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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Just as an example, neither the C++ documentation nor its sagely bloggers have ever shown why it is a good fit for, say, systems programming. A really neat way of handling bit-level data is actually in Erlang’s bit syntax.

    Erlang requires a runtime environment, which disqualifies it for situations where you don’t have a filesystem to load the runtime from, like developing a kernel or for microcontrollers.
    Of the popular languages, your choices are virtually just C, C++ and Rust for that.

    More towards your general question: Not needing a runtime environment also means you can use C, C++ and Rust for cross-language libraries. For example, SQLite and OpenSSL have just been implemented once in C, and then you simply have a thin wrapper for Java, Python etc…
    If you are looking to build a library that can be used by as many devs as possible, that’s a selling point which is hard to ignore.





  • Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval.

    Just to say, though, I feel like 99% of the software we deploy is open-source for that exact reason. Projects generally start out small, where you try to evaluate some concept. You’re not gonna spend months to go through the purchase process of some proprietary tool, if you can help it…




  • Yeah, I always found it really valuable to know a person on the other side. Obviously, they’re not immune to propaganda either, but even just seeing the differences in propaganda can teach you a lot, both about which parts may be untrue, but also how propaganda works.

    For example, I once saw a guy on Mastodon, who posted a populist Indian news article and expressed his agreement. The article was about some policy the EU was discussing, following Putins attack on the Ukraine, which would’ve affected India.
    That policy was controversial here in the EU. I don’t remember what policy it was, but I didn’t feel good about it, my country (Germany) didn’t support it, but the EU as a whole did agree to it.

    Meanwhile, that article framed it as “Europe is doing a bad thing” and “the West is blah”.
    Like, man, I doubt, I would agree with my neighbor about this policy, but somehow I’m being generalized into an amorphous blob, the size of half the fucking planet.
    It dehumanizes. It makes it seem like we’re not open for discussion, despite us internally leading extremely heated discussions.

    But of course, we do the exact fucking same. We talk about India collectively all the time, even though it is much larger than the EU, with 1.4 billion different opinions. You don’t hear “the East” as often these days, but you do hear “Asia”, which is effectively just as meaningless of a word.

    And yeah, just seeing the inverse happen to me, made it instantly clear why this is shit, which I would not have even thought about, if I only ever read our news outlets.


  • Oh man, seeing folks suggest it as a Discord alternative always had me uninterested, because I don’t even use Discord and it just seemed like yet-another-standard.
    Now I’m reading this really technical title for a talk which mentions XMPP and I’m instantly sold.

    Well, to be honest, “Movim” also sounded like a VC-funded startup. Looks like it’s a bus-factor-of-1 open-source project instead, which I have significantly more trust in.


  • Most developers I’ve looked at would happily just paste the curl|bash thing into the terminal.

    I mean, I typically see it used for installing applications, and so long as TLS is used for the download, I’m still not aware of a good reason why you should check the Bash script in particular in that case, since the application itself could just as well be malware.

    Of course, it’s better to check the Bash script than to not check it, but at that point we should also advise to download the source code for the application, review it and then compile it yourself.
    At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and I have not yet seen a good argument why the Bash script deserves special treatment here…

    Having said that, for cases where you’re not installing an application, yeah, reviewing the script allows you to use it, without having to trust the source to the same degree as you do for installing an application.










  • Yeah, I don’t like when corporations put stuff like that into their ToS, but at the same time, I 100% understand why every open-source license under the sun has it. You’re giving it away for free, so you don’t want people to sue for more than you’re providing for free.

    Mastodon.social is currently very much in the latter camp of giving things away for free. I also understand that a service is yet another beast than a piece of software, since they hold your personal data and may leak/sell it. But yeah, at this point in time, I wouldn’t want someone to be able to sue Mastodon.social out of existence. I guess, it depends a lot on how it’s formulated in the end…