Notices by Ian Wagner (ianthetechie@fosstodon.org)

@obrhoff this post is ironic since Trump in 2016, largely targeting Meta and Apple, introduced an outrageous law that lets the US tax any US person (legal or natural) with 10% or more ownership of a foreign company as if they actually received any profits. To “bring that money home” at US tax rates whether it moved or not. And screwed every American entrepreneur overseas in the process, since the US is one of two countries that taxes citizens worldwide.

@obrhoff lame. That said, I’ve been a telegram user since 2014 and signed up for premium when it launched. It’s got problems and… questions, sure, but it’s literally 10x better than every other messaging app. That’s something I’m happy to pay for.

Hot take: JSON is a terrible configuration file format. I get why it sounded like a good idea at the time, but not being able to handle comments (without custom parsers /extensions) is kinda insane.

@seungjin yup! And you can even get a high quality, milk and espresso drink from a local roaster for 3,000 KRW! It’s only expensive if you go to places with really expensive rent!

@seungjin I see many people for whom distro hopping is an unacknowledged addition which prevents them from getting anytbing done.

That said, you can and should expect everything to be “outdated” on Debian. It’s kind of a primary feature. You get just security updates. No major software changes otherwise in the base packages.

@nicemicro @organicmaps funny enough, I live nearby and noticed similar issues with Valhalla-based routing a few months ago when working on Ferrostar (new FOSS mobile navigation SDK). I think Organic Maps uses OSRM, which means it’s a clear issue with the routing tags but I never got around to looking into it.

@nicemicro @organicmaps for OSRM I’m less familiar with the internals but I’d expect somewhat similar logic.

This actually catches me at a very good time to pursue this rabbit trail since I’m in the process of submitting a new profile for Valhalla and in the process I built some debugging tools last week 😂 I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

@nicemicro @organicmaps that’s correct. I’m actually looking into how Valhalla does it on this case right now. Curiously the public FOSSGIS instance (what you see on the OSM website when you select pedestrian Valhalla routing) is a bit different from what our current APIs as well as the Valhalla master branch running locally compute. The public instance routes foot traffic on the major road which is absurd. The more correct routes cross the street and it MIGHT to minimize crossings.

@pete_wright same applies to projects that seem to think distributing a docker image is a solution to a bad build system 🙃 but now I’m ranting haha.

I also think C etc is mostly written by old school hackers that appreciate these differences more. Not because they are better. They just have more experience and historical context. Most devs my age only know macOS and Linux. Windows in some cases. Anything else is obviously irrelevant…. Until you look deeper.

@pete_wright this is not really specific to Rust but of most modern development in general.

Ironically, Rust actually makes it easier than ever (IMHO) to write cross platform code. While FreeBSD isn’t a common target, it’s not hard to make most crates work on FreeBSD, but it seems there just isn’t the effort to pay attention to BSD differences vs Linux.

Which is very sad as I’m a huge fan and daily user of both Rust and FreeBSD.