome Wayland compositor out thereâ is a huge step backward that Iâm not willing to take. I tried, itâs just painful and annoying with zero benefits.
So ⊠it was fun experimenting with Wayland a bit, but Iâm now back to waiting for things to settle down considerably.
@prologic@twtxt.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Itâs better this way. đ I donât like all this negativity in tech. We tend to focus on bad aspects too much, imho. Then again, itâs really easy to focus on bad stuff, simply because thereâs so much of it. đ
Today is one of those days where Iâm really grumpy and have typed out lots and lots of rants. Luckily, I all deleted them in the end instead of sending them. đ
@prologic@twtxt.net They all gave Crowdstrike root access to their machines. What could possibly go wrong? đ€·đ€·đ€·
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, ok, somehow I thought this was not your thing. đ
Maybe I was misled by you calling them âAcca Daccaâ, which felt somewhat derogative. But I just found @mckinley@mckinley.ccâs twt gaapgna
from a while ago â so this is just normal Aussie slang for AC/DC?! đ€Żđ„Ž
@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club
I run it in a Work profile on my GrapheneOS phone that I can switch off at any time
Hmmmmmmm, I like that idea. If I could ban WhatsApp into a second profile and only switch it on every now and then, I would feel a little bit better about it.
(I donât really trust Android, though, and I suspect that apps can still install background services that are always active. Pure speculation and paranoid on my part, but still.)
@mckinley@twtxt.net Hmmmmm, yeah, sounds like jabber is not the right thing for us then.
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com To be honest, I donât like Matrix that much myself. We donât use any of the fancy crypto features and all that, no federation either. And clients like âFluffyChatâ look and feel pretty much like any other chat client. Itâs a rather simple setup. Problem is just that itâs not WhatsApp and people want WhatsApp, nothing else. đ«€ (Hence I have little hope that Signal would be a big success.)
Anyone who reads the CrowdStrike self-description and then buys the product has really earned a major fault.
The nasty thing is: Sysadmins donât decide this, do they? The management does. And they donât have to clean up this bloody fucking mess.
All the fellow sysadmins who were hit by this have my sympathies. đ
@prologic@twtxt.net Everythingâs on fire. Weâre going to be complaining for a couple of days, then weâll continue as usual, repeating the same mistakes. Nothing to see, carry on. đ«€đ„Ž
(Iâm just glad it didnât affect us at work.)
Then there comes in feature creep.
This is driving me nuts. Everybody thinks that âdevelopment has to be kept alive!â When people see a project without commits in the last 2 years, they think itâs dead and not worth using. Bah, why? Software can be âdoneâ. If no bugs are known, then thereâs no need to change anything.
All these ideas are old. Iâve heard about much of this from meillo some 15 years ago and he didnât come up with it, either.
Itâs all super unpopular. Why? Many of my projects see a burst of commits in the beginning and then mostly just maintenance â and thatâs great. It saves me from so much trouble and work. For example, my X11 wallpaper setter was written in 2017, Iâm using it daily all the time, it just works, boom, done.
A project isnât dead if it doesnât see commits anymore â itâs dead if nobody maintains it anymore.
@mckinley@twtxt.net Last time I tried jabber was probably 10 years ago. Howâs group chat these days? Is it comparable to âmodernâ chat systems, does it feel the same?
I guess itâs irrelevant which platform Iâm going to propose as an alternative to WhatsApp. Itâs the same old problem: Almost all their contacts are on WhatsApp, so thatâs what they want to use, end of story.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You had me in the first half, I thought you were going to their concert. đ That would have surprised me.
I had some pleasant experiences with public transportation lately, but that wasnât Deutsche Bahn.
Would a bike or an ebike be an alternative for you? đ€
@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net Itâs a twtxt feed that anyone can post to via Gopher: gopher://g.nixers.net/1/%7eanon/
Do we think this is a problem? đ€ If so, you should be able to contact the admin in #nixers on libera.chat.
