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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.

    Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).

    Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.

    Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.

    Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks



  • I agree Grian shenanigans are fantastic.

    I am currently working my way through Mumbo’s S6 and the best episodes so far have Iskall and Grian in them.

    The thing I have noticed it Mumbo isn’t really pressuring himself on a build. He has just kept focus on the storage system because he is finding it fun.

    I thought Grian was at his best with the barge, his episodes had a flow where he would resource, stock the bardge, do a “small” build/project and then shenanigans.

    I am not sure that flow is sustainable but he was clearly having fun.

    At the moment it just seems he is increasingly beating himself up on being a builder and needing to build the most epic base ever.


  • I have listened and as the seasons go on I get increasingly worried about him. He is increasingly showing signs of burn out so clearly his flow isn’t working for him.

    Listen to season 7 as he talks about the back of the mansion. He is feeling self pressure to complete the back and he is getting fustrated at himself.

    Its the same with the Ally, you can hear how excited he is at the start and as the season progresses anything to do with the ally he talks about like an unpleasant chore.

    With the stones other hermits try to intervene to help him, his reaction there really doesn’t seem a bit. It sounded a lot like the panic caused by burn out.

    He clearly loves being on the SMP and his shenanigans and ideas are fantastic and clearly a lot of fun for him. I want him to stick around and think unless he learns how to break up work so he can find joy in all his builds he will loose that joy




  • stevecrox@kbin.runtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDistro's depicted as vehicles
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    3 months ago

    Nah Linux Mint is a Kia Ceed.

    Ubuntu is a Ford Focus, they successfully stole the volvo estate market (Debian). The car was fun, good value and very practical. It was everywhere. Then Ford started increasing the size, weight, price, etc… killing the point of the Focus.

    So along comes Kia trying to make a competitor in the Ceed.

    In theory the Ceed is a great car, its super cheap, lots of cabin space, nippy, the inside has every modern convenance, but…

    • It plays engine noises via speakers that aren’t aligned with what you are doing
    • The boot space is rubbish, so 5 people can happily travel in the car you barely fit a suitcase in it
    • There is an steering sensitivity button that stays on at 70 MPH with no indication on the display
    • A Vauxhall Nova just out accelerated you

    Your left wondering why anyone is bothering with hot hatchbacks these days as you climb into your volvo


  • stevecrox@kbin.runtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDistro's depicted as vehicles
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    3 months ago

    Debian would be a Volvo Estate, its the boring practical family choice, the owner is soneone boring like an architect or a financial advisor.

    Arch is a Vauxhall Nova, second hand battered owned almost exclusively by teenage lads who spend a lot of time/money modifying it (e.g. lowering so it can’t go over speed bumps, adding a massive exhaust to sound good but destroys engine power).

    Fedora is something slightly larger/more expensive like a Ford Focus/VW Golf/Vauxhall Astra owned by slightly older lads. The owners spend their time adding lighting kits and the largest sound systems money can buy.

    Slackware is clearly a Subaru Impreza, at one point the best World Rally Car but hasn’t been a contender for a while. Almost all are owned by rally fans who spend fantastic amounts of time tinkering with the car to get set it up an ultimate rally car. None of the owners race cars.

    OpenSuse is a Nissan Cube, its insanely practical. It should be the modern boring family choice, but it manages to ve too quirky for your architect while not practical enough for van drivers.

    I don’t know the other distros well enough.

    I run Debian btw



  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world...
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    4 months ago

    I wouldn’t get massively excited.

    Python is a scripting language, its shines when you want to write a stand alone file which takes an input and performs a task. Scripting languages are great to learn as a first language and so python is wonderful for non developers.

    The issue you hit is the build management solutions for Python are kind of broken and these help support and encourage good development practice so a lot of Python projects end up a collection of scripts rather than a mature project. You can have good projects but…

    In raw benchmarks Java has 90% of the performance of C/C++, but in reality Java is more performant because developers get bogged down in memory management on C/C++ and they get more time to optomise in Java as a result. I’m not sure where Rust will come out to be honest.

    Python benchmarks at 50% the performance of Java, in reality I’ve found code ends up slightly worse because Python is procedural, library support and streaming is poorly supported.

    Take library support, Spring really rose to prominese because of ‘hibernate’ which was a way to abstract talking to different databases through objects, you could switch from PostgreSQL to Oracle through config. Spring data has dumbed this down so I define a plain old Java object and Spring will generate everything I need.

