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.

Sure, but as it happens with multiplayer games, you typically have a friend group that plays a certain game. Getting all of them to switch to another game can definitely be a problem.

Eh, it’s gonna depend on your taste in games. If competitive multiplayer games are your thing, then it is a problem. But sure, there’s lots of people who have zero interest in competitive multiplayer.

Here’s a collection of words I might use to describe their culture: Japanese, anime, quirky, open-minded, fun, goofball, Absturztaube.

Or a bus seat…

Yeah, although it goes both ways. A piece of software with tons of effort put into branding gets eyed extra closely. Chances are its commercial software, which typically means it’s crappy.

I enjoy the faces on the laptop. It’s like a very modern art piece showing the horrors of remote work.

recreational coding

Well, good news, it actually is fun to dick around in the Nix configuration and see those changes manifest on your system.

The purpose is similar, i.e. configuring a system, but I’d say Ansible works best, if you need to make a few small changes from an existing distro, whereas NixOS rather takes the approach of controlling everything about the operating system.

And in many ways, controlling everything is actually simpler.

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.

Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn’t the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.

This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that’s what you’re getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it’s cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.

I believe, it mainly has to do with dark-theme screens quickly becoming illegible when there’s outside light sources. It just isn’t bright enough to overpower the glare from the sun and such.

That is genuinely one of the reasons why I use light theme. Like, have you see how bright the fucking sun is? My light-themed screen is still a joke compared to looking outside the window. So, I’m trying to help along my circadian rhythm by at least somewhat simulating the sun on my screen.

T shirt

I see what you did there…

🙃

Yeah, I agree that there could probably be a way to “close” Activities, which doesn’t do the session management, so explicitly just throws the windows onto another Activity (or maybe prompts you when there’s still windows on that Activity), without having to outright delete that Activity.

Deleting an Activity is relatively disruptive, since you may have files linked to it or nicely setup wallpapers and such. And there are a number of places where Activities show up, where it can be annoying to have Activities showing up that you’re not currently using.

I can imagine them being open to that suggestion, if you articulate it well.
From what I saw, they did make a lot of changes to remove the start/stop functionality, but most of it was session handling code. So, it might not be too additional much trouble to add a way to close Activities instead.

As a wise Nate Graham once said: The most reliable way to find out whether people use a feature (and how they use it) is to remove it. The second-most reliable way is to announce its removal.
Well, you did miss the announcement, so it probably felt a bit rude to you, but yeah, you should still consider this the start of a conversation. They’re not hellbent on removing this feature.

Copy Link to Highlight is my favorite addition.

The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…

Yeah, this explains why they decided to remove it: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/upcoming-changes-to-activities-in-plasma-6-5/

To be fair, your “SUUUPER stable” is another person’s “not really going anywhere”…

Yeah, I also recommend this. Particularly with laptops, it’s good to have a full-fledged desktop environment, since you’re more likely to need WiFi, power management, easy display configuration etc…