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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I know looking at it from the outside can look like throwing a fit, but as a software dev I can assure you our professional life is a constellation of papercuts and stumbling blocks on the best days. It is a fun job in many ways but it’s by its nature extremely frustrating at times. For professionals, the inherent frustrations are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, the rest of the iceberg being induced frustrations due to work environment causes of various nature, and a lot of devs who also develop stuff in their own free time do it to regain a sense of purpose and control.

    If these kinda hiccups keep happening even outside the day job of a developer, it is absolutely understandable that the reaction is simply to cut the bullshit rather than grabbing yet another shovel to shovel away the shit you’ve been covered with this time.

    Ultimately, the cost benefit analysis for keeping uBOL hosted on mozilla’s platform became skewed on the cost side and the additional expense is not one that gorhill can or wants to afford.

    So, yeah, it’s not a hissy fit.


  • It’s one thing to pay, and another to be squeezed dry.

    When ads were mostly static banners on websites almost nobody was blocking them, because they were mostly unobtrusive.

    However, they would often link to shady websites that would install random crap, so the usecase for blocking them was already there.

    Then they became animated, and they multiplied. It was one at the bottom of content at first. Then a couple. Then two vertical banners on the sides too. Then more rectangular banners here and there for good measure.

    Then they became unkillable javascript popups, then proper new browser windows. Then autoplaying videos with audio were added. And this is just the visible stuff. Add tracking pixels, tracking cookies, browser fingerprinting, and tons of other spying technology deployed under the guise of “but the content is free”.

    After every step the use of ad and tracking blockers became more legitimate as serving ads moved further and further away from paying for free content and squarely in the space of selling user data collected without consent for huge profit margins.

    If ads and subscriptions were enough to just make a normal amount of profit, very few would be blocking ads or pirating content, because the amount of ads or the price of subscriptions would be reasonable and affordable.

    But since everyone wants to make a 1000% markup on the content they generate, they will drive their very own paying customers away.

    Youtube could have served me a couple ads per video and I would have kept using it forever. Instead they served me a minimum of 20 ads per video, so now they will serve me zero, forever.

    Netflix could have gotten 12 euros every month out of me for their dwindling and dwindling content selection. Instead they wanted 14 after a while. And 17 after a while. And 19 after a little while more. All the while refusing to serve me the 4k content I paid for.

    So instead they now get zero too.

    I am very happy to pay for content, and a lot of people like me. But the comment you originally replied to was in reference to youtube increasing the price of their subscription by ludicrous amounts. You replied there content isn’t free, and I replied that youtube has no problem making money. The increases are not to keep youtube afloat, is to make youtube make 10 billions in profit rather than 8 next year.

    It’s not about paying a fair amount of money for content, it’s about making you pay all that you can give and suck you dry.

    So to your question “how do you pay for content/services in general?” I answer “with money”, but that is not what is happening here.



  • ugo@feddit.ittoLinux@lemmy.mlGoldilocks distro?
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    24 days ago

    +1. Arch is super easy to install, just open the install guide on the wiki and do what it says.

    It’s also really stable nowadays, I can’t actually remember the last time something broke.

    As a counterpoint, on ubuntu I constantly had weird issues where the system would change something apparently on its own. Like the key repeat resetting every so often (I mean multiple times an hour), weirdness with graphic drivers, and so on.

    That said, I also appreciate debian for server usage. Getting security updates only can be desirable for something that should be little more than an appliance. Doing a dist upgrade scares the shit out of me though, while on arch that’s not even close to a concern.


  • What “it” is configurable? If the code is indented with 4 spaces, it is indented with 4 spaces. You can configure your editor to indent with 1 space if you want, but then your code is not going to respect the 4 spaces of indentation used by the rest of the code.

    I repeat, the only accessible indentation option is using tabs. This is not an opinion because every other option forces extra painful steps for those with vision issues (including, but not limited to, having to reformat the source files to tabs so they can work on them and then reformat them back to using spaces in order to commit them)


  • ugo@feddit.ittoProgramming@programming.devWhy YAML sucks?
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    28 days ago

    Hard tabs are the only accessible option though. If you care about developers with a different vision capability than yours, the only correct indentation choice is tabs.

