I don’t know if it’s of any solace, Linux used to be a much more… ahem… “involved” experience a decade or two ago. This was more-or-less the norm:

I can’t really say what the newcomer experience is nowadays, but I can say for sure that even in the worst-case (as it was in the times when I started using it), after a couple months of furious issue-fixing and trying new things, you will eventually settle on a setup that works for you. Some people actually get addicted to all the problem-solving and start looking for more issues to fix; some start distrohopping to find a “more perfect setup”, getting their fix of issue-fixing in the process. If you’re not one of them, congrats, at that point you can (mostly) just continue using it, until you need to update your hardware, then process may or may not be repeated depending on your luck. If you really hate fixing issues twice, you can look in the direction of declarative distros like NixOS or Guix, but I will warn you that the two-three months of furious hacking is still very much a thing here, but after that you’re set more or less for life.

NIX IS FOR REPRODUCIBLE BUILDS. That’s fucking it, seriously. It’s literally on their website.

This post is specifically about NixOS and friends, though.

IT’S A HORRIFIC EXPERIENCE FOR NEW USERS TRYING TO RUN A DESKTOP. Steer clear.

There are thousands of users who run NixOS on their desktop, and thousands more users of home-manager (or nix-darwin) on macOS. If you are ready to put in the time and learn how it works, it’s wonderful - your entire distribution, the thing through which you interact with computers, becomes just another project in your ~/projects, rather than something you have to manually configure. You can’t forget “how to configure $X”, because it is all recorded in one place and done automatically when you get a new machine or update or whatever. It’s GNU Stow on steroids, for your entire system.

There are a lot of downsides for sure as well (mostly the learning curve, and having to fix the buggy bullshit in some software which only runs well in FHS), but if you are a software developer (or adjacent) and like Linux, NixOS is still awesome.

This is clearly not “a russian wondering what’s wrong”, this is “a russian living in russia who doesn’t want to die in prison”. This would be a fair criticism if there wasn’t a law criminalizing pacifism together with many laws making it easy to deanonymize internet users.

Silence does not fix things.

Neither does grandstanding on Lemmy. It especially wouldn’t fix anything if a person in Russia trying to build international relations would go to prison for it.

This is about as useful as suggesting to an average USian/brit/german that they violently overthrow their oppressive governments and install socialism. The punishment for trying (at least in UK/germany) is about the same as it would be for a russian wearing an anti-war T-shirt, the benefits for the humanity would be greater than they would be for overthrowing Putin’s dictatorship, and yet I don’t see people yapping about it any time someone from those countries posts an open-source project.

There’s almost no civil society of any kind left in Russia, so it’s impossible to say if a nation overall supports or opposes the warfare. People with an active pro-war or anti-war stance are minorities, somewhere in the 10-20% range, and neither are allowed to speak up (interestingly, quite a lot of pro-war social media influencers are in prison right now for daring to speak up against corruption in the army or similar). The vast majority of people are just going about their days. Does that technically help with the war? Yes, I guess, it drives the economy, people pay taxes etc, but then the same can be said about an average american, brit or german right now - I don’t see them blowing up munitions factories (that directly supply the ongoing genocide).

There is a complex sociopolitical history as to why it’s likely Russians aren’t as vocal about these sorts of things

There’s also a very simple reason: Russian Criminal Code article 280.3, which criminalizes pacifism with up to 7 years’ imprisonment.

I don’t think there’s a law in the US that criminalizes pacifism [yet] (with actual prison time as punishment)

It’s easy to blame russians for not resisting the war when you don’t have the prospect of spending 7 years in a russian prison

The basis of trust has been breached by whole nation, so it has to be earned by every single member of that nation.

1. WTF is this collective punishment nonsense? Replace “nationality” with “race” (keeping in mind that a person typically doesn’t choose either and it’s decided by who their parents were) and you should be able to see the issue here
2. I hope you rather quickly uninstall almost all popular FOSS software from your devices, because almost all of it contains sizeable contributions from russian citizens and I don’t think you’ve individually verified their intentions

For context I’ve been using aerc as my email client for a while now, and was looking for something similar for calendars/tasks myself

I’ve tried:

• calcurse: fine but clunky, also a bit difficult to set up. The most mature option and probably the best one available, but I just couldn’t get used to the interface
• calcure: similarly clunky interface, glitchy/blinking rendering to the point of being headache-inducing, lacking features (couldn’t figure out how to look at all event attributes?)
• khal: limited in features (compared to calcurse) and slow when there are a lot of events (even when it’s only 2-3 per day), also there are some rendering bugs sometimes. Probably the most intuitive and clean interface of all, and good scripting opportunities.
• gcalcli: only Google Calendar (I also need support for arbitrary CalDAV), didn’t investigate further
• plann: no TUI as such, just CLI

A couple weeks ago I’ve decided to start writing my own. It’s still very much a hacky WIP but I’ll update in this thread if I ever decide to publish it. In the meantime, I hope one of the above works for you!

