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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • The 99 bottles of beer song is (was?) a popular programming exercise to teach beginners about loops. Singing it in real life would be pretty annoying because you would essentially repeat the same two sentences for a couple of minutes. Apparently, the PHP developers were planning to order one beer each, sing the song and get on everyone’s nerves. The C++ dev stopped this by buying all the remaining beer at once.

    The choice of languages is probably OP’s own prejudice. These days I’d say PHP devs are on average older and more experienced than JS and Python devs, just because almost nobody learns PHP as their first language anymore.


  • And I’m pretty sure that the name “hot potato license” and the comment above the license are very strong indicators for this not being the case. The license is meant to mimic a game of hot potato where you get the code for a short moment (one commit) and have to throw it to someone else. Sure, the analogy doesn’t quite work because you can’t decide who has to make the next commit but it would make even less sense if you were able to keep control over the code and add more and more commits. That would defeat the whole point of naming it “hot potato license”.





  • Not sure why you get Apple into this. Apps on iOS have been natively compiled from the beginning and they are amazing at running stuff on older hardware. My current iPhone 12 Mini is over three years old and smoothly runs everything I throw at it. Before that I had a 2016 iPhone SE for about four years and only replaced it because I wanted something with a better camera (I’m a semi-professional photographer so I want something decent for when I see something cool and don’t have my big camera with me). I gave the SE to my mom and she used it for another two years until she decided she needed a bigger screen. It probably still works and it got its last OS update just two months ago.

    As long as you don’t run something super hardware hungry, you can easily use an iPhone for at least five years without any problems. Even if the battery dies halfway through, there are lots of repair shops around that will replace it for a reasonable price in case you’re not comfortable with opening up the phone on your own.



  • They can. They just have to compile it themselves (the code is available on GitHub) or find someone else to give them a compiled version (for example F-Droid which is linked from the readme on github).

    Free software means that you are allowed to do a lot of stuff. It doesn’t mean you can expect to be handed everything on a silver platter. Correctly building and uploading mobile apps to an official app store is a lot of work (even more on iOS than on Android) and while I personally wouldn’t take money for it, I can completely understand when other developers do so to finance their work. Remember, open source developers also need to pay for food and housing.





  • I never got into kubernetes but docker swarm mode services (not to be confused with old docker swarm) are pretty similar and they’re absolutely amazing for small deployments, even for just a home lab. If there’s anything I want to self-host, no matter if it’s homeassistant, jellyfin, nextcloud, a mastodon instance, a lemmy instance, GitLab or whatever, I can usually just get a preconfigured container, adjust some lines in a docker-compose.yml to fit my environment and be done with deployment in under 5 minutes without having to worry about dependencies, isolation or most configuration. Same for the stuff I write myself. Most of my stuff has a very simple GitLab CI config of maybe 20 lines and immediately shows up live when I merge my changes into main.







  • All the bloat is a function of people not caring, and to some degree different requirements.

    At the operating system level I would say the different requirements are probably the more relevant reason than people not caring. Modern operating systems, even ones optimized for weaker hardware, include a lot of stuff that was either not invented or at least not common in consumer PCs in the 80s and early 90s:

    • wifi
    • several encryption standards, especially TLS
    • many other network-related features; we’re talking about a time before HTTP and most other modern protocols were invented
    • support for multi-core CPUs or even multi-tasking at all
    • modern memory management (paging, virtual memory, swapping…)
    • USB
    • proper audio output instead of just a few predefined channels
    • much more complicated video output
    • drivers for all the most common hardware so you can just install it and go

    And that’s not even talking about people expecting a modern-looking desktop environment, web browser, file browser, image viewer, text editor and so on. The linux kernel is modular so if you compile your own, you can disable a lot of stuff that you don’t need to save space and with something written specifically for those old machines, you can strip out even more stuff you don’t need.

    That being said, the thread title is very misleading. In the video he states the OS he uses works on the original Pentium processor which came out in 1993. Four years after Reagan went out of office.