@whitequark@wingo and yeah i never really expected that it was imposed (im certainly not a 'redhat truther'), i just find it super interesting how groups of people ingrain ideas collectively, and also then how difficult it is to dissuade those groups from harmful ideas. (and i mean, all groups have some of these unfortunate stuck ideas too, it's not exclusive to gnome)
@whitequark yeah i'm just curious, was it like a stated aspect of apple's design that everyone copied? or did somebody make a decree about it back in the day. I don't really remember when the 'zero configuration' push started. Is it all because everyone hated xorg.conf so much :') anyway it's really funny coming from a games background where you'll get lampooned (rightly!) for not supporting configurable fov, motion blur, configurable bindings, 100 graphics settings, accessibility modes, etc.
@whitequark i'd love to trace where the linux desktop userspace world got the idea that configuration was bad. it's such a weird ingrained thing across many projects.
@bob@whitequark@gsuberland@untitaker yeah, that would make sense, but you can't oversubscribe a static document store. at least not without doing something impressively wrong.
@whitequark@gsuberland@untitaker I have to imagine it's some kind of backoff? E.g. it's quite literally doing nothing. Because from the screenshot this is also a static document???
My partner is learning python (zero programming experience) and wanted some introductory resources, are there any good ones out there? to save me the effort of wading through the endless sea of SEO optimised AI garbage...
@whitequark@0xabad1dea@gsuberland@tthbaltazar another thing which does behave that way in practice is GC and systems built around GC shaped data-structures. e.g. if you trigger an emergency collection on oom or low memory. which, exactly like you say, doesn't work so good when you have multiple instances. (classic 'language server' issue there, manually pressing the force GC button in resharper to salvage memory...)
@whitequark@0xabad1dea@gsuberland@tthbaltazar Honestly I'm not sure it's common that applications speculatively fill up memory as cache. It's true mostly just for things like games which dynamically adjust their texture budget for GPU memory, but even there lots of them just splat out whatever they require and hope vidmm keeps their shit resident when they're in the foreground. cpu side applications seem even less sophisticated in general, but still end up relying on OS paging.
@whitequark@joe@charlotte@8051enthusiast it's interesting in rust because you only need the atomic because of sync issues, otherwise a single threaded atomic is exactly a cell, I believe. I'm not sure whether going towards "atomic" is better from an API perspective, or if making "cell" more ergonomic is a better choice.
@gsuberland@whitequark I think this is basically how most 'big' languages do it (C#, Swift, Java), to be honest. C and C++ just clowned everything up, and languages which don't support localization at all (e.g. Rust) I think take the view that you can just call ICU if you care.
the way most fast automation works is by carving out a narrow part of a problem and solving it in a highly constrained, predictable, and specialized way to enable a human worker to (dramatically) improve their output. the way people talk about technology often seems to neglect this somewhat fundamental aspect. i don't see this changing anytime soon. physical reality... matters. #gottem
this generalizes, automating things is hard not because doing things with machines is hard (though it is), but because doing things with machines at anywhere near the speed and accuracy of a human is *incredibly* hard. everyone loves to meme about people being bad drivers, or shitty at x or y, but do you know how many people drive every single day, and how few of them have accidents. it's absolutely absurd. with better training and assistance it's even harder to beat