Nah, actually, in a typical company the lower down the ranks you are the less likely you are to be fired, statistically speaking (to a point, of course you’re more likely to be fired while on probation or something).

Yes, it’s not linear. The progress of GenAI in the past 2 years is logarithmic at best, if you compare it with the boom that was 2019-2023 (from GPT2 to GPT4 in text, DALL-E 1 to 3 in images). The big companies trained their networks on all of the internet and ran out of training data, if you compare GPT4 to GPT5 it’s pretty obvious. Unless there’s a significant algorithmic breakthrough (which is looking less and less likely), at least text-based AI is not going to have another order-of-magniture improvement for a long time. Sure, it can already replace like 10% of devs who are doing boring JS stuff, but replacing at least half of the dev workforce is a pipe dream of the C-suite for now.

It’s categorically the same as printing out a PNG onto a sheet of paper. I can see how you might call that “storing”, even if it’s a lossy process.

Honestly, yes. I have days when I want to code something new and experiment, and days when I just want to drudge through existing code and carefully refactor/clean up so that it still works (or even works better in some cases).

To be fair, systemd also fixed a bunch of issues (by making the boot sequence declarative and also consolidating a bunch of previously disparate services into a cohesive ecosystem); it also introduced new ones which are now difficult to fix due to compatibility. I still prefer it.

There’s no need for the middleman in this scheme. Instead, a much simpler solution would be:

1. Website A gives you a randomly generated $TOKEN
2. You go to Government and ask it to sign something like The person with $TOKEN is of legal age. You have to provide your ID or whatever here, but the government doesn’t know who made the token.
3. You go back to website A, it checks the signature of the message and lets you through

This can be automated in some way; maybe with a browser extension or some referrer-less redirect sort of thing.

It’s still fundamentally shitty though, because now the government pretty much knows that you want to watch adult stuff, it just doesn’t know which adult stuff exactly.

A better (but almost impossible to implement) solution would be for the government to issue everyone a smartcard as an identity document (many countries already do, but without the following features). On that smartcard is a private key, with the corresponding public key signed by the government. The smartcard can then sign any $TOKEN with true statements about you, e.g. The person with $TOKEN is of legal age, or The person with $TOKEN is called $NAME, or The person with $TOKEN has a driving license, etc. You have to connect it to your computer in some way so the website can talk to it, but it should be trivially doable with almost any modern smartphone. This way, everyone has the ability to attest stuff about them without the government being directly involved.

The reason this won’t work is because it would be quite expensive to do and would take a long while to implement.

The article is clearly mostly manipulative bullshit. The arguments about “incompatibilities” between uutils and coreutils being used as an “extend” strategy is just bonkers, the point of uutils is to be a 1-to-1 compatible toolset, and there’s no reason to doubt the developer’s intention there. Even if they do introduce some extra features, most software projects that actually matter will not be using them, because compatibility with coreutils will remain important for decades to come.

The kernel of truth hiding in there is that Rust’s “preferred” licensing under MIT/Apache is indeed a problem, and it should have been GPL (or at least MPL) everywhere from the beginning, especially for libraries. This is probably the worst aspect of Rust indeed, but not enough to outweigh all the awesome technical parts of it.

The US has pretty much never been a real democracy (other than in a roman sense, as in “power belongs to rich men”).

It’s easy to write, easy to build, produces lightweight and fast executables, and the type system is great. Why not rust?

This is precisely the problem that deploy-rs solves!

You decrement the wish counter first, execute the action (which includes waiting those 5 days), and if it fails you increment the counter back. Something like this:

wishes = wishes - 1;
executeWish(wish).unwrap_or_else(|_| { wishes = wishes + 1; })?

This way if the action fails in the future, you get a wish back and can ask something else.