𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • Dude I mean in this in the most genuine, kind way

    No offense taken.

    a significant aspect of being a successful programmer is using the tools in your environment.

    If I were a professional programmer, I’d be doing this. I was a professional software engineer for 20 years before I took a management role, then managed software teams, and then organizations, for another decade before I chose to do something else. One of the things I decided was that I wasn’t going to work on, or with, technology I didn’t like anymore - as long as I had any choice, and since all my software development is voluntary pet projects, I’m able to do this. It has, in the aggregate, greatly improved my mental well-being to not have to work with crap anymore. I mostly avoided having to touch Windows in decades; I had only a brief brush with JavaScript that left only minor scarring, and with WASM there’s every hope I can even do web-based projects should I get the itch without killing brain cells with JS. Having spent years with C++ and decades programming Java, I’m convinced that I’ve learned enough about what’s horrible in software, and don’t really need to spend more time being taught about new ways developers can screw up the software engineering space. SOAP alone covered most of the bases of bad design and architecture.

    So now, I get to select where I play. I can focus on learning new things that I think are good, rather than being forced to figure out ways to work around the bad.

    My original plea was simply: if you can use defacto standards, please do.

    If you can’t do something without bringing in your Tool of Choice you’re artificially limiting yourself.

    Insofar as the technology limits me in what’s available, absolutely. Mainly, though, I choose to focus on supporting projects and products that support standards. If a project wants to be a Special Flower and use BrainFuck as it’s tooling language, good for them! But I’m going to look for alternatives.

    I would prefer, however, that projects - when they’re using software that could be more standards compliant by using a few more MB, and have the space to do so, simply be compliant and ship something less stripped down.

    In this case you’re myopically focused on not even a specific language, but the language agnostic feature of regex capture groups.

    To be precise, I’m focused on the fact that, in a toolset where usually at least one of many standard tools provides a functionality, none do. I’m not complaining that ash doesn’t support regexp string matching with groups; in complaining that BB was compiled such that none of the standard tools do.

    You should be asking yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your goal without this (spoiler: there are probably dozens of alternatives)

    Yes. I tried 3 or 4 of the standard, usual ways to break out and parse data. My next attempt was going to resort to field cutting, hoping that that also hadn’t been stripped out.

    Eventually, I hacked a solution together in Lua, which will be useless the next time I encounter a stripped down BB that isn’t in OpenWRT, and I’ll have to waste time trying to work around broken tooling again.


  • Yup!

    On the OpenWRT issue, I ended up hacking a solution up in Lua, which won’t help the next time I encounter an issue with a limited BB in something that isn’t OpenWRT. And, in a month I won’t remember the tiny bit of Lua I learned, because this is the first and probably last time I’ll be forced to use it.

    Nothing against Lua, per se; I’d just prefer to keep working with ubiquitous standards for simple stuff, and use strongly typed compiled languages for anything nontrivial.



  • Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But I also want a president who’s not just going to take amphetamines so he can perform well past his bed time.

    I’m not saying either of these guys is my first choice. I’m just saying that it was late, Biden had a cold, and he was probably taking Nyquil or something - he would want to be up there sneezing and blowing his nose. If you compare his performance in the debate to his speech in N Carolina, he certainly wasn’t at his peak. Good knows how much cocaine Trump had snorted before the debate.



  • That’s not how I meant it.

    There’s a cultural value in virginity in girls. It’s pretty common across cultures: for marriage, virgin women are more desirable than non-virgins. It’s biased; the virginity only increases value for girls, and it probably stems from men wanting to be sure than any prodigy are actually theirs. Women can be nearly 100% sure a kid they have is theirs (not quite 100%, as there’s a brief period when a channeling swap could conceivably be made), but the men can never be certain. The best odds you have is to get yourself a virgin. So female virginity has been valued through history (by men), and I think this is where the fetish of having sex with virgins comes from.

    That’s what I’m taking about. I’ve never understood the appeal of “being a girl’s/boy’s first.”




  • Yeah, fuck giving examples, because people ignore the stated problem and focus on the example. You’re exactly right. It’s stackexchange all over again, and I should know better than to provide any specifics, because people can not resist solving the wrong problem.

    There’s an actual term for this behavior, but it escapes me. It’s the opposite of the X/Y problem, where people fixate on some irrelevant detail. I need to learn to ignore “can you give an example” comments, because all that leads to use someone trying to fix a specific instance of a larger, more general problem.


  • The problem is that upvotes serve two conflicting proposes. Upvoting raises visibility, so one use is to say, “this is a post people should see.” In that case, you may not necessarily agree with the content of the post, but rather believe it’s worthy of debate. A good example of this is c/unpopularopinion, where the community rules specifically state to upvote if you agree it’s an unpopular opinion, not whether you agree with the opinion.

    The other, conflicting, use is to signal approval or disapproval.

    You can’t do both at the same time. It’s a flaw in design Reddit had, which they fixed but monetized. Lemmy did not learn from Reddit’s mistake and instead repeated it.

    Two conflicting uses for the same action is terrible UX design.









  • I agree, there are places where a totally stripped down BB makes sense; I’m not arguing that. I’m arguing against stripped down BB when it isn’t necessary.

    Also: Lua is 1.536MB on my system. Bash is 1.1MB. I don’t know how big ash is, because I didn’t easily find the sources for it, but even if it were half the size of bash, replacing ash with bash would make the cost of adding bash only 0.6MB - a third of including Lua. If you think you have enough space for Lua, you probably have enough space for bash instead of ash.

    And you be able to do normal scripting with proper regexp support and not forcing your users to learn another language just to hack together a small solution.

    I want to thank you for a calm, reasoned, sympathetic discussion about something that’s currently, actively irritating me and making my responses more… acidic… than they should be.


  • For sure. But there will be a lot of indirect debate on social media, because Trump can’t keep his burger-hole shut, and Klobuchar’s free to murder him (metaphorically) on public platforms. Even if he only posts to TruthSocial, everything he says gets parroted on X and Facebook, and that’s still where the most eyeballs are.

    And old school public media picks this stuff up and repeats it - that’s mostly what they’ve been reduced to -but it still reaches a lot of eyes and ears.

    And: Trump refusing another debate, she could just hammer on his cowardice, over and over. That’d be a win.

    Klobuchar is tough. If nothing else, I’d love to see that fight. Only slightly less than I’d love to see an AOC v Trump fight; that’d be like watching a skinny junkie enter the MMA ring against Holly Holm. It’d be hilarious. But AOC is too young, and Trump will be either dead or in a home by the time she’s old enough to run. I just hope Bernie is still active enough by then to support her. I don’t know that she could get elected - she’s too polarizing - but it would be a marvelous spectacle.

    Anyway, I prefer Yang’s politics, and I’d be thrilled to see Buttigieg in the White House, but I stand by Klobuchar as the best bet.


  • I have a Pixel C that none of the Linux distros support. So I’m running one of the OSS Android distros, but it’s still fucking Android.

    I’d love to find as nice a combo - great build, small size (10" screen), detachable yet integrated keyboard - that runs Linux. Sounds a lot like what you’re looking for.

    I think there are 11” Dell XPSes. I’ve owned a couple of those, and they’re pretty good, and they have great Linux support if that’s your thing.