Notices by firebreathingduck (firebreathingduck@social.vivaldi.net)

@dalias

I think his early blog posts on programming were insightful, even if he had an asshole tone.

His “platforms rant” is, I think, worth reading even now, and I think it’s one of the best tech industry blog posts, ever.

And sometime between then and now, he lost his way. (Is “lost his mind” ableist?)

@hellomiakoda

He's been gone almost a year.

@lrz @thomasfuchs

My employer is paying $18,000 a year towards my family health insurance. This year I paid $28,500 between health insurance and deductibles until I hit my out-of-pocket maximum. Next year the numbers will be $18,000 and $33,700, respectively. (My wife has medical issues that will cause us to reach our deductible.)

Now obviously not every family has a member with expensive chronic ailments. But many do, and countless others will. So the US government could raise my taxes $45,000 a year as part of universal health care and I would be thrilled.

@hellomiakoda

Yeah, I noticed that about DuckDuckGo too. I keep turning off the AI features, and getting summary bullshit anyway.

@danirabbit @cap_ybarra

Awesome, thank you!
Ha! I *am* sponsoring Elementary through GitHub, but I guess I never looked into the sponsor perks. I'll take a look now.

I'm so glad I spoke up, this is cool.

@cap_ybarra @danirabbit

Danielle can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Elementary has any ARM64 builds right now. I tried to boot the Elementary standard x86-64 .iso in QEMU with x86-64 emulation on MacOS on an M2 Mac Studio, and it works but it's painfully slow.

I have Elementary installed on a relatively high end HP laptop, and it runs well. Not perfect, but well enough that I'm happy with it. I won't buy another high end HP laptop, though, but that's unrelated to Elementary. The laptop got painfully hot and had awful battery life with Windows 11 and Ubuntu too.

@cwebber

I saw a lot of coverage of Hegseth and Trump's speeches here.

Now I just need to remember who I saw it from, so I can recommend it to you.

But at least some corners of the fediverse weren't silent about this at all.

@danish_akhtar7

With the Administrations firing of researchers, ending of research contracts, and arrest and deportation of even lawful immigrant scientists, we're rapidly approaching the time when the USA's best won't be able to reinvent a wheel.

@hellomiakoda

I don't think the MAGAts will be quite as united behind anyone but Trump. The rest of the conservative leaders are just as evil but not as bombastic and can't pull off the same level of insanity.

As for the Democrats - this is exactly what they wanted, a great justification for fundraising while they pretend to be sad that the oligarchs are bleeding us dry. They don't want to fix anything.

@dalias

40 years ago nobody got fired for buying IBM. 20 years ago nobody got fired for buying Microsoft. 15 years ago nobody got fired for investing in mortgage-backed securities. 5 years ago nobody got fired for investing in crypto.

Executives don't need to be smart, hardworking, or competent. They just have to follow the crowd, and Wall Street will make them rich.

@eloquence

The headline is "Hammer blow to Taiwan"? Really?

Tariffs would give Taiwan and TSMC a powerful financial incentive to sell to other countries instead of the US. That doesn't just hurt US innovation, it accelerates competing innovators.

Trump is hell bent on speeding the collapse of the American empire. I would be all for it, save that he plans to torture the LGBTQ community, non-whites, and women along the way.

@clarity

Oh, that's an angle I hadn't considered. Thank you.

I mean, obviously I would consider what car I drive for the reasons you state. My ten year old dream of owning a car with the nifty 'T' logo is dead.

I just hadn't thought to put it into the same category as choosing a programming language.

Edit: agreed completely on production and commodification. One of my daughters refuses to shop at Shein or Temu because of their known use of child labor. My wife counters that every other vendor probably does the same, but does a better job concealing their supply chain.

@clarity I'm thinking of medicine, or construction. Nobody is going to avoid prescribing a particular drug or medical test because the company behind it are jerks. Nobody is going to break up concrete with a chisel instead of a jackhammer because the jackhammer team is arrogant.

But if I am writing something in Basic and find the community insufferable and bigoted, it's valid to switch to Smalltalk. (I picked those examples at random.)

@clarity

I find it fascinating that software development is a rare case where the politics and personalities around a set of tools can (and should) matter more than the tools themselves.

I haven't done anything with the Hare language, but the language creator Drew Devault seems (don't take my word for it) committed to a welcoming community and a specific emphasis on not attacking alternatives.

Good luck, no matter what languages you try.

@ramin_hal9001 @sacha

Agreed. There's a reason no popular infrastructure-as-code tool uses only sed, awk, grep, and /bin/sh. It's the same reason git is a unified project instead of a set of instructions for using rsync, patch, diff, and sha256.

With emacs in particular, I'm just frustrated because the learning curve is steep. It's taken me months of effort to be almost as productive in Spacemacs as I was in a week with VS Code and a few add-ons. I know the longer I put in the effort, the more my Spacemacs productivity will continue to improve. But it's a hard sell on novices.

@hellomiakoda

You're more patient than I am. I just can't watch the show any more, the repetition drives me crazy.

@hellomiakoda

Some hero should take all of Mythbusters and cut out the foreshadowing and recaps. It would cut each 43 minute episode down to about 9 minutes of great content.

@dalias

Wasn't fast compile times a primary design goal in Go?

I think a few other languages have, or at least had, fast compilation as a goal for that reason too. D and Zig come to mind.

@hober @sterophonick @divya

Thanks for calling out his transphobia.

@dalias @jherazob @AlexanderMars @ehproque @rk @SecurityWriter @protonprivacy @nextcloud

No, Microsoft especially has started taking the policy that email coming from a domain without a long-established reputation is automatically spam, and you have to jump through hoops to get it delivered. But all of the major providers have started doing this.

I've been running my own mail server using the https://mailinabox.email service on my own domain with a fixed IP for six years, and I still have delivery problems. I am not a spammer, a quick look in Thunderbird indicates I had 28 email conversations in the past 12 months.