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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • You know, the more I think about this, the more I bristle at Dyson claiming this will solve Britain’s food security problem.

    Firstly, this kind of system seems limited to small cash crops rather than staple foods. (Good luck growing wheat on these.)

    More importantly, Dyson has personally done far more to harm British food security than this gadget could offset. He was an ardent Brexiteer, which resulted in substantial barriers to importing food from our closest neighbors. (He also then immediately started relocating his business to Singapore in a stunning show of confidence in post-Brexit Britain)

    These people don’t want to save the world. They just want to look like heroes




  • Seems like a pretty fun language with an unfortunate amount of 90s baggage.

    However, I firmly believe that trying to de-parenthesise lisp is a distraction. The main reason being that s-expressions make the beloved code=data concept very obvious.

    A suitable editor makes it really easy to ignore the parens (until they’re useful, e.g. for navigation). When reading, the structure of the code is inferred from indentation and line breaks. Just like C.





  • Just to lob a controversial thought in there: There may be some challenges the game industry faces that aren’t solely “capitalism bad”. The most compelling one I’ve heard is that, as games as a medium they have to increasingly compete with a growing back catalogue of classics.

    Between that and the rise of indie games, it gets increasingly risky to invest in large projects.

    (To try and preempt some comments: I am not saying that investors are “right” to pull out of the games industry. I just want people to consider whether the problem, and hence the solution, is more complicated than they first thought)


  • I think it means client-server basically. You can host a server in “the cloud” then access a frontend to it via your browser.

    Might also mean it has features relevant to debugging/deploying cloud services.

    Cloud is often a BS marketing word, but I’m sure there’s ways to make it justifiable in this case. (Not that any of us has to like these features. I for once can’t stand the idea of having my editor run inside a browser…)



  • Be aware there are basically two different things called Owncloud. There’s still the original php version, which is similar to nextcloud but worse (not open source, smaller plugin ecosystem I think)

    On the other hand is owncloud “infinite scale” (or ocis). This is the thing entirely written in go. But as others have pointed out, it’s little more than a file server at this point.

    IMO the self-hosting community is really missing a self-contained “all the DAVs” server (files, calendar, contacts). Baikal etc seem like a great start, but it would be great to have somewhere to get those parts pre-assembled. Until then, nextcloud works for me.






  • Reading time 105 minutes…

    And worth every second!

    I decided to have another go at learning C++ given all the recent work that I had heard about regarding memory safety and support for functional programming. This gives me a lot less confidence that my efforts will be worth it in the long run.

    Time to check out rust I guess 🤷.


  • The big downside is that, for backwards compatibility, the default must still be unsafe code. Ideally this could be toggled with a compiler flag, rather than having to wrap most code in “safe” blocks (like rust, but backwards).

    One potential upside that people don’t seem to be discussing is that the safe subset could also be the place to finally start cutting down the bloat of C++. We could encourage most developers to write exclusively in the safe subset, and aim to make that the “much smaller and cleaner language” trying to get out of C++.


  • Obviously there’s a lot of caveats about how representative this survey (or any other survey) is of the broader population, but I think this is a good reminder of how weird we all are. Nobody on here claims to use Ubuntu or Manjaro, yet they are more popular than Fedora (and potentially even arch, when steam decks are discounted).

    There’s nothing wrong with that, I love the weirdness of the Lemmy Linux community! I just always think it’s good to appreciate when opinions (like my love of ublue) aren’t as popular as you think they are.


  • Its all about how an application goes from “I would like to display X on a screen” to how X actually gets displayed. Wayland is effectively a language (technically a protocol) that graphical applications can speak to describe how they would like to be drawn. It’s then up to a different program more deeply embedded in your OS to listen to and act on those instructions (this program is called a Wayland compositor). There’s a lot more to it (handling keyboard input monitor settings, etc), but that’s the general idea.

    Wayland is a (relatively) new way of thinking about this process, that tries to take into account the wide variety of input and output devices that exist today, and also tries to mitigate some of the security risks that were inherent to previous approaches (before Wayland, it was very easy for one application to “look at” what was being displayed in a completely different app, or even to listen to what keys were being typed even when the app isn’t focussed).

    Thing is, change is hard, doubly so in the consensus driven world of Linux/FOSS. So, until the last couple of years or so, adoption of Wayland was quite slow. Now we’re at the point where most things work at least as well in Wayland, but there’s still odd bits of software that either haven’t been ported, or that still rely on some features that don’t exist in Wayland, often because of the aforementioned security risks.