@prologic@twtxt.net Kind of, yeah. (I wish they wouldnât focus so much on âelitismâ.)
Regarding complexity budget, slow software, all that:
Very few people do take pride in building simple, elegant, high-quality systems, do they? Why is that? Why are huge shiny things with tons of features more attractive? đ€
I never explicitly thought about this, to be honest. It was only at the back of my head. And I never tried to teach our younger âstudentsâ at work: âHey, itâs a great achievement to build something simple and elegant. Thatâs something to be proud of!â
Worse, simple software is often described as âboringâ. Yes, in a way, it is boring, because your brain doesnât have to get into overdrive to understand it. But thatâs exactly the point. And itâs hard to achieve that! Simple software isnât just âfewer lines of codeâ, you have to be pretty clever to solve a problem in a simple and elegant way. So itâs something to be proud of.
Could this be an intuitive, emotional way to get more people on board the âsimple softwareâ-train? đ€
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, youâre right. The quality aspect is lacking, too. Sigh. đ
Focus on quality, focus on âdoing it rightâ, make that your primary goal. And everything else shall fall into place.
If it only were that simple. đ«€đ
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, itâs hard(er) with family members. I shouldnât have started that Matrix stuff â before that, they had an easier time accepting that I donât use WhatsApp. Now itâs more like âwhy donât you switch?â
âJoy of missing outâ, eh? :D
@prologic@twtxt.net Iâll look into it. đ€ The good thing is that I think some people already use Signal. Weâll see.
If WhatsApp was just a messenger, I probably wouldnât be so reluctant to join. But itâs an app that insists on running on a smartphone. It has access to so much metadata ⊠Fuck this shit. đ«€
The âMatrix Experimentâ, i.e. running a Matrix server for our family, has failed completely and miserably. People donât accept it. They attribute unrelated things to it, like âI canât send messages to you, I donât reach you! It doesnât work!â Yes, you do, I get those messages, I just donât reply quickly enough because Iâm at work or simply doing something else.
Iâll probably shut it down.
Nobody cares about privacy. The reasons I bring up in discussions are âtoo nerdyâ. They put all their stuff to Google or Apple, so why would messaging be any different? (Weâre not even using all those Matrix crypto stuff ⊠That would be insane.)
Itâs a lost cause. Iâm frustrated.
Will I give in and use WhatsApp instead? Not sure yet.
@prologic@twtxt.net Iâm not smart/educated enough to come up with a formal spec. đ€
Itâs somewhat telling that the HTMX blogpost also (mostly) only talks about feelings, not hard facts.
@prologic@twtxt.net How about ânowâ? đ
Personally, Iâve been doing this for a long time now. Minimal(-ish), slow pace, no pressure. Works quite well for me. The idea isnât very popular, though. đ„Ž
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Awww, nice birdie. Lovely pic. đ
We desperately need to start a Slow Software movement. High quality, intentionally designed, low defect software done at a quarter of the pace for the same price. Because weâve been destroying the mental health of developers for the last quarter century, and what do we have to show for it but a giant mess?
Maybe your softwares are just perfect and there are simply no bug reports and contributions required. :-)
Haha. đ I guess my software is just way too irrelevant. đ Or maybe not. I just donât know. I should add some telemetry. đ
I just also see the issue with smaller mail servers being blocked by the large ones. This also happened to me I believe. My mails just never made it to the people. Or they were ignored, I cannot tell.
To be honest, when I send private email, like insurance stuff or to the bank or similar, I always get a reply. The recipients are German mail servers, usually run by those institutions or individuals. Sometimes itâs MS Outlook or Telekom. In other words, itâs not Google. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm âŠ
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Is that an actual lake? And a fish? It looks so small. I always wonder how fish end up there. đ€
@prologic@twtxt.net Well ⊠đ
Should sit down and see what the contributions have been for some of my projects before and after the migration away from Github? đ€
I might do that for my projects. đ€
Maybe itâs a discovery problem too?
Yeah, well, apart from my own blog and rarely Mastodon, I donât really talk about my projects anymore. I used to mention them on forums and reddit and the likes. Forums were really good for that. But I mean, forums are dying out as well, so where do you âpromoteâ your projects? đ€ On Mastodon, it usually gets drowned in the noise.
I sure hope not, that kind of defeats the point of an ecosystem that is suppose to encourage distributed software development and distributed forms of collaboration. Right? đ€
It does, yes. Question is, do people actually care about distributed development anymore? (Did they ever?)
@prologic@twtxt.net No, just a minor injury, as far as I know.
This sums up the Matrix experience: https://cathode.church/@apothecary/112742706806370926
I would never ask anyone to send me patches via Email.
Thatâs not even what Iâm doing, but I just realized that my bugs.html
page isnât really clear about that. It implies that patches are meant to be sent via email and Iâm fine if that happens â but I donât insist on people doing that. You might as well send me a link to your fork on GitHub or your own server or whatever.
I should clarify that. đ€
@prologic@twtxt.net Huh, okay, thatâs surprising to me. I had thought that Gitea would be easy enough for people to use. I mean, it even has the âSign in with GitHubâ button. đ€ And itâs not like Gitea is some arcane/archaic tool like Bugzilla, which is just horrible to use.
So ⊠whatâs stopping people?
Iâm not sure what else we can do? Iâm nNOT moving back to Github, ever.
Same. There are alternatives like https://codeberg.org/ now, but does that really help? GitHub was also a small and independent platform once. Are we supposed to âforge hopâ (as in âdistro hopâ) all the time, migrate from the most non-shitty hoster to the next? That canât be the solution.
@prologic@twtxt.net Someone shot at Trump: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1d31jeyzlo
I donât run a bug tracker, instead all my projects link to this page:
https://uninformativ.de/bugs.html
It basically says, when you find a bug, please send me an email.
Now Iâve read this:
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/EmailVsForgesUnfortunate
I hadnât thought about this before. Thatâs a quite valid reason. đ«€ Sadly, it applies to any truly independent self-hosted service. That OAuth thingy (âSign in with GitHubâ) might be the only compromise âŠ
(I rarely get any feedback on my projects, btw. jenny might be an exception, because weâre talking about it here sometimes. Overall, the number of bug reports has dropped significantly since I moved away from GitHub.)
Jesus christ, America. đ«€
Trying to learn this on double bass now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcf7GeBq-M
Too bad my electric double bass will never sound as majestic as an acoustic one.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, absolutely. Doing crazy stuff is fun every now and then, but thereâs no need to be masochistic. đ
yarnd
that's cropped up that results in a " />
at the end of uploaded/links images. I'm not able to figure this bug out yet đą
@prologic@twtxt.net Whatâs the offending commit according to your bisect?
Speaking of programming languages, Iâm so glad that Iâve spent so much time doing C and a little bit of Assembler over the years. Itâs the perfect foundation for my recently acquired retrocomputing hobby. đ You can target basically any platform with C â DOS, OS/2, Windows NT, UNIX, ⊠Had I gone all-in on Java (as University and employers nudged me to in the mid-2000âs), I probably wouldnât have this skill set now. đ€
yarnd
that's cropped up that results in a " />
at the end of uploaded/links images. I'm not able to figure this bug out yet đą
@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, Iâve seen this for a while now. đ€
@prologic@twtxt.net Rust just isnât the best tool for every job, even though thatâs what the âcultâ around it wants to make you believe.
Iâm surprised that the article doesnât talk about the ecosystem and the large number of dependencies that you usually pull in. đ€ Maybe the author is already used to that.
Yeah, weâre quite lucky with this very, very wet summer this year.
⊠unless youâre living in one of those areas with severe weather: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/unwetter-sturm-hagel-100.html đ đ±
We had some lovely 15°C this morning, too. Now at 20°C. Letâs hope it stays that way for a while.