    If, because of bad vision, someone needs to crank the font size way up, it’s very possible that they might need to work with a tabstop of 3, 2, or even just 1 space.

    With tabs, this is user configurable. With spaces it isn’t.



  • We use null objects at work, and as another person said they are a safety feature. Here’s how they work: they are wrappers around another type. They provide the same interface as the wrapped type. They store one global instance of the wrapped type, default initialized, in a memory page marked read-only.

    Here’s why they are considered a safety feature (note: most of this is specific to c++).

    Suppose you have a collection, and you want to write a function that finds an item in the collection. Find can fail, of course. What do you return in that case? Reasonable options would be a null pointer, or std::nullopt. Having find return a std::optional would be perfect, because that’s the exact use case for it. You either found the item or you did not.

    Now, the problem is that in most cases you don’t want to copy the item that was found in the collection when you return it, so you want to return a pointer or a reference. Well, std::optional<T&> is illegal. After all, an optional reference has the same semantics as a pointer, no? This means your find function cannot return an optional, it has to return a pointer with the special sentinel value of nullptr meaning “not found”.

    But returning nullptr is dangerous, because if you forget to check the return value and you accidentally dereference it you invoke undefined behavior which in this case will usually crash the program.

    Here’s where the null object comes in. You make find just return a reference. If the item is not found, you return a reference to the null object of the relevant type. Because the null object always exists, it’s not UB to access it. And because it is default initialized, trying to get a value from it will just give you the default value for that data member.

    Basically it’s a pattern to avoid crashing if tou forget to check for nullptr



  • Looks to me like the ruling is saying that the output of a model trained on copyrighted data is not copyrighted in itself.

    By that logic, if I train a model on marvel movies and get something that is exactly the same as an existing movie, that output is not copyrighted.

    It’s a stretch, for sure, and the judge did say that he didn’t consider the output to be similar enough to the source copyrighted material, but it’s unclear what “close enough” is.

    What if my model is trained on star wars and outputs a story that is novel, with different characters with different voices. That’s not copyrighted then, despite the model being trained exclusively on copyrighted data?



  • I think it’s possible that the filesystem ran out of inodes, so even though there is space on disk, there is no space in the filesystem metadata to store new files.

    Now, I don’t know off the top of my head how to check this, but I assume the answer is on the internet somewhere (am on phone and can’t help much more than this, sorry)



  • Use uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock, not AdBlock Plus, not any other crapware. Looking at AdBlock website they have a blurb about only keeping anonymised data and never selling it and yada yada yada, because it goes against their company ethics.

    Company ethics. AdBlock is owned by a company. A for-profit entity. How do you think they make their money? Either they sell the data they have gathered (why does an ad blocking extension need to gather user data?) or they have agreements with ad companies.

    Compare the websites of AdBlock and uBlock Origin. The first thing on uBlock Origin website is a link to the publicly available source code. That’s trustworthy. AdBlock’s website has a handpicked list of 5 star reviews.

    TL; DR: please switch to uBlock Origin and ditch AdBlock, they (the company behind AdBlock) likely have agreements with advertisers (including Google and YouTube) to make money. Your data is being harvested by using AdBlock. You cannot look at the code for AdBlock. AdBlock is not trustworthy.


  • if you’re using windows and expect any privacy at all […] throw that notion out the window

    Correct. And the same is true even if you are using linux, macOS, android, or a butterfly to manipulate bits to send a message through the internet.

    Because if your message ends up on the screen of a windows user, it’s also going to be eaten by AI.

    And forget the notion of “anything you post on the internet is forever”, this is also true for private and encrypted comms now. At least as long as they can be decrypted by your recipient, if they use windows.

    You want privacy and use linux? Well, that’s no longer enough. You now also need to make sure that none of your communications include a (current or future) windows user as they get spyware by default in their system.

    Well maybe not quite by default, yet