Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • As with all things, there’s a trade off: how much do you value the [convenience/ecosystem/insert other thing that proprietary system offers you] compared to the ongoing cost - monetarily but also in terms of privacy, market manipulation, environmental impact, etc. of supporting and relying on the proprietary system.

    You can’t do your work without connecting to Exchange because Microsoft has leveraged decades of monopolistic gains to make Outlook the default option for any “serious” business, and has invested even further in making inconvenient (or soon impossible) to connect to Exchange from outside their sanctioned walled gardens. Demanding that Linux solve that for you is akin to demanding that the person commuting on bike undo a century of automotive-centric urban expansion in the US so that they don’t interrupt your commute. It’s not their fault they can’t solve the problem and it doesn’t help anyone to get mad at them for doing their best to behave rationally in a system stacked to only serve the 1%’s corporate interests.




  • Since I am not a woman, transgender or otherwise, I won’t comment on the differences or similarities of their experiences. That said, excluding transgender women from a woman-oriented space does not seem helpful or thoughtful to me, just transphobic.

    Also, distinguishing between women and females is not something I’m familiar with and don’t feel good about it. It’s certainly self-evident that afab women and transgender women have on average different lives experiences especially during their formative years in which an interest in tech and CS is likely to be either cultivated or discouraged. Nonetheless, given the significant prejudice against transgender people, I imagine few women would begrudge them participation in this community.



  • This is such a brain dead take. The conference exists to support a group that has been and is actively discriminated against and harassed in the tech industry. All the men crashing the event care not at all about the conference, its mission, and its participants - they’re just desperate to find a job. And while I absolutely sympathize with people suffering unemployment, it’s really shitty (and sadly so typical and indicative of the problem) to flood a space designed for women and non-binary people, completely disregarding them in the race to get ahead.



  • I can’t claim full understanding, but what I took away from it was that NVIDIA somehow ended up using GPL-licensed code in their proprietary drivers, possibly in a way that could incriminate the Linux kernel if not handled properly. My best guess (as someone with no kernel programming experience) is that NVIDIA sometimes contributes code directly to the Linux kernel that exists solely to support their proprietary drivers (the shims mentioned in the article). Apparently, these shims were exporting GPL-licensed code for use inside the proprietary drivers, which would be a violation of the GPL (unless NVIDIA made the source code for their proprietary drivers freely available in compliance with the GPL).

    TLDR: (I think?) NVIDIA essentially infected the linux kernel with license violations to support their proprietary drivers, and the linux kernel devs are working to excise the violations and prevent anything like that going forward.



  • Have been using it since early Alpha days, and I like it a lot but it definitely is still lacking some of the polish of more established tools like Notion.

    1. Does it work offline? Yes, it does. Your changes are saved locally and synced at the next opportunity. Obviously this can occasionally cause conflicts but in practice I’ve never had issues.
    2. Does it have databases like Notion? Not exactly. I was never a Notion power user so I can’t say how well they compare, but Anytype lets you define your own custom objects with custom relations (sort of like database columns) and link any objects together, as well as creating Sets of objects of the same type and Collections of objects of any kind. So I think in principle it can replicate all the features of Notion databases but in practice you’d want to change how you think about it to fit Anytype’s model more easily.
    3. Nothing like that yet, although they just open-sourced all their code and the devs are very active on the official forums receiving feature requests.

  • I think you’re confused on a couple of points.

    1. The laptop just released was the 16 INCH framework, not the 16th generation. It is only the second model of Framework laptop, coming after the 13 inch. They have released parts for 3 generations 11-13) of Intel motherboards for the 13 inch laptop.
    2. Framework is a fairly new company. They’ve only been around for a handful of years. I believe the very first 13 inch laptops shipped in 2021 (plus or minus a year).

    So their track record so far with delivering on their promise of upgrades and repairs is short, but so far it has been stellar.



  • Thinker@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldIs Flatpaks the future for Linux?
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    1 year ago

    NixOS is a distribution built around the package manger Nix. Nix is not necessarily an iteration of Flatpak ( especially since it’s been around since 2004), but it does accomplish many of the same goals in a more robust way with fewer trade offs.

    The main idea of nix is that EVERY dependency of a package is tracked, from the exact glibc version all the way up to e.g. Python packages. I am not a Nix expert, but my surface-level understanding is that this is accomplished by hashing the package and all its dependencies, very aggressively, so that even if a hot fix patch is released that doesn’t change the version number, the new package is still different (as is every package that depends on the new version). That enables Nix to be the best of all worlds as far as sharing system packages like a native dependency while assuring stability and encapsulation like a flatpak. So it ends being as fast and small as the former while being as convenient and cross-distro as the latter. There are other innovations, like declarative dependency management and perfect rollbacks, that make Nix/NixOS stand out, but the above is it’s main innovation over Flatpak and older system package managers.