• 14 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Yeah, my brother and I used to play. Then we got new starter decks and I happened to pick a zombie deck, which we later learned was more-or-less the current meta in proper ranked matches. And the combos it allowed were just insane. If I gave any damn at all, I could steamroll him with no effort.

    I do imagine that’s only gotten wilder over time, as more cards allow for more optimal combinations.


  • I find it so tricky, too. With the maintainers that I see struggling, it’s rarely a lack of contributions that fucks them up, but rather a lack of maintainers. And they can’t easily onboard other maintainers, because:

    1. there’s hardly anyone willing to invest enough time into your project to be a particularly helpful maintainer.
    2. everyone’s just strangers on the internet, who may or may not want to ship malware as part of your project.

    Like, I even have a friend who’s excited for a project that I’m building, but so far, they’re purely cheerleading (which is appreciated), because they do have projects of their own that they find fun, and in particular also a life outside of programming.
    I do not currently struggle with maintainership (because I haven’t announced my projects anywhere publicly 🤪), but yeah, it just feels like it’s asking for a lot, if I were to try to get that friend on board. In particular also, because not many aspects of maintainership are fun.




  • I’m currently prototyping a macro to help reduce boilerplate, as part of a more general library. And I’m doing some wild shit, like defining the fields of a data type from the parameter list of a function.

    But then, yeah, what I’m now stuck on is that my generated code references a data type under one name, but it’s actually got a different name in the public API. All the wild shit was smooth sailing, but a technicality now fucks me over. 🫠


  • I mean, sure, I do understand what’s happening on a logical level. I’m just so baffled, because this whole internet thingamabob was architected by the military.
    It was intentionally built, so that parts of it could fail without disrupting the rest. When a corporation fucks up, it was supposed to take down the servers of that corporation, not also a good chunk of the rest.

    But unfortunately, this internet thingamabob is merely the closest approximation we have for the “perfect market” that economics theory calls for, so it still doesn’t actually self-regulate like that whole theory would love to believe.
    In fact, it is so much worse, because now monopolization happens across the whole planet. Particularly also because we don’t have a functioning “world government” that could enforce competition at that level via laws.

    So, the network leads to companies monopolizing on top of it and then monopolies necessitate that the respective companies do as poor of a job as possible, because this reduces costs and increases profits. As a result, major parts of this military-grade internet now falter every few weeks.


  • Oh man, these global outages are really getting out of hand. A few days after the recent AWS and Azure outages, I suddenly noticed that I couldn’t reach certain webpages anymore. And I genuinely didn’t even bother trying to debug, because I just assumed that it’s another global outage.

    In the evening, I did look into it and noticed that my router was at fault (presumably DNS got bugged by a recent update). That was just wild to me, that I genuinely deemed it more likely that several major webpages went offline together than that my home setup is fucky.










  • As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
    But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

    In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.