What is so bad about virtual environments? I found them to be really nice and useful when I developed in Python over about 5-ish years. It was really nice being able to have separate clean environments for installing libraries and executing things.

Granted, I only used Python as a solo developer, so if there are shortcomings that emerge when working with other developers, then I would not be aware of them…

Edit: also, performance is a bit more of a subtle topic. For numerical logic, Python actually is (probably) much better than a lot of its competitors thanks to numpy and numexpr. For conditional logic, I would agree that it’s not the best, but when you consider developer velocity, it’s a clearly worthwhile tradeoff since frameworks like Django are so popular.

True, but if you’re looking at a Python library that doesn’t have type hints in 2024, then chances are that it’s not very good and/or not very well maintained.

Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

The comic states that Firefox is a crown jewel of open source, not the crown jewel.

That said, I agree that if I had to pick only one, it would definitely be Linux over Firefox.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he’s shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

At this point, it’s hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

But for him, it’s much easier to pretend that he doesn’t know what’s going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he’s paid to do.

Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.

Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

In some countries, there are already.

In others, it will be up to courts to decide whether this is illegally firing staff. That said, good luck getting equal legal representation to these trillion-dollar companies.

So yes, basically, it’s legal.

But part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you can repurpose existing computers running other OSes to run Linux instead. This is a great way to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, because it’s easy to test it on a Live USB or a dual boot. It’s much harder to do this on phones because they have locked bootloaders.

Another problem is that phones are not productivity devices - they’re consumption devices. Maybe this is just my personal bias, but I don’t think people will be as passionate about liberating their phones because they’re inherently less useful than computers. Convenient, yes, but useful? Not as much.

That said, I would love to be proven wrong. I would definitely consider a Linux phone if they become more popular/useful, but I can’t really justify spending hundreds of euros/dollars on something for which I don’t see any particular use.

Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they’ll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

(My guess is that there isn’t because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

The biggest theft in history, even.

Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it’s okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let’s imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

Not on the outside, at least.

That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

It’s great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.

I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.

One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.

It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.

Not necessarily! I always run ln -s '/usr/bin/$EDITOR' $(which $EDITOR) after a fresh install, so I have a valid executable on the path called $EDITOR.

Of course, then I have to make sure to add export EDITOR=\$EDITOR to my .bashrc. (Obviously.)

And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

I haven’t done too much work with WASM myself, but when I did, the only languages I saw recommended were Rust, C++, or TinyGo. From what I’ve heard, Rust and C++ are smoother than TinyGo. Garbage collected languages usually aren’t great choices for compiling to wasm because wasm doesn’t have any native garbage collection support. That limits your selection down a lot.

But another option you may want to consider is Nim. As I understand, it compiles to C, so any C->Wasm compiler should theoretically work for you as well. I did a quick search and wasn’t able to find any great resources on how to do this, but you might get a bit more lucky. Good luck!

You’re probably right. I think COBOL development is one of the cases where the crazier stories are the ones that bubble to the top. The regular scene is probably more mundane.

I do think there are a few advantages to learning COBOL over C++. COBOL seems to be much stickier - companies that use it seem much more hesitant to replace it than a lot of the companies that use C++, and as a result, they will probably get more desperate. And while there’s definitely a lot more C++ out there than COBOL, I have to imagine that the number of people under 50 that use COBOL is probably tiny, while C++ still has a very large userbase. On the other hand, consulting depends a lot on your portfolio, references, and past accomplishments, and nobody’s going to pay 1k EUR/USD/etc. per hour (exaggerating, obviously) if you don’t have any credentials. It takes time to build that up.

Ultimately, I do think you’re pretty spot on, but we’ll have to see. This is more just a fantasy I tell myself to make it seem like retirement is closer than it probably is…

I fantasize about being one of those extremely well-paid Cobol consultants when I reach the later stages of my career. Hoping that I can earn a full year’s salary in 3-4 months and take the rest of the time off as a semi-retirement. It would be easier said than done, but it’s a dream that helps me get through the days when I get sick of the daily grind.