    Python expects you to hand craft SQL statements and every database extends SQL slightly differently, so i need to write SQL for every operation and manage/own it. So the win in being able to quickly read/write to a database (since you don’t have to learn anything about Spring) is quickly ruined because of the all the boilerplate and error handling you now have to write.


  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoToday I Learned@lemmy.world...
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    4 months ago

    Every programming languages has communities built around them.

    Its becoming clear Rust solves a lot of C/C++ type problems and the embedded communities are definitely shifting over.

    Apache is the primary community for Java, a quick look at their project list shows it’s entirely web servers, data engineering and clustered projects for distributed computing.

    Personally if you asked me to solve this problem I would use Spring Boot with various Spring libraries for talking to the caddy, user control, etc… Looking at the project, its exactly what they have done



  • Immutable distributions won’t solve the problem.

    You have 3 types of testing unit (descrete part of code), integration (how a software piece works with others) and system testing (e.g. the software running in its environment). Modern software development has build chains to simplify testing all 3 levels.

    Debian’s change freeze effectively puts a known state of software through system testing. The downside its effecitvely ‘free play’ testing of the software so it requires a big pool of users and a lot of time to be effective. This means software in debian can use releases up to 3 years old.

    Something like Fedora relies on the test packs built into the open source software, the issue here is testing in open source world is really variable in quality. So somethinng like Fedora can pull down broken code that passes its tests and compiles.

    The immutable concept is about testing a core set of utilities so you can run the containers of software on top. You haven’t stopped the code in the containers being released with bugs or breaking changes you’ve just given yourself a means to back out of it. It’s a band aid to the actual problem.

    The solution is to look at core parts of the software stack and look to improve the test infrastructure, phoronix manages to run the latest Kernel’s on various types of hardware for benchmarking, why hasn’t the Linux foundation set up a computing hall to compile and run system level testing for staged changes?

    Similarly website’s are largely developed with all 3 levels of testing, using things like Jest/Mocha/etc… for Unit/Integration testing and Robots/Cypress/Selenium/Storybook/etc… for system testing. While GTK and KDE apps all have unit/integration tests where are the system level test frameworks?

    All this is kinda boring while ‘containers!’ is exciting new technology


  • You seem to be intentionally missing the point, but to reiterate…

    You shower before entering a pool to wash the dirt from your body off (your cleaning yourself).

    The more of your body covered the less effective that shower is.

    Ideally everyone would be naked in the shower, but there are probably outfits which increasingly render the shower less and less effective (e.g. speedos are better than shorts, etc .).

    It would not surprise me if a Burkina covered so much that the cleaning shower is rendered pointless


  • The shower before a pool is to ensure people aren’t entering the pool coated in dirt (e.g. sweat, hair, dead skin, etc…).

    The chemicals in a pool are designed to bind to that dirt and kill any bacteria introduced.

    There is a limit to the chemicals you can add to a pool (before it hurts humans) and once the amount has activated you need to drain the pool and refill it.

    Swimming pools hold crazy amounts of water which is also really expensive to heat up, so pools want to do that as little as possible.

    Clothing interfers with cleaning your body, so people entering near fully clothed (e.g. like a Burkina) will likely introduce more dirt into the pool.

    That translates into increased costs for swimming pools or pools which maintain the old schedule and just operate unsafely.

    This is all based on owning a hot tub and learning how to maintain it.

    Hopefully this also explains why it doesn’t matter people enter the sea fully clothed




  • stevecrox@kbin.runtoFediverse@lemmy.worldWhat's going on with kbin.social?
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    5 months ago

    The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

    If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

    That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

    To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn’t want to encourage contributions that is his decision but…

    KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn’t have.

    The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

    Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

    Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs



  • Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory…

    Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

    I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

    Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.


  • The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

    Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

    I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious…

    I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc… Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

    I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

    I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

    I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies


  • It does but for the 90’s/00’s a computer typically meant Windows.

    The ops staff would all be ‘Microsoft Certified Engineers’, the project managers had heard of Microsoft FuD about open source and every graduate would have been taught programming via Visual Studio.

    Then you have regulatory hurdles, for example in 2010 I was working on an ‘embedded’ platform on a first generation Intel Atom platform. Due to power constraints I suggested we use Linux. It worked brilliantly.

    Government regulations required anti virus from an approved list and an OS that had been accredited by a specific body.

    The only accredited OS’s were Windows and the approved Anti Viruses only supported Windows. Which is how I got to spend 3 months learning how to cut XP embedded down to nothing.