Fuck Microsoft

Add computer science and you have a programmer.

I mean, while this definitely does happen in reality, in particular if you count data scientists towards programmers, I feel like I need to point out that neither knowing computer science, nor maths, makes you a good programmer.

In fact, if you tell me someone is a computer science professor, I will assume that they are a bad programmer, because programming takes practice, which is not something they’ll have time for.

Yeah, although it doesn’t mean that, say, the top 10 pop songs aren’t blander today than they were 50 years ago.

I’ve heard it argued that Spotify pushes songs to be blander, for example, because:

• they don’t typically get played back as part of an album anymore, so they’re more samey in that they all have to work as a single,
• you don’t want to be the song that stands out, where the user presses Skip, because Spotify will rank those lower, and
• lots of folks now consume music as background noise, so the intricacies of a guitar solo, which would’ve hit like a truck for active listeners, are often just drowned out by traffic noise or may just be too much to take in while you’re learning for school or whatever.

Having said all that, there is the flipside that the top 10 pop songs are less relevant than ever. You’ve got practically an infinite supply of songs to choose from, so you kind of just have to find the good stuff.
That is work, I admit, so I can understand a certain level of frustration, but yeah, it is also something to be excited about, that there is such a huge selection to choose from.

I always just do ss -ltnp | grep <port-number>, which filters well enough for my purposes and is a bit easier to remember…

To give a quick highlight, because this case is often politicized and misrepresented:

The plaintiff, Stella Liebeck (1912–2004), a 79-year-old woman, purchased hot coffee from a McDonald’s restaurant, accidentally spilled it in her lap, and suffered third-degree burns in her pelvic region. She was hospitalized for eight days while undergoing skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment. […]

Liebeck’s attorneys argued that, at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C), McDonald’s coffee was defective, and more likely to cause serious injury than coffee served at any other establishment.

So, the lawsuit never demanded McDonald’s to put a warning that you’re not supposed to spill hot coffee on yourself. It argued that it’s an unnecessary safety hazard, because the coffee was served at hazardous temperatures.
No matter how many warnings you put down, it can happen that someone spills coffee on themselves and they shouldn’t need to be hospitalized from that.

I find it annoying, because the hype means that if you’re not building a solution that involves AI in some way, you practically can’t get funding. Many vital projects are being cancelled due to a lack of funding and tons of bullshit projects get spun up, where they just slap AI onto a problem for which the current generation of AI is entirely ill-suited.

Basically, if you don’t care for building useful stuff, if you’re an opportunistic scammer, then the hype is fucking excellent. If you do care, then prepare for pain.

I guess, those don’t work for hidden/minimized windows.

Perhaps worth considering a bspwm-like workflow. Rather than minimizing windows, you put them onto another workspace. Just absolves you from dealing with the whole concept of minimized windows…

Lots of “modern” languages don’t interop terribly well with other languages, because they need a runtime environment to be executed.
So, if you want to call a Python function from Java, you need to start a Python runtime and somehow pass the arguments and the result back and forth (e.g. via CLI or network communication).

C, C++, Rust and a few other languages don’t need a runtime environment, because they get compiled down to machine code directly.
As such, you can call functions written in them directly, from virtually any programming language. You just need to agree how the data is laid out in memory. Well, and the general agreement for that memory layout is the C ABI. Basically, C has stayed the same for long enough that everyone just uses its native memory layout for interoperability.

And yeah, the Rust designers weren’t dumb, so they made sure that Rust can also use this C ABI pretty seamlessly. As such, you can call Rust-functions from C and C-functions from Rust, with just a bit of boilerplate in between.
This has also been battle-tested quite well already, as Mozilla used this to rewrite larger chunks of Firefox, where you have C++ using its C capabilities to talk to Rust and vice versa.

Yeah, I’ve considered setting up a scrappy rsync solution, because Syncthing felt like overkill for that use-case and like it might stop working one day.

There’s the Syncopoli app on F-Droid, which hasn’t been updated in three years, but it seems to just be a thin wrapper around rsync, which has been stable for decades, so I still kind of trust it more to continue working. Or at the very least, if I need to fix something or update the app myself, I feel like I’ll be able to do it.

To my knowledge, the only problem was that there was no communication about the handover. If there had been a post on the original repo with reasoning for Catfriend stepping down, instead of the repo just disappearing (from what I heard), there would’ve been no drama…

Admittedly, I did not look into it too deeply, though.

Good question. My best guess is that the buttons have become less important, because:

• they try to auto-detect where a signal comes,
• they have better defaults, so you don’t really need to change settings, and
• even monitor brightness can partially be controlled by the OS.

But yeah, I got a new monitor at work, and instead of buttons, it has a joystick on the backside. Now the monitor’s menu pops up every so often, I’m guessing because something shook the joystick just enough to trigger it.
When I saw that joystick for the first time, I wondered how long it’ll take before it breaks, but it’s broken on day 1, so that’s great. 🫠

No idea, but I have not yet heard of a computer science department going exclusively for Apple…

Probably varies a lot between countries and universities. In my university, you were better off, if you were on Linux. But I’ve heard horror stories from the US before, where Windows was mandatory…

A few years ago, I set up a home-server with music and some pictures on there, and recently I noticed that my storage disk was getting full. Then I saw that the disk only had 16 GB and wondered, where the hell I got that small of a disk from.

So, I go to plug in a bigger disk and can’t even find the original disk at first. Turns out my whole storage capacity was one of these bad boys:

And yeah, I’ve got about 1800 songs, clocking in at 5.8 GB, so even that tiny storage would easily be enough for a much larger collection.
And I do also have them replicated on my phone, for listening on the go. (Don’t even need an SD card in my case.)

Presumably, that ampersand needs to be replaced with &…

If you enjoy pinball, this one is decent: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.dozingcatsoftware.bouncy

Not what you’re looking for, but perhaps also interesting, there’s a comic written in CSS: https://comicss.art/

I’m weirdly deeply invested, like I’ve got decent headphones, I’ve composed songs before, I’ve played two instruments, and like someone else posted, I’ve also implemented my own music player program.

But man, I struggle with feeling it as art. I don’t know, if that’s a case of music-maker being snobby about everyone else’s music, while being too critical of their own music. Maybe my expectations are just too high.
Like, I’m trying to create lyric-less music where I feel a meaning. And at times, I’m amazed that I can evoke the sense of snowfall. But at many other times, it just sounds paperthin to me, and I still haven’t managed to really portray a deeper meaning.

Maybe I’m just frustrated, because poems come more naturally to me (and yes, I am dense for not adding lyrics to my songs 🫠).

I would argue that a substantial reason for their popularity is also just that devs have fun when developing them.

With most other genres, you’ve seen the story a gazillion times, you’ve done each quest a thousand times etc… It just gets boring to test the game and it becomes really difficult to gauge whether it still is fun to someone who isn’t tired of it.

Meanwhile with roguelikes, the random generation means that each run is fresh and interesting. And if you’re not having fun on your trillionth run, that’s a real indicator that something needs to be added